What I find the most baffling about Final Fantasy XVI is how confident it is in its combat. The game expects the player to be engaged with it for 70-odd hours when it has nothing mechanically interesting to offer beyond Clive's interactions with baddies. This is where it falls apart compared to other giants in the action game genre - your Bayonettas, DMCs, and, hell, even Kingdom Heartses(es).

Notice how I didn't once say the combat is bad? It's not. It's quite good, even. Clive can do all the cool things a basic action game protagonist can; he's got launchers, he can juggle enemies, and he's even got enemy step. Impacts feel crunchy, and magic burst combo windows are just tight enough to feel equal parts satisfying and rewarding. Then you throw the Eikonic abilities into the mix, and you have a layer of decision-making you only see in the best action games. You're encouraged to think about your Eikonic loadout before battles, and their set-up and execution during battles. The enemy stagger windows are just long enough for you to get creative with your damage output, but also short enough for it to require some skill to pull off efficiently. The enemies are fairly varied, albeit a bit slow to attack, but you can bypass this with the game's taunt. The bosses are also fun to engage with - especially if you've got the right Eikon kit to counter their various melee and ranged attacks. There’s a very unique catharsis to depleting a boss’s Will Gauge with a perfectly timed Heatwave Counter or Raging Fists.

Where, then, does the game fall short of other, better, action games? What can you do in Bayonetta that you can’t in FFXVI? A lot of things actually but I’ll get to the point – you have more non-combat actions to do in almost every encounter in Bayonetta, both outside and during combat, than you do in all of FFXVI. Let me elaborate. In Chapter XII of Bayonetta, you navigate a large military transport jet. Throughout the stage, you have pitfalls, and need to watch out for environmental hazards in the form of Jeanne’s Gomorrah. You need to keep track of these external elements and they actively influence your approach to encounters. You can fall off? Well, so can the enemies, if you launch them. You can get hurt by the propellers? Well… actually I don’t recall if the enemies can but you get the point. This variety in encounter design can be found in action games as old as DMC1, and as new as this year’s excellent Hi-Fi Rush.

In FFXVI, you’re restricted to enemy type mix-ups for encounter variety and that’s all there is to it. There is only one playable character, unlike the last three DMCs. There are no puzzles, unlike The Wonderful 101 and there’s no platforming, unlike every single one of the other games I mentioned. Then what do you do between combat encounters? You talk to some very boring people, in some very underdeveloped shot-reverse-shot dialogue sequences. You do this an obscene number of times too. This game’s side quests are a Blight (pun intended? Maybe, IDFK I just wanna wrap this up) to what otherwise could have been a much better game. For what little they add to world-building they take a lot more out of my precious time and investment.

The story is nothing to write home about either… so I won’t. Cid and Byron are pretty cool, so there’s that at least.

At its worst, FFXVI feels like a very boring visual novel with an insanely high budget. At its best, it feels like nothing more than a proof-of-concept of a solid action game, with some decent boss fights thrown into the mix. If it was just the latter, spread over the course of a standard linear adventure, I would have been more charitable towards the game. But as it is now, with its bloated run time (play time?) and its uninteresting world, I can’t fully recommend the game to anyone who isn’t willing to look past its drawling quests and enjoy it for the cool shit you can do to the enemies and their health bars. 6.5/10