The combat system in Final Fantasy XVI is very impressive: the core conceit of is that you have a suite of basic attacks that are always accessible but relatively weak, plus a customizable set of "Eikon abilities" that are much stronger but have relatively long cooldowns. Major enemies have a posture meter and stagger when it's emptied, giving you a few seconds of free hits with a damage multiplier. Even with just this structure, there's an intrinsic push and pull where the player is incentivized to use their abilities to push the stagger meter down while also carefully timing their cooldowns to do as much damage as possible during the stagger.
But it gets more advanced from there. The basic abilities hold a deceptive amount of complexity that takes real care to fully learn, and the Eikon abilities are multi-purpose, with clever counterplay to the enemies' movement and attacks. It's wise of them to provide an "arcade mode" that grades your performance, because this really does seem like a combat system you could go very deep on.
The main plot is also a lot of fun. I've heard people complaining that it was sold as Game of Thrones and doesn't really work as a grounded political fantasy, but where it drops that initial conceit it picks up a high-key anime intensity with a contagious joy in its own bombast. The Eikon fights aren't as mechanically deep as the primary combat, but they make up for it in a spectacle that fully justifies the graphics power of current-gen hardware.
But the game has some major gaps in its charm as well. Outside the main quest, the plot and writing is vastly spottier. There are some really lovely side quests (especially those that tie more closely to the main characters), but there are also some that are upsettingly bad, like the run of ham-fisted "everyone hates the bearers" quests just before Oriflamme. Even in the decent sidequests, the writing lacks verve, leading me to instinctively reach for my phone instead of giving it my full attention.
And the excellent combat system isn't very well-supported by everything around it. Non-boss fghts are uniformly featureless arenas full of relatively weak mobs, and because you can't easily switch Eikon loadouts a moveset optimized for one-on-one battles will have limited tools for dealing with them. The end result is a sense of chewing cardboard: not unbearable, but not a lot of fun either.
The crafting system, such as it is, is also direly underbaked. The only thing to craft are weapons and armor which, contrary to RPG convention, are just a linear series of power upgrades. If you do all the quests you will have enough materials for everything, so picking up items in the overworld or getting additional quest rewards means nothing at all.
I'm not enough of a Final Fantasy player to have a great sense of where this sits in the series as a whole, but as an occasional player of RPGs I wish it had a little more meat on the bones when it came to customization and as a player of action games I wish it had a little more thought put into the encounter design. All the same, I did have fun, and this game undeniably broke me out of a few of my comfort zones in exciting ways.
But it gets more advanced from there. The basic abilities hold a deceptive amount of complexity that takes real care to fully learn, and the Eikon abilities are multi-purpose, with clever counterplay to the enemies' movement and attacks. It's wise of them to provide an "arcade mode" that grades your performance, because this really does seem like a combat system you could go very deep on.
The main plot is also a lot of fun. I've heard people complaining that it was sold as Game of Thrones and doesn't really work as a grounded political fantasy, but where it drops that initial conceit it picks up a high-key anime intensity with a contagious joy in its own bombast. The Eikon fights aren't as mechanically deep as the primary combat, but they make up for it in a spectacle that fully justifies the graphics power of current-gen hardware.
But the game has some major gaps in its charm as well. Outside the main quest, the plot and writing is vastly spottier. There are some really lovely side quests (especially those that tie more closely to the main characters), but there are also some that are upsettingly bad, like the run of ham-fisted "everyone hates the bearers" quests just before Oriflamme. Even in the decent sidequests, the writing lacks verve, leading me to instinctively reach for my phone instead of giving it my full attention.
And the excellent combat system isn't very well-supported by everything around it. Non-boss fghts are uniformly featureless arenas full of relatively weak mobs, and because you can't easily switch Eikon loadouts a moveset optimized for one-on-one battles will have limited tools for dealing with them. The end result is a sense of chewing cardboard: not unbearable, but not a lot of fun either.
The crafting system, such as it is, is also direly underbaked. The only thing to craft are weapons and armor which, contrary to RPG convention, are just a linear series of power upgrades. If you do all the quests you will have enough materials for everything, so picking up items in the overworld or getting additional quest rewards means nothing at all.
I'm not enough of a Final Fantasy player to have a great sense of where this sits in the series as a whole, but as an occasional player of RPGs I wish it had a little more meat on the bones when it came to customization and as a player of action games I wish it had a little more thought put into the encounter design. All the same, I did have fun, and this game undeniably broke me out of a few of my comfort zones in exciting ways.