Final Fantasy XVI killed Final Fantasy for me, and while I think I'll ultimately be grateful for that it's been exhausting to process.

In the early hours, I was delighted--finally, a new story I can get invested in with this series, one that's told coherently, with characters whose relationships I can follow. And while Active Time Lore™ was appealing to me up front--"remembering" my experiences with XIII and XV--I rarely even utilized it and could follow along just fine, only dipping in for deep dives driven by my own curiosity. Up front I had lamented the complete move to action combat, but I also braced for it knowing it was something they had been toying with already, and for what it's worth they managed to create a solid loop that expands into some decent variety over the course of the campaign, for a while.

But little by little, the foundations of my excitement began to crumble. A lot has already been said about FF16's treatment of women and its slavery/class narrative struggles, all criticism thoroughly justified. For me, it's how the game treats Jill specifically that paved the beginnings of its road to ruin. It's actually hysterical how much of an afterthought Jill is to the story they're telling, especially given that she's standing with you for nearly all of it.

It comes to be almost like a challenge the game puts forth to see how much worse her treatment can possibly get, to the point that it culminates in putting one particular endgame sidequest--which gives Jill an emotional moment with Clive and puts her "permanently" in your party until you proceed with the finale--behind another sidequest related to Clive's father. It is so easy to see a situation in which players put off that sidequest, imagining it to be a nice "final" one to go for, only to discover another with a key party member hidden underneath it--one where half the reward becomes potentially pointless as putting her in the party "for the rest of the game" might be actually zero time. And neither quest is marked with a signature plus-sign that indicates where the Real Rewards are, the "good stuff" like increasing how many potions you can hold or the ability to smith a weapon if you do hours of additional content to get the required crafting items from special enemies.

It sounds like a lot has been said about the game's sidequests as well. Here are my two cents: when FF16 sidequests are good, they are far and away the best content you can find in its runtime. Not because you get two more max potions, but because they spend more effort filling out the details of the world and some of the characters' relationships. They can be the strongest indication that the developers behind this world do actually like the people in it, can relate to their struggles and offer them glimpses of hope and camaraderie. But the sidequests are set up for failure from the start. They're introduced as strictly tedious chores, outside of one early on that gives the faintest hint of new character information after you've done the riveting task of finding a bag of supplies. And even when the narrative quality of the sidequests improves, that quality is still buried under artificial lengthening, long and unchallenging fights [I hope you like the raw feel of the combat a lot!], running [or fast traveling] back and forth.

Which is a long way of saying--by the time I reached the final barf-up of sidequest icons before the game's conclusion, it broke my heart but I was done with them. Full disclosure, in the face of my frustration a friend told me Jill had a sidequest dedicated to her amongst all these potential weeds, so when none of the quest descriptions suggested as much I straight up googled to find which quest it was. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it's because they didn't barf up all the icons up front.

This was the pivotal moment for me. Suddenly my mind was racing as it tried to reconcile what I had experienced for the past 45-50 hours. I marched on with the finale, trying to enjoy the "emotional payoff" of the story, but I was distracted by a dreadful feeling that dove into some weird kind of spiritual emptiness. And when the credits started rolling, I suddenly knew I had lost something and somehow hadn't seen it coming.

It took all that to realize what Final Fantasy as a series has truly meant to me. My first Final Fantasy experience was the now oft-maligned Final Fantasy VIII, which I still adore to this day. I rented Brave Fencer Musashi because it looked and sounded cool, but I maybe played it for half an hour tops because it came with a demo for FF8 that I immediately obsessed over, replaying a number of times before I had to return the demo along with the game I was supposedly renting. It was over for me. I would save money and get the full game in short order, and the next year saw both a heavy discount on Final Fantasy VII at a local store as well as my newly developed awareness of console emulation on my family's PC, opening the doors to all the SNES RPGs I couldn't afford. Super Mario RPG helped me discover RPGs, but Final Fantasy shot that appreciation into the stratosphere.

There are plenty of game series or creators that mean a lot to me, but Final Fantasy was probably the only one where my fondness went largely uncontested. I had my ups and downs with the games, but my love for them remained. It's also the only series that served as a foundational block for some of the closest friendships in my life, and while those relationships quickly didn't rely on those games, I don't know that they would have had that potential without that foot in the door.

I couldn't stop loving Final Fantasy games for a little over a decade, and then I played Final Fantasy XIII and experienced its relentless, nonsensical terminology. And Final Fantasy XV and its disinterest in anything beyond "vibes" of riding in a car across endless stretches of nothing. Yet I still loved Final Fantasy, still had expectations that when a new one came out I would be playing it. So what happened--why is that feeling now gone? Why wasn't this the result of playing XIII or XV? I would have initially guessed it's the aforementioned struggles with coherence that actually served as distractions, and that in the moment of playing both of those games I was convinced I was having some manner of a good time.

But it's now been literal months since I wrapped up XVI, and I feel I can more accurately pinpoint that, at the end of the day, even though I do not particularly like XIII or XV, I had an emotional reaction to them. I can poke fun at terms like L'Cie and Fal'Cie while marveling at XIII's clever battle system and beautiful sights. I can say however many times I like that XV's narrative left zero impression, but I will genuinely never forget the weirdo end-game side dungeon that I accidentally discovered, or buying soundtracks from other games in the series and putting them on for long car trips, or even just the meta insanity of putting out a game and expecting people to watch a prequel movie or potentially play a free beat-em-up for narrative clarity, like it was already worthy of that kind of dedication.

Almost as a defense mechanism, while watching FF16's credits I thought about Final Fantasy VII Remake, which I enjoyed a fair amount, so surely Final Fantasy isn't dead to me, but at the time it only made it worse. Sure I enjoyed it, but it was a different spin and presentation on a story I already loved, setting its laser sights on one of Final Fantasy's most iconic locales in Midgar. And in that focus they made some missteps--most notably the train graveyard sequence, a tedious expansion of a 2-3 minute moment in the original game. And now, as my brain dwells on that immediate gut reaction during the credits with the pondering that's occurred since, I've come to realize that it's because Final Fantasy XVI could have been practically any game released by a big studio in 2023, something I one thousand percent cannot say about XIII or XV.

As game development costs have increased exponentially, so too has the need for developers of massive commercial games to find ways to extend them under the false pretense that longer games with more content, prettier content, are inherently better or more worthy of purchase. And Final Fantasy--a series that has leaned into its bombastic production--is certainly not immune to that. Based on how Square always says their games underperform, they're even less likely to pivot to leaner, stronger experiences. The sidequests, as presented, are a solution to a game development "problem." Long dungeons with numerous repetitive encounters are another. Barely-interactive prolonged QTEs with elaborately produced cinematics are yet another. And Final Fantasy XVI indulges in all of these things.

At the end of the day, giving Jill a more impactful character arc--or just, I don't know, more to actually do in a game in which she's constantly present--both wouldn't have made a big difference to me with this particular title, and was also never going to happen. Not when it's easier to design a sidequest in which the player travels to three distinct locations and delivers items to NPCs and then reports that they did that and probably gets another goddamn meteorite; when it's easier to make another "castle" dungeon where you push a door open, kill some bads, walk down some stairs, kill some bads, climb up a ledge, kill some bads, and so on; when the budget is "better spent" creating a Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired spectacle shitstorm that refuses to end [shoutout to the Titan eikon fight!], because how else will people know their money was justified.

And so that special bond is gone. The Final Fantasy Experience now feels like some focus-tested husk. And that's ultimately fine. There are countless indie RPG developers interested in creating the sort of magic they grew up experiencing, whether it be Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or whatever, and while most will fail others will succeed in genuinely speaking to and understanding that era with their own spin. Hell, Square themselves is publishing those sorts of games, and creating them with smaller teams. So when I wish to dive into that kind of game, I will not struggle to find one. Doesn't mean some small part of me won't feel lost.

In a way this is the worst kind of game for me, one that has agreeable yet shallow mechanics that aren't bad, but also has been designed to be an 8+ hour experience banking on my being enchanted by the aesthetics and story. It's nice enough to look at and listen to, and there are a few moments here and there where it lived up to its spooky Lovecraftian promise. It unfortunately seems like most of the focus went into boat and space management, and since it doesn't go nearly far enough it ends up feeling repetitive before the main quest has even reached the halfway point. And yet, because the "vibes" are so rarely effective or surprising, I spent like 90% of my time with Dredge thinking about finding resources so I could get more cargo space, to hold more items or better equipment so I could get even more resources for even more cargo space.

Making me spend so much time doing inventory management is only going to make me want a better-designed inventory system, or at least something more creative. I would say a lot of the other 10% of my time with the game was spent thinking about Wilmot's Warehouse, where inventory management, and even defining what inventory is, is actually the game. Your personal creativity and ability to compartmentalize determine your success, and likely your level of frustration. In Dredge, inventory management is of very little interest because you quickly fill up, even when you're far into the game, so it's more like you have the smallest suitcase that you constantly have to unload. The choices I was making regarding my stock were typically along the lines of "do I want to spend two minutes fishing or two minutes getting materials?" Management in this situation isn't really a choice, it's just homework.

So since inventory management is constant and mundane if you get anything, and the fishing mechanics while satisfying on a nonzero level don't particularly evolve, the worldbuilding [via exploration] bears the brunt of Dredge's burden, and while I occasionally ran into fun surprises, a lot of my reward was being informed of a new fetch quest for some specific sea creature. The writing wasn't bad enough to deter me, but only good enough to give me hope for a payoff that would make it all worth it. I don't know if I saw all the endings, but the ones I did see could not have landed more flatly and did not make it worth it in the slightest.

If the game was better at any of what it was doing I could have still come away from the experience with a positive stance. If it was worse I could have called it off after an hour or two and saved time. As it stands, it was really only good enough to pull me along, and left me feeling empty at the end. Oh well!