Vanillaware does it again.

Massive game with a lot of content and many, MANY characters. Many people have said its similar to Tactics Ogre but I have never played that game, so if you did, it's like that. If you haven't, This is a Real Time with Pause strategy JRPG where battles are played between parties that have programmed attacks, and its very, very fun and cool.

There are a lot of characters you find with stories and conversations between each other and its fun to combine them in units to see how they work and see them interact in the story and in conversations.

The only reason it doesn't get a perfect score for me is because the story is a tad bit generic. Could have had some more sauce especially coming from 13 Sentinels which was absolutely crazy. Some minor nitpicks as well such as animations being pretty slow and speeding them up mutes the music. Besides that it's genuinely amazing.

I've never touched a Fromsoft game in my life and as someone who has been playing Skyrim pretty much since release I am basically treating it as a harder Skyrim. it's interesting to see my approach vs Souls veterans who prefer to jump from boss to boss. Not that either way of playing is wrong- it's a game!! but it's just interesting

This is a game that wants you to slow down and take in its world if you are struggling and I can see why- this is one of the most breathtaking game worlds I've ever seen. the first time I caught a glimpse of Nokron the Eternal city I actually got a little emotional over how beautiful it was and I NEVER do stuff like that lol. I hope the artists are proud of what they made.

I got this game on sale for like £30 and I actually feel a little bad I didn't pay more for it, and that's the ONLY time you'll EVER catch me saying that about a product lol trust me i'm the cheapest mf out there. But this is the sort of game I dreamed of playing when I was like 9. If you'd sat LOTR-obsessed child-me down in the 2000s and put this game in front of me I don't think I ever would have gone to school ever again lmao

I've been playing like a month and haven't even finished the academy area yet, i think I'm gonna be playing this for the foreseeable future and I love that for me, so excited!

     'Those great, beautiful ships, rocking silently on the calm waters, with their idle and wistful sails, are they not telling us in a silent language — when will we depart for happiness?'
     – Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, VIII, 1887 (personal translation).

One of the most difficult issues in fantasy studies is to define its contours and, by extension, its relationship to reality. In her seminal study, Fantasy: The literature of subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson points out that fantasy violates the conventions and rules of our reality and: 'threatens to subvert rules and conventions taken to be normative [and] disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature’s reproduction of the "real"' [1]. The capacity for deviation that speculative fiction offers is both an opportunity and a danger. Jackson points out that this subversive potential does not mean that fantasy or the fantastic are genres that always aim for social progressivism. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the pulp tradition was steeped in racist, homophobic and misogynist tropes that exerted a lasting influence on fiction throughout the late twentieth century and to this day.

     The misogynist issue in Western-style fantasy

Many authors hide behind these historical precedents to conceal a conservative discourse. The existence of multiple races allows for the perpetuation of social oppression, and while female characters have generally become more active in recent decades, they continue to fit into old-fashioned stereotypes [2]. The Final Fantasy series is part of this dynamic and has always oscillated between these major themes of fantasy fiction, notably by offering a regular comparison between magic and technological modernity, nature and industry, good and evil, humanity and divinity. These dichotomies are relatively common and allow the story to touch on issues such as capitalist exploitation and the use of natural resources. However, the representation of other topics remains disastrous: Final Fantasy XIV (2010) is especially characterised by deep-seated racism and sexism, the latter partially masked by the presence of strong female characters in positions of power.

It is hard to say whether these precautions were taken to appeal to a particular audience, but it is clear that Final Fantasy XVI ignores all these concerns and plunges into the most outrageous archaism, piling on misogynistic scenes wherever possible, supposedly justified by the harshness of European medieval society. Excuses of this kind obscure the real issues. The player follows the story of Clive Rosfield, drawn into a quest for revenge after the Phoenix Gate incident, which spells the end of the Duchy of Rosaria. Miraculously reunited with his childhood friend Jill Warrick, he joins Cid's group, determined to change the situation of the Bearers – magic-capable individuals enslaved across the continent. Final Fantasy XVI is therefore a tale of free will and independence, pitting the dark nature of the world against the purity of Cid and Clive's ideals.

To create this atmosphere, as well as the division between good and evil, the title makes extensive use of violence, sex and sexual violence as narrative drivers. Lenise Prater explains that Fiona McIntosh's Percheron trilogy (2005) constructs: 'a series of juxtapositions between good and evil [...] through the representation of sexual violence' [3]. The same processes are at work in Final Fantasy XVI, from the very first narrative arc of the adventure, where Benedikta is cast as the archetypal femme fatale, ready to use her body to manipulate her rivals: the character is constantly brought back to her status as a woman, and it is the threat of sexual violence that cements her development – Annabella is constructed in a similar way. Final Fantasy XVI revels in the dichotomy between whores and innocent virgins. Despite the Western aesthetic of the title, Jill is no more than a yamato nadeshiko who is constantly sidelined by the game. She mostly serves as a narrative device to advance the plot, through her multiple visits to the infirmary or because she is kidnapped by Clive's enemies. The title denies her any agency, and her nuanced fragility is only hinted at in a few sentences before being brushed aside: it takes almost thirty hours of gameplay before Clive explicitly asks her how she is, despite her constant concern for the protagonist's anxieties.

     A case for centrism and laissez-faire

This conservative portrayal is echoed in the discourse on the Bearers. The game is moderately critical of slavery on the continent and fails to make it a structural issue for Clive, who always remains somewhat detached from the problem. This issue is structurally embedded in the way the player interacts with the world, as they are extremely passive in relation to the events portrayed in the story. While the player is aware of the political manipulations taking place in Storm, they cannot act on them directly; Clive is blindly thrown into the fray and the situation is simply resolved in a battle that depoliticises the social stakes. Similarly, the Seals donated by certain NPCs guarantee Clive's reputation in the community in a highly artificial way, removing any roughness from the interactions. Clive fights to free the Bearers because he inherits this mission from his father and Cid, but this task seems disembodied throughout the game.

Beyond the main quest, the side quests are particularly lacklustre and do little to deepen the world-building. Because they can be accessed at any point in the game, Final Fantasy XVI chooses to exclude companions from them. They simply disappear from the cutscenes and thus have no chance to react to the world around them. Since the intention is to establish Clive as an ideologically good, open and self-governing character, all side quests are resolved by Clive's ideological concessions or miraculous unifications in the face of artificially created danger, without the slightest contradiction from any of the other main characters. Only in the final stretch does someone point out Clive's hypocrisy and domineering power over Jill, but the scene is quickly swept away by the return of Gav, the comic relief of the group.

Final Fantasy XVI is more concerned with shocking, melodramatic or cathartic platitudes than with radical denunciations of inequality and oppression. Worse, these shocking scenes do not even make the world dynamic, so poor is the structure of the narrative. Two problems stand out. Firstly, the interweaving of high-intensity sequences with slower passages: instead of building up the world through genuine slice-of-life sequences, the game multiplies banalities that the player has already understood for several dozen hours. The temporality of the story is also incoherent. Clive seems to cross the continent in a matter of hours, while his rivals remain completely passive. The confrontation between the Sanbreque Empire and the Dhalmekian Republic is characterised by irrational stagnation and passivity, allowing Clive to strike unhindered. The Twins always remain static, despite long ellipses in time.

     A hollow and meaningless experience

Perhaps Final Fantasy XVI should not be taken so literally, but rather accepted as the nekketsu it becomes in the second half of the game. Such an interpretation would be acceptable if the game did not take itself so seriously. However, as in Final Fantasy XIV, the writing wallows in a very uncomfortable theatrical heaviness – which the actors generally manage to save from disaster – as if clumsily mimicking the drama of Shakespeare's historical plays. However, Clive's disillusioned, self-deprecating, borderline comic character breaks up this fiction. Some characters work well, playing up their theatrical nature, such as Cid or Lord Byron, but they are quickly relegated to the background or an essentially comic role.

The shifts in tone and pacing detract from the development of the narrative, which cannot be saved by a few flashes of brilliance. The aetheric floods seem to have been imagined as a reflection of nuclear risks, highlighting the danger of Japan's post-Fukushima energy crutch, but in the end they are only used as a narrative expedient to create danger where the plot needs it. The pinnacle of dishonesty and disrespect for a title that centres its discourse on human free will lies in the choice of names for the NPC fillers. In the pure tradition of Final Fantasy XIV, they include puns and comical alliterations ('Broom-Bearer') that strip them of all substance and reduce them to ridicule. In the second half of the game, a little girl is introduced as a character of some narrative importance, but the title does not even bother to give her a name or address her living conditions.

Meanwhile, the action sequences prove to be particularly hollow. The choreography in the first few hours is quite ingenious, highlighting Clive's agility with complex movements and rather creative camera angles. As the title progresses, this aspect is abandoned in favour of fights that drag on and resort to nekketsu clichés. The duel against Titan lasts forty minutes and is a miserable succession of attacks around the stone tentacles. Final Fantasy XVI even has the audacity to end the battle not with the obvious cinematic climax, but with a dull and particularly unpleasant aerial sequence. Subsequent encounters also drag on for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate a genuine – if futile – mastery of the lightning engine.

     Ergonomics, gameplay and fluidity

While Final Fantasy XVI boasts detailed environments at first glance, the facade quickly cracks. The early areas are indeed highly detailed, to the point of drowning the player in detail – navigating through the thick vegetation is quite difficult, forcing the player to use Torgal to progress – but the quality deteriorates as the game progresses. The dense environments disappear in favour of vast open areas that struggle to convey the majesty of the world. Although the cities visible on the horizon are beautiful backdrops, they fail to radiate materially onto their surroundings, which then become mere abstractions. Moreover, Clive's movement is extremely sluggish: even getting on his chocobo is an unpleasant task that constantly interrupts the fluidity of the action, while the player is condemned to an extraordinary passivity in order to get from one place to another.

In the Hideaway, this impression is reinforced by Clive's inability to sprint: in the second half of the game, getting to the backyard is a gruelling chore. The magic of this cocoon quickly vanishes, as the various characters keep repeating themselves and are only mediocrely animated. Despite the detailed scenery, the game borrows all its animations from Final Fantasy XIV, giving a very artificial tone to the discussions. The Hideaway is less a place where the player can comfortably catch up with their favourite NPCs, and more a burdensome obligation to access NPCs, side quests and the hunt board – requiring the player to physically go there to see the location of elite monsters, a design mistake that even Final Fantasy XIV avoided.

The enjoyment of the combat system is left to the player and their experience of other character-action games, but it is absurd that the player has to wait at least twenty hours to finally be given a modicum of flexibility in their attack options: Final Fantasy XVI justifies its unique protagonist with a deep combat system that encourages the creation of diverse builds, but this philosophy is only appropriate in a New Game+ where all powers are unlocked from the start. In a first playthrough, the player must suffer from an impressive slowness, to the point where the Story Mode becomes an obvious option. The title here echoes the recent problem of Shadowbringers (2019) and especially Endwalker (2021), which first designs its battles with the Extreme and Savage versions, before cutting out the most difficult sections for the Normal versions – the result is a sense of incompleteness that is particularly damaging when combined with the very slowly evolving combat system.

It is difficult to place Final Fantasy XVI in the landscape of modern Japanese video games, so awkward is it in every way. With the title still in its cycle of artificial marketing in preparation for the DLCs, one can only speculate as to the reasons for these failings. Perhaps the lack of coherence can be explained by the fractured development team working on two major games, and the highly eclectic nature of the directors brought together by Naoki Yoshida. His design philosophy is particularly well suited to an MMO, but Final Fantasy XVI suffers greatly from it: the endless succession of side quests involving the Hideaway characters just before the final battle is incomprehensible, as if the game had remembered that it needed to conclude. Hiroshi Takai and Kazutoyo Maehiro's narrative vision is a series of shocking, empty, meaningless scenes: players of Heavensward (2015) had the opportunity to suffer from Ysayle's portrayal, and it is surprising that Final Fantasy XVI does even worse, a standard-bearer for passive misogyny in modern fantasy. That Jill's theme becomes 'My Star' and denies her any agency in the game's final moments is particularly painful and aptly sums up the title.

__________
[1] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The literature of subversion, Routledge, London, 2005 [1981], p. 14.
[2] On the topic, see for example Peter Bebergal (ed.), Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons, Strange Attractor Press, London, 2021. In the afterword, Ann VanderMeer discusses the conservative roots of pulp fantasy and of the historical TTRPG.
[3] Lenise Prater, 'Monstrous Fantasies: Reinforcing Rape Culture in Fiona McIntosh's Fantasy Novels', in Hecate, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2014.

I was so excited when it was announced Naoki Yoshida would be helming Final Fantasy XVI. I love XIV, so the director helming a main series title without any of the constraints of an MMO sounded fantastic. It’s the first Final Fantasy I’ve bought at launch since the Playstation 2. But, I really don’t enjoy saying it. I hate XVI. I hate it so much it reflects back on XIV, drawing attention to any shortcoming that was present there, now blown up to massive proportions.

Maybe the biggest issue is how much of the core gameplay is lifted from the MMO. If you’re not in a dungeon or a cutscene, you’re doing quests, and they’re all MMO sidequests. Find the NPC with a marker, click through their dialogue, move to the next NPC, repeat. Kill three badgers. Pick up five motes of sand. Etcetera. It’s all busywork, it all feels pointless. Despite the fact that the quests are non-stop talking, you have no control over dialogue. This is a game that in many ways wants to be the Witcher 3, but misses the real essentials there of giving you agency over how you engage with the story. This felt acceptable in XIV where a branching story doesn’t really work with a shared world, but here it just feels like a mistake.

The fact the story is totally linear might not be so bad if it weren’t also just very badly written. There’s a long first act where the game pokes at different threads- Clive’s quest for revenge, mystery, redemption, but then settles into a very formulaic quest to break crystals that fills almost the entire rest of the game. Every part of it feels thinly written. It’s hard to pick what to focus on here- the mysteries with obvious solutions, the politics that stop existing the moment you look away from them, or the world changing actions that never seem to have any consequences. What I kept coming back to is the heroes’ plan to end slavery. Magic users are enslaved in the world of XVI, you see, and Cid has a plan to save them. It doesn’t, by and large, involve breaking chains or forming a free magic nation or anything like that. The plan is to destroy the mother crystals, which allow normal people to use magic, and cause the ecological disaster creeping across the land. This will end slavery, you see, because- well- actually- it’ll make the slavery much much worse, because as the crystals disappear the discrimination against magic users will become even more cruel. But then, somehow, eventually, the slavery will be over. Trust us!

If you think that’s not a particularly deft handling of an issue, it’s a theme. The way women are handled in this game is dreadful. There are three principal female characters in the game, and you’ll see all of them naked before the story is over. Two are villainous schemers whose overt sexuality is framed as duplicitous and evil, seducing dopey lads into doing their bidding. The third is Clive’s virginal companion, Jill. Jill spends large chunks of the game convalescing, the writers switching her off whenever they can’t be bothered with her around. When she is there, she’s usually just standing behind Clive looking supportive. Even at the culmination of her own revenge arc she’s incapacitated by a random boss monster and needs Clive to save the day. This woman embodies the power of a Nuclear Warhead. But she gets off the best- the others receive brutal deaths as retribution for being too sexy. Joke all you want about Tifa Lockhart’s chest, as a character she had a lot going on, an arc, a unique personality, agency. XVI is the worst the series has been for women since Final Fantasy II.

I could go on. The RPG progression is so token as to be pointless. Same for the crafting, and the economy. The world feels absolutely tiny, you can walk from one end of the continent to another in about 5 minutes. There’s a really confused ecological message where maybe global warming is bad, but it’s definitely not society’s fault. And so on, and so on.

For all my complaints, there were still things I like. It’s graphically very impressive. The boss fights are the obvious centre piece and they’re very cool, gigantic dragons and demons sparring amidst a sea of flames, grinding down stone tendrils to smash the arms off a titan. I found myself caring about Gav and Clive’s silly old uncle, even if I didn’t care for the protagonist himself. But when I look back across every Final Fantasy game I’ve played, there’s no game I want to replay less than this.

--There are no story spoilers in this review. Gameplay that was previously shown in trailers is discussed.--

During the development of The Elder Scrolls IV, Bethesda sent Patrick Stewart a massive booklet containing robust background history and motivations for the character he would be playing. Stewart was delighted by the sheer amount of character prep he was given, and was excited to be a part of the project. His character dies 10 minutes into the game.

To me, this little footnote for a completely unrelated game, perfectly sums up Final Fantasy XVI. A game that promises incredible depth to it's story and it's world building, and fails to deliver. The early game sets up the incredible realm of Valisthea, and it's clashing kingdoms and petty politics. Every character is introduced with a near-limitless amount of intrigue. As you approach the latter half, you realize how one-note the characters and their motivations are, and the limited interaction you have with Valisthea amounts to dipping your toes in a kiddie pool.

As you have probably heard, this game forgoes Final Fantasy's turn-based roots and grounds itself in the high-octane action genre, akin to Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. While this may be a welcome change to some, several important facets from both sides of the genre shift are lost in translation.

On the RPG side: the depth and complexity to combat is gone. There is no resource management, stat weights, or even classes. All spells are special attacks, and healing is done primarily through Souls-like flasks. This is also a solitary adventure, party members are nowhere to be seen. While some NPCs do follow you around from time to time, their dialogue during these excursions is non-existent and their combat damage numbers are in the two digits. While Dragon Age set a high bar with it's talkative cast in the world, a little more interaction outside of lengthy cutscenes would go a long way. I would go as far to say Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins does a better job of blending these two genre's together.

In regards to combat: While the game has flashy moves and agility akin to some of the better known brawlers on the market, it does not contain nowhere near the depth those games have. Sword swings end after four, and you can shoot a blast of magic for minor damage. Special abilities are on timers, similar to hero shooters, and it is near impossible to flow these abilities into a satisfying, air combo where the ground waits several minutes for your return. Vergil from DMC you are not. This issue is magnified by the non-existent enemy variety. You have small enemies, medium size enemies that have stagger gauges, and boss enemies, also with stagger gauges. You fight each time the same way; slash four times, use abilities off cooldown, use the bumper to dodge incoming attacks. rinse and repeat. Even the climactic Eikon battles fight and move in the same way, unless of course it's an Eikon battle that is entirely made up of quick time events (which are two buttons by the way). If you were purchasing this game with the hype of seeing massive monsters duke it out (like me), I promise you Asura's Wrath did it far better 11 years ago. If you are an old school RPG fan, or someone who enjoys building up their multiplier in combo action games, you can do better than this.

The world, as beautiful as it is, has hardly any interaction to it. If you don't like shopping for potions or killing goblins, you are out of luck. There are no minigames outside of time trials and combat challenges. This is a massive step back from XV, where cooking, fishing, and driving were fun ways to pass the time. Hell, even VII Remake had darts, exercising, and a strategy game attached to it. Even after finishing the game, I'm continuously baffled by how little "gameplay" there was.

I have written a lot of negative things about this game, but the silly part is I did enjoy myself, believe it or not. Square Enix once again shows their mastery over visual effects and sense of scale, and there are some parts of the story that did pluck at my heart strings. While the combat is very simple, hitting attacks of any variety is a lot of fun thanks to the excellent sound design.

While this game sits far below Final Fantasy XII (The best FF game ever made don't @ me), I would recommend it for newcomers to Final Fantasy or the action genre in general, and I reckon you would get much more mileage out of it than I did. If you're looking for games to play that are similar, I recommend -

Asura's Wrath
Bayonetta 1 and 2
Devil May Cry 3,4,5
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
Nioh 1
Final Fantasy VII Remake
Final Fantasy XV

Naoki Yoshida and Creative Business Unit 3 are like the King Midas: everything they touch turns into FFXIV. So even though XVI is the furthest Final Fantasy ever went away from the old formula, some remnants of JRPG genre keep holding it back. The fetch/hunt/speak-to-an-NPC sidequests were barely tolerable in a MMORPG, here they kill the pace completely. Gear/crafting/item system is a shadow of what it once was, coming down to "equip thing with big number". Optional dungeons do not exist and main story dungeons are linear corridors with a group of enemies or a chest with 20 goblin nutsacks placed in every second room. I struggle to think of any piece of side content that doesn't feel like a chore to do. Trials and hunts are marginally better, though the low variety of enemy types brings them down a bit as well.
So why not a lower rating? There two saving grace in FFXVI - combat system and music. That guest dev, who was put in charge of battle design pulled not only his own weight - he carried the entire game. Combat is fluid, flashy, simple enough to grasp, but deep enough to not get tired of it even after hundreds of battles. Every new battle is a pleasure, boss battles even more so.
But the best part would be the story bosses and Eikon battles. Whoever designed them must've loved Metal Gear Rising and Asura's Wrath, since the story bosses get more and more over-the-top with every step of the way. Add in to that ridiculousness the music by Soken and his team, and you have some of the best battles in the entire series.
XVI is an amalgam of a game, made from a bunch of pieces that don't quite fit. It's a good first try for CBU3.

Final Fantasy XVI is a case study in how poor pacing can deflate an otherwise excellent game to just a good game. I genuinely feel if this was just the arcade stages stitched together with slightly pumped up difficulty and a bunch of cutscenes in between them this would be one of my favorite entries in the series.

It feels weird to advocate for this being more of a linear DMC-esque action game when many of the complaints lobbed against it are regarding it as too much DMC and not enough RPG. However, its strengths lie almost entirely in that action so i'd rather prop that up than expand on the RPG aspects of the game which are window dressing at best and mind numbing at worst. It just feels so awful to go from some of the most bombastic, over the top, expensive ass boss fights I've ever seen to doing chores for people for 3 hours straight waiting to get back into the action.

I understand that this game really wants a chance to flesh out its entire cast, even characters you would not expect to have any depth whatsoever, and to do that it needs to slow down and have some quieter moments in between the big fights. It's just that the way these quieter moments are handled just does not mesh very well with the rest of the game and does not work for me outside of a handful of really good side quests. I'm not even being a hater with regards to all the writing in this game, where the writing concerns the overarching plot or the core cast of characters it's actually really solid. I just wish it was more focused in on those aspects!

Instead of writing a joke open im just gonna vent that they patched in a way to disable the motion blur literally the moment I beat this game. Yoshi P i'm going to fanfest I will have my revenge.

I really enjoy this game's combat, even if the game being excessively easy brings it down a bit. I'm alright with the story, its not super great but there's parts and characters that i like, and CBU3 really knows how to make a sick ass set pieces.

The combat is really enjoyable in defiance of its roots of the modern action game of XXXX > Y for Combos, Cooldown Skills, And Platinum dodges. Mostly on the strength of the stances and the skills themselves. You can run up to 3 stances based on the Eikons you face in the game, giving you 2 skills out of 4 to pick from, and with some levels you can crossclass the skills as well, as well as a special skill locked to the stance (phoenix is a teleport, garuda is Nero Grab, ect). It sound limited at first but there's a really solid variation of skills, and the cross classing between skills really opens up a lot of things. Odin Stance is the shit. The game's overall enemy and boss encounter design also uplifts it, there's a good variety in regular enemies and some really fun bosses.

The game's other big gameplay pieces are the Eikon battles; set boss battles where you go Ifrit Mode, often against other Eikons. I was kinda afraid going into this game that these were going to be mostly just cutscenes with QTE prompts and a UI, and while like 2-3 of them basically are, the rest of them are actual boss fights, with multiple phases with unique gimmicks. CBU3 is probably at they're best making big multi phase boss fights, and they are fucking sick so hey props to them. I think it peaks at titan but the rest of them are good too.

I think the biggest problem with the gameplay part of this game is how easy it is. No one in the land actually stands a chance against Clive, he is insanely strong between the incredibly generous Platinum Slowdown dodge windows, enemy's overall long windup + low damage and how even a little basic skill experiment can lead to just brutalizing. Even the Eikon bosses are incredibly lenient, you have a ton of health with 6 heals in the back to use and equally lenient dodge windows. I died 3 times total in this game, and 2 of those was me trying to parry moves that ended up being one shots.
In theory this might be solved with higher difficulty options; there's atleast 2 higher difficulties, but they're NG+ locked. If FF difficult was pickable from the start I probably wouldn't be writing this paragraph, but it sounds like FF difficulty is just higher stats so idk.

Story is fine. I'm not super blown away by it but it's kinda carried by just some good ass set pieces. It kinda half commits to the racism themes (though I cant say i'm not pretty tried of the Thinly Veiled Racism stand in, especially in a game pretty harshly criticized when yoshida got asked why there isnt any black people in it and going "lol") or the more interesting theme of Ruling Class Will Choose To Ignore The The Plight Of World If Itll Cost Them Anything and they basically stop getting mentioned by the half way point for a more traditional FF villain. Said villain is kinda boring imo, He gets some interesting aspects by the end but it's a little too late to get into it. But also if they went in depth more we'd all notice that they're just reusing a 14 plot lol.
It's also really badly paced at times, but maybe I'm just annoyed that you get off the insane high of the titan fight into the most Nebulous Nothing shit for like an hour.

(this is a weird thing, but the game has a thing where if you pause a cutscene and press the ps5 center button it shows blurbs of characters/locations/lore/ect relevant to the scene you're currently in. Obviously it's really useful if you think you forgot about something, but the game depends on this a little too much. a lot of relevant exposition is actually locked to these blurbs, I feel like there's whole scenes of lore exposition that's been replaced with the cutscene lore blurbs, but that's might just be me)

Outside of the combat and story there isn't really too much to talk about! You travel between youre hideout, a series of fairly open zones and "dungeons", which is reality is more like a regular character action game stage rather than a dungeons, and there's some shallow sidequests(which i stopped doing outside of the ones indicated that they give you a permeant upgrade) and some pretty fun Hunts inbetween.

Some people complain about the lack of any real RPG mechanics in the game, but personally if they're gonna commit to this game being an action game i'd rather they trim the always really shallow RPG elements that show up in these "action rpgs" and just commit to combat. People compared it to the new GOW games, but really I think I got a lot more out of messing with stances/skills than GOW's gearing. If you're really missing a more traditional turnbased RPG i feel for you truly because I am NOT one of those people who thinks all turned based games suck ass, but personally I do not agree with meriting a game on what previous games in its franchise do, especially when it's clearly going for somethin very different. There's still plenty of turn based RPGs out there anyways.

Music is also good as always, though personally I wish Soken got a bit more weird with it. You really get some of that Soken magic in the titan fight, but there isnt much of it outside of that. It's very strange hearing a soken composed game where most of it has a pretty similar sound, especially if you're a FFXIV boy like me.

It's very pretty. I don't have too much to say graphics wise. It's extremely polished. I think a lot of the designs, especially the eikons, are really strong, and there's some really pretty zones. Performance mode on PS5 having a luxating framerate outside of battle is annoying but it never hits like below 40, and the amount of times combat went below 60fps was like less then 5 times.

One final note, this game as cemented something in my head that Yoshi P (Maybe just CBU3 as a whole? idk) is one of those game directors whose games have "a feel"- something that would've been really obvious if he wasn't exclusively working on FFXIV for the past 10 years or whatever. If you've played a shitton of XIV like I have you can really feel it; an emphasis on core combat and encounter designs over RPG elements, long multiphase fights with some really strong spectacle moments, sidequest names, hell even the dungeons feel like XIV dungeons (which is to say, hallways into circular arenas lol), and more. I would need a completely separate post if I wanted to go into this, and I might do that another day.

FF16 is really fun to play, and if there was a threat of dying I'd probably hit it with a 4 star. everything else is Fine. I will definetly go back to this game and do a FF difficult playthrough at some point, justtt not immediately.


#clivehive