#clive's first initiated kiss with cid!!!

[dunderella]

kinktober day 6: first kiss 💗

(find the rest of my kinktober entries on my sideblog @dddrunkderella !!)

[cosmic-metanoia]

Femininity Concepts in FFXVI

***Spoilers for Final Fantasy XVI***

Well, here I am again, now focusing on the female characters.

Like I did in the previous post, I will focus on the female Dominants first then highlight some secondary characters that really stood out.

*Jill - Come on, we gotta start with our beloved gal. She demonstrates this silent but strong (and even fearsome) spirit. She's very supportive of Clive but is not afraid to voice her opinions. She possesses a natural elegance and grace but demonstrates her fierce capabilities on the battlefield. She has a knack for negotiation and relating to others. We really see her unveil her dark side when she confronts her past head on in the Iron Kingdom. What's fantastic is that she asked for Clive's support and understanding but made it clear that she would be the one to face off against the Crystalline Orthodoxy's head priest (his name escapes me). Jill may not always make background commentary but her words are carefully selected and measured.

*Benedikta - She is your classic femme fatale that plays with men to further advance her position. Yet the one who she is in a love/hate relationship with is the one she can't have. She is ferocious yet what makes her different is that she contains this hidden sorrow and just wants to be genuinely loved. The way she frantically panicked when she lost her Eikon honestly brought tears to my eyes. She ended up with the wrong crowd and played this game of political chess in a room full of powerful men yet she instantly realized how useless she was to them in that moment of losing her most valuable piece.

*Side note: Let's hope that Leviathan the Lost is another female Eikon when the DLC hits in the next few months!! <3

*Jote - Okay, this awesome woman is HIGHLY underrated! She is incredibly enigmatic and we learn so much about her from the thoughts of other characters but never from her own lips! Initially players may brush her off as some unimportant maid servant but we see that she is so much more - a shield, a formidable fighter (though never witnessed!), a healer, a scout, etc. She's basically doing the jobs of Tarja, Clive, and Gav wrapped up in one! Yet her eyes give away her feelings towards Joshua and especially when she frets over his health. Yes, she longs for him but what makes it unique is that she loves him for who he is, not for what benefits his Eikon brings to the Undying that worships him.

*Mid - A freakin' prodigy. I mean, she is the head of the hideaway engineers! An occupation that is stereotypically masculine. She is 100% focused on her tasks and is not your typical 16 year old gal for sure. Her genius inventions, zest for life, and fast-talking mannerisms has all of the hideaway family wrapped around her finger (true, also because she is Cid's daughter). That whole scene with Joshua kneeling to kiss her hand upon meeting her cracked me up - she's the last woman who requires a chivalrous display but what I love is how she laughed and pulled him up and gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

*Charon - What can I say, this woman does not take s--- from ANYONE. She's even intimidating to some of the men at the hideaway which is absolutely hilarious. She is a hardened woman that commands respect but has her softer side which takes time to reveal. Money is on her mind but eventually she learns that there should be more to life - using her abilities as a cunning merchant to help a cause greater than herself.

*Tarja - Like Charon, she also does not accept any B.S. and takes her job as the non-magical physicker very seriously. What's great is that she isn't a nurse but the actual (and only) doctor of the hideaway. Her extensive knowledge is incredibly valuable and the hideaway would definitely not have survived without her.

*Vivian - A woman held in high-esteem who is so focused on the garnering of knowledge that she even gets targeted by assassins. Her intelligence certainly tips the scales in favor of the Cursebreakers to gain the upper hand.

*Anabella - I have a huge post written about her but I figure it's worth mentioning a particular aspect. She possesses quite the evil ambitions and is able to persuade not just the theocratic Sanbrequois emperor but powerful men from other nations - NOT just through her looks but through her conniving strategies. She longs for a powerful legacy forged by the greatest possible noble blood and even views herself as the prized breeding cow.

Some other examples of different aspects of female characters include: Eloise who is an astute businesswoman who conducted deals and contracts while her brother Theodore (sob) became her trusted porter; Martha who is the tough protector of Martha's Rest - the Rosarians put their trust and faith in her; the same with the Northreach residents when it came to Isabelle. What's great about her is that she is a courtesan but we see her blossom into a strong and trustworthy leader that many held in high esteem.

Even the stoic Dorys is the commander of a Cursebreakers squad.

I love how the story had female characters each with their own drives and ambitions whether they were motivated by a just cause or for evil reasons.

[comic-panels]

Final Fantasy XVI Review

Spoiler warning For Final Fantasy XVI

and Asura’s Wrath I guess

Somewhere around 2/3rds of the way through Final Fantasy XVI Godzilla and Mothra do the fusion dance to defeat King Ghidorah and I am through the moon.

It’s the peak of the dumb spectacle that FF XVI delivers in its best moments, topping the previous large spectacle boss fight that was also a marvel of large scale blow your socks off nonsense. It’s also the emotional peak of the narrative where the emotional threads that the game actually cares about come together (It’s brothers all the way down).

They go to space!

It’s great.

After that Final Fantasy XVI basically fritters away everything it’s built up, squandering all its potential and my good will. But before I get to the deal breaker let’s talk about some other issues.

The early hours of Final Fantasy XVI spend a lot of time building up the world and political realities of the world. The game wants to present itself as a more adult Final Fantasy. This is a Final Fantasy that fucks and says fuck. There’s blood. Red blood. There’s politics, people in a room discuss a war. And a lot of air is spent on the magical slavery of this world. The early hours we see the tragedy of Clive’s life and how everything he had is taken away from him.

And then he gets like all of it back. Even his dog.

Clive is a pretty dumb protagonist. And I mean like head empty dumb. It takes hours in game for him to realize that it was him who turned into Ifrit and killed his brother. And then he has to come to terms with having killed his brother. And then it takes more hours for him to discover that his brother was never really dead after all.

I don’t have a problem with a head empty himbo protagonist, but it tries my patience a little to be following around this specific guy who’s never put two and two together explore and learn about the world of magical slavery and why it’s bad.

This is a game about Kaiju firing lasers at each other in space. There isn’t nuanced thoughtful commentary here. The game doesn’t have anything interesting to say about its magical slavery, or how to depict it, it just sucks a lot of the air out of the room. A lot of whinging, no meat.

All that early posturing, and setup in those early hours gives way to a game that isn’t really “mature” at all. It took some light seasoning from Game of Thrones but that’s it. After those initial scenes of Benedikta straddling Hugo in the hallway, or Anabella ready to go to town on Elwin’s dick while ranting about genetic purity, the game is actually really chaste and terrified of sex.  When it comes to Clive and Jill’s romance suddenly the game is unwilling to show anything. When they meet up as adult they just fall into being married like immediately, the game only willing to even give the player the classic almost-kiss-but-interrupted moment after hours of them together. Just falling face first into the Whores and Madonnas trope. My favorite example of this is when Clive goes to an actual brothel and the Madame flirts with Clive a little and there’s just zero chance that Clive would respond to this one iota. The only characters allowed to be really horny are explicitly evil and brutally killed. Only characters the game doesn’t think of as fucking are allowed to have the actually emotional conversations that can provide a feast for horny fan communities. Like Clive and Cid. Or Clive and Gav. Or Clive and Joshua. Clive and his brother spend more time lovingly starring into each other’s eyes than him and his wife do in this video game. And the one actually gay relationship is also reduced to tasteful kiss with the camera zoomed out. The game is too scared of actual romance and so the emotional moments of characters interacting and sharing feelings is left to the homosocial moments. The endgame sidequest that is basically Jill’s loyalty mission when at the end of it you get a pop-up saying Jill will now always stay in your party is about you and Joshua hanging out without her. And she doesn’t even come on the final mission!

But so it goes.

The game is at its best when it’s Kaiju firing lasers in space. Being afraid of cooties isn’t a deal breaker.

Neither does the fact that all the political intrigue hinted at early on comes to naught when it becomes clear that the video game is built around going to all the Mothercrystals on the map and blowing them up. You just go around and cut off the head of every major government one by one and none of their relationships with each other matter. Infuriatingly at the same time as you’re doing that you’re also going to a nearby town and befriending the most influential richest person there, who is your main ally in your quest to free slaves. To the point where in the last town you don’t know who your contact will be so the plan is to specifically find the richest, most influential person in town, because clearly that person will be against slavery. What are we doing here guys? Just a lot of time befriending the nice slave owners in this video game. There’s a late game sidequest that’s all about about finding your dad’s lost will where he says he was gonna free all his slaves after he died. Aw, see, he was a good one after all.

Can we get back to the Kaiju in space please.

It’s not just that the content of this part of the game is bad. It’s that it’s bad in the same way repeatedly, which sets up a bigger problem with the end of the game.

The game just doesn’t have enough surprises.

When Ifrit and Phoenix fuse together into one being, the emotional climax of their entire journey to stop their step-brother Bahamut, whose life has also been ruined by Anabella and is now enthralled to Ultima, I was surprised and delighted. That just never happened again for the rest of the game.

The only kinds of surprises were baffling disappointments, like Jill not coming on the final mission, or Ultima’s strongest form just being evil Ifrit-Phoenix, like this was a Marvel movie.

The thing I will point to that I think a lot of this stems from is that Ultima is fucking boring. His flat affect, his weird emotionless face and the fact that at the end of the day, he’s just another dumb guy.

There’s also the fact that being enthralled to Ultima also makes Barnabas/Odin suck.

In the early parts of the game there is some intrigue set up with Cid, Benedicta and Barnabas; how Cid abandoned his position at Barnabas’s side. We see Benedicta hates him for it and we get a taste of Cid’s  anger towards Barnabas.

But with Cid dead by the time Barnabas is really in the story there’s no emotion left there. He and Clive have no relationship. Ultima’s whole thing is about how people shouldn’t have will, they’re just a tool he created for his own needs. With Barnabas fully bought in on that, it means there’s no juice to this showdown. Barnabas is just a dumb guy who doesn’t believe in his own will.

There’s nothing there. There are hints of other things as you can tell at some point someone thought maybe there should be more to this. We get a cutscene with Barnabas naked as Ultima transforms into his mom also naked. But there’s no follow up to that. And then during the fight Barnabas, in masked Odin mode, goes full green goblin and becomes a different character briefly cackling like a madman, which is like just enough to make me go “you’re right video game, Barnabas should have had literally any personality this whole time.”

And this is where my enthusiasm for this game died. For one the game pads out getting you to the Barnabas fight, and it does so using a nasty trick it used before: to put you face to face with the boss fight, only to then pull you away so that you could meet face to face again, without any of the stakes of the game having changed. The game also does this with Titan, but at least there you got to cut off Hugo’s hands for your trouble. You fake fight Barnabas twice, with him kicking your ass in cutscenes and you undergoing no actual power ups before you really fight and defeat him.

The spectacle of this fight is a downgrade from the last big one, you barely even fight Odin in Eikon form. And there are no emotional stakes. Barnabas is King of a dead city. He doesn’t have an argument, his temptation of Clive is completely hollow.

I just need the characters to hate each other, or at least be emotionally involved with each other in some way. This is basic Shonen stuff here, and the game drops the ball completely. The storytelling and plotting have sucked everything dry. Early on all Odin had to do was stand on a hill and be huge, and my heart swelled.

He’s a giant dude on a giant horse, and all the fun of that has been slowly, repeatedly and thoroughly stamped out.

At this point I’m mad.

You never even confront the blight itself omg, how do you fuck that up, I’m so mad. Ultima is just some guy running from it. Cid’s whole theory was wrong but it never even mattered. We’re just here to punch God and end the video game. Nothing matters.

I love the video game Asura’s Wrath. That is spectacle action done correctly even though the playing of the video game is kinda whatever. The end of that game is Asura angrily punching God for making his daughter cry. It’s not complicated. But it’s worlds more engaging to me than the end of Final Fantasy XVI, which vaguely just copies that ending beat for beat without any of the verve that makes Asura’s Wrath sing.

It feels kinda dumb to say after mentioning Asura’s Wrath, but the combat here kinda ran out of steam over the length of the game. It starts really fun and the first few Ikon unlocks really keep making it better, but then you kinda hit a wall. Too many of the abilities feel similar to others, and there’s no fun new moevement getting added to your kit. And then the really late game Eikons just gave me abilities that had lengthy animations attached, so it really was like an older Final Fantasy where I’m sitting there watching an unskippable cutscene in the middle of battle. The game went from dodging and parrying to comboing abilities to maximize stagger amount to firing Kamehamehas over and over. And like, that last one is cool, but less engaging when you’re just doing that over and over for like the last 10 hours or whatever. That’s an exaggeration, but for the final boss, he was so mobile that I basically couldn’t do my setup combos on him and just had to wait for the cooldown on my lengthy laser beam spell.

Final Fantasy XVI wishes it were as good as Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4.

I was having a good time for most of the way through Final Fantasy XVI. I had my nitpicks with the story and structure, but the highs were very high. The Bahamut fight is truly incredible. I was very happy. But the back end of the game was frankly just pretty boring overall, which burned away a lot of my goodwill and makes me less forgiving of the game’s other problems.

There’s like one moment late in the game where your whole crew crashes your death march to kill the Night King beyond The Wall and you are all finally together to confront evil and I saw a glimpse of a better world where you just got to hang with your party and use the power of friendship to save the world together.

But like that the dream was gone.

Instead the game ends with a world where people use flint to make fire instead of expending people’s life force.

So I dunno. 7/10. 7.5? It coulda been a 10. The Devs should have watched less Game of Thrones and more Kamen Rider. It would have served the game they were capable of making better.