#final fantasy xvi review

[hoodlessmads]

Who wants to read a long ass review of FFXVI?

I would give this game a 6/10. Here’s why. (seriously, it's long, I'm warning you)

SPOILERS for late game (I don't spoil the ending but I do mention characters and events through basically the beach scene - if you know you know)

First, I've seen a tendency to dismiss and/or mischaracterize people’s criticisms of FFXVI as them saying “I don’t like that it’s not turn-based” or “it’s not like other Final Fantasies” when that’s not at all what I’m about to say. Those aren’t my issues with the game. At all. So just getting that out of the way. Kingdom Hearts II is one of my favorite games of all time, so I am not at all adverse to this game having action combat. Final Fantasy XII is different from other Final Fantasies too, but that’s in my top 3 FF games, so that’s not my issue either.

To be honest, I haven’t actually seen anyone criticize the game for not being turn-based except in memes, so I can’t help but feel like fans are blowing this particular criticism out of proportion, unless I’m just in the wrong places online. Who is actually saying the game isn’t Final Fantasy because it’s not turn-based? 90% of people seem to love the game.

Moving on.

This is not...professionally written, by the way. I kind of wrote it in one sitting. Also, please try not to take my extreme language too seriously - that's just how I write. praying emoji

Credit where credit is due

The presentation is great – graphics, cinematics, voice acting, cutscenes. Some of the cutscenes in this game and some of the cinematic QTEs were actually insane. Completely bonkers. The game reaches extreme high points with its story and spectacle that had me yelling. I’ve never in my life cared about graphical quality or spectacle, but this game got me, and I think part of it is the way they successfully integrated the story’s most dramatic moments with the grandest spectacle possible gameplay-wise. Virtually all of the big story moments were dope as hell. I hope this integration helps these spectacular moments stand the test of time when they eventually become graphically outdated. (Because they will. Who cares about the FFVII motorcycle chase anymore? But it blew minds back in the day.)

Things I didn’t know I needed in Final Fantasy: Ifrit hanging off a crystal going, “Fuck.”

The combat is pretty good. It could be better, but it’s pretty good. Action combat-wise, it’s a huge improvement from FF15. I didn’t love it, personally, but I enjoyed my time with it sometimes, and would definitely count it among the game’s strong points. I like that you can control Torgal; it added a nice layer to the combat. I did find myself skipping most mob fights, though.

The story, like the combat, could be better, but overall I think it’s pretty solid. My issues have more to do with the execution and storytelling than the core concepts, which I think are really good. There are some really compelling and interesting ideas here. The story feels very “Final Fantasy” in a good way. I enjoyed it for the most part. I had one MAJOR issue with it that I’ll discuss in the negative section of this review but other than that the flaws in the writing, while there (especially the writing of some of the characters and the ending), aren’t huge detractors for me. I hated the moments I call “Game of Thrones bullshit” which is where I felt the GoT posturing got a little too on the nose, but otherwise, I’m a sucker for political storylines and the political machinations and such in this story were some of my favorite moments, along with the epic confrontations, of course.

Some of the characters: I like Joshua, Cid, Mid, and Dion. Joshua....what can I say. I’m obsessed with him? I’m hyperfixated on a character that is trapped in a game which I think is otherwise mediocre, and that sucks.

Overall, I'm actually really frustrated by all the things I like in this game, because similar to the last mainline entry, I feel like Square almost made one of the best games in the series, if not the best. Truly. But they kind of shat the bed instead.

Gameplay negatives

I could nitpick forever, but the main gameplay element that fully ruins this game for me, if I’m being honest, is the fact that there is no permanent party.

You have your dog, and sometimes you have Jill, but for most of the game Clive is alone. The game’s story preaches a lot about bonds with other people and togetherness and how that is humanity’s strength, but the gameplay doesn’t match up with that message at all. The gameplay sends the opposite message: that this is Clive’s sole journey. As a result, a lot of the story’s themes don’t land well. Also, because you are playing alone as Clive for most of the game, the game is pretty much made or broken on how much you like him. For me, I don’t like him. I’ll get more into why in the story negative section. But because I don’t like him, I have a hard time really enjoying my playing experience because I am forced to spend all of my time with him, and only him. This isn’t about not being able to play as other people, though that would be nice. It’s that the other people aren’t even there.

Final Fantasy XV is a broken mess of a game that I did not enjoy, with a messy story, but even that game understood this most basic principle of building a sense of camaraderie with the main character’s friends by having them all in a permanent party together all the way through until the very end of the game. When that game talked about Noctis’s bonds with others being his strength, it landed because of all the time I, as a player, had spent with the party members. I bought that. The game had earned it.

This sort of leads into my other big issue with the game, which is the virtual lack of RPG elements. Even when you do have temporary party members, they are (relatively useless) AI bots that you have no power to affect whatsoever. You can’t even change their equipment. In the menu, the only character is Clive (other than some cute sprites). It makes you feel even more alone in the journey. So there are no party members to outfit – what can you customize? The game’s customization options are limited to picking and choosing which abilities to give to Clive using earned ability points and an extremely bare bones crafting system. As for the abilities, I will admit there is potential to customize your combat based on which Eikon abilities you choose to outfit Clive with. But it pretty much stops there. The itemization and crafting system are utter dog shit. I don’t feel like I need to justify saying that...even fans of this game have to admit how tacked-on that shit is. In addition, there isn’t even something as simple as elemental weaknesses that might be affected by said tacked-on crafting system. This is a game where the story centers around eight Eikons for eight magical elements and yet there is no elemental affinity baked into the gameplay. I have to ask, what the fuck?

Some Zelda fans would probably get mad at me for saying this, but even though Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom also feature a solo journey without any party members, they legitimately feel more like RPGs than Final Fantasy XVI. Those games have elemental weaknesses and systems that force you to put some thought into your approach to combat, and they have a more worthwhile and involved gear upgrading system. It’s crystal clear that the developers of FF16 put a lot of effort into the presentation, the story and the combat and I applaud those efforts, but it really feels like they put zero effort into ANYTHING else outside of that because there is NOTHING to this game outside of the main story and combat. I would almost rather they hadn’t even bothered to try to pretend this was still an RPG instead of the linear character action thriller it wants to be.

Even in that sense, it’s not particularly outstanding. The combat’s depth is questionable...I would have preferred if you could at least use ability points to, say, modify the base combo, which never changes. Shake it up just a little bit. Instead, the modifications to Clive’s combat as the game goes on come entirely in the form of Eikon abilities that are on timers and you can cycle through them as you want. I don’t get the feeling that Clive himself is growing stronger or better, persay. Each ability has a unique utility, but that utility is limited in any given boss fight due to the lack of enemy variety, and they mostly served for me as extra damage dealers rather than relating to any sort of strategy. The lack of combo modifiers and also the lack of a dedicated block mechanic other than the one Titan ability makes the combat feel a bit clunky and outdated to me. I don’t know how to say it, I guess, because Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom also don’t have combo modifiers and that combat isn’t particularly deep but it doesn’t feel nearly as clunky to play, so I don’t know what I’m saying...but FFXVI’s combat just feels clunky to me sometimes and you’re gonna have to believe me. (I'm not trying to compare these two games, I just feel like since I compared them in the last paragraph I should at least mention I'm not trying to make a double standard about the combat here.)

Lastly, a big issue I have with the gameplay is the exploration. It’s shit. Really. You get a couple of big maps but they’re empty. The coolest locations in the game are ones you either only get to visit once or ones you only see in cutscenes. This does a lot to alienate me from the world the game is trying to build.

I've seen a counter-criticism amounting to basically, "You shouldn't bring franchise expectations to the game!" when people criticize the lack of a party or the lack of RPG elements but I have to ask...why shouldn't I? Any game that carries a series title is going to draw comparisons with other entries in the series, and why shouldn't it - otherwise, what's the point in carrying the title? Every Final Fantasy game has always been "new" in many ways, but there has also still always been a thread connecting them, even a thin one. For me, this game just frays that thread a bit too thin. Through 12, 13, 13-2, Lightning Returns, 15, you name it, I've still always felt like "This is Final Fantasy." When I'm not even playing an RPG anymore, it's gotten too far away from the core of the series. I'm sorry, but it has.

Now here's the story negative section:

Final Fantasy XVI has a slavery problem

There are other story negatives, but for me, this is the big one. I haven’t seen people talking about it much (yet) and I don’t really understand why, because for me it was glaring and cast a pall over the entire story and many of the characters.

There’s nothing wrong with featuring slavery in your fantasy story and/or world; far from it. I think it can add stakes and a dark, realist tone to the narrative (as we know, unfortunately, slavery is a disgustingly frequent part of human history and still exists even today) as well as set up some political commentary. It just has to be done right. It’s obviously a sensitive, heavy topic. FFXVI completely bungles its handling of said topic and betrays that its developers seemingly did not have the historical comprehension or tact to appropriately handle it.

In the narrative of FFXVI, there are good slaveowners and bad slaveowners. (You can see where this is going.) The bad slaveowners are people like Clive’s mom Anabella, who view Bearers (magic users) as vermin and treat them abhorrently. Like, clownishly evil and violent treatment. The good slaveowners are people like Clive’s dad Elwin, who claim to want to make life better for Bearers and treat them relatively well by comparison—see them as human beings (theoretically)—but still keep them as slaves.

During the game’s prologue, you play as a teenage Clive who was raised as a prince of Rosaria in a slave culture where Bearers are branded and are forced to work in service to his father’s duchy. We are shown that Clive is nice to the slaves and wants to make sure they are treated well; however, he doesn’t see that there is much wrong with them being enslaved and is perfectly fine with the status quo. Clive idolizes his father, who is otherwise an evenhanded, astute ruler who truly cares about his people (at least the ones that aren’t slaves). I like Clive during these first few hours. He shows a bit of personality: he is earnest and loyal to a fault, he is fiercely protective of his brother, he is focused on what he sees as his duty to his father and his country, he is secretly devastated that his mother doesn’t love him and wants to earn his place so he has poured his entire life into making himself worthwhile in his own way, i.e. becoming the best swordsman of all time. He’s kind of giving a jock but with a sensitive side.

It’s uncomfortable that he is so comfortable with slavery, but that is exactly how a kid who grew up in a slave culture under a father he admires might think and behave. That’s why there is massive potential here to have his worldview shaken up in a big way – we know that Clive later becomes enslaved himself.  As an adult, how might he look back on his interactions with the slaves in Rosalith? How might he reevaluate the man he thought his father was, compared to the man he actually was: a benevolent father but a man who owned and sanctioned the owning of slaves?

There is one scene where, as adults, Clive and Jill are in Martha’s Rest having just witnessed some awful treatment of slaves, and they comment on how it’s crazy that they never saw anything wrong with slavery as kids. That’s it. The commentary begins and ends there. Outside of this moment, not once does Clive come to terms with his complicity in slavery as a teenager, and not once does he ever think to criticize his father for it.

On the contrary: throughout the game, Archduke Elwin is revered by everyone, and we the player are supposed to revere him too. There is one part of the game where Clive returns to a village in Rosaria and the mayor, recognizing him as the prince, offers him his father’s old Bearers back in a chillingly casual tone. Like, offers to give him his father’s old slaves back who have just been hanging out in this village ever since the country was taken over. Clive of course declines, but we don’t get any indication of how Clive feels about this reminder that his dad was, you know, a slaveowner. Clive also never confronts the mayor’s assumption that these people are things to be owned, just lets him keep on as he was. Clive then meets one of his father’s old kitchen slaves, who has become senile. The old former slave thinks he is still waiting for Elwin to return and take him back to the kitchens, where the former slave apparently enjoyed working. The old man apparently has no idea what to do with himself in the mean time and just hangs out by the well waiting for Elwin, day in and day out. The old man thinks Clive is Elwin returned to get him, and Clive plays along, but says the old dude should just chill out in the village until he’s done with his journey and eventually he’ll come back and get him.

Now...it’s not super clear what we’re supposed to get out of this scene. It’s not entirely clear if we are supposed to take the old man’s ravings about how great it was working in Elwin’s kitchens at face value. Obviously, that would be horrifying. I have to assume that we are supposed to sort of see this as a really dark and sad look at a Stockholm Syndrome-type situation. But the uncertainty that I feel is just the problem. Does this quest exist to show how great Elwin was and how much everyone loved him, including his slaves, or to show how fucked up slavery is? This shouldn’t be a question I’m asking. And the reason I’m asking it is because our viewpoint characters give us nothing to go off of.

Assuming for everyone’s sanity that it’s the latter, why doesn’t Clive have some sort of emotional reaction? This is his father we’re talking about. The great Archduke Elwin. And here is a devastating reminder of the horror Elwin wreaked on a man’s life and psyche. Nothing. We get nothing from Clive. If a normal person suddenly realized that the food they ate growing up was always prepared by slaves, you’d think they’d have some kind of reaction.

And like...is Clive serious? Is he actually planning on coming back to “get him” when he’s done with his journey? Does Clive literally just own slaves in this game? (I don't actually think so, but I'm just saying, the scene was weird.) In any case, it is clear that most of the current and former slaves in this game are completely helpless and will just keep being enslaved through inertia if someone doesn’t save them or at least come and explain to them that being enslaved is wrong, actually, and they should be free. (A portrayal of slaves that is more than patronizing...it’s revolting. Certainly many real life slaves were victims of this sort of brainwashing, but it just feels like...way too many of them are like this in the game, and there are almost no rebellious slaves to provide an alternative portrayal, so it feels very one-sided. The Hideaway folks don't count - I'm talking about current slaves that you meet in the wild.)

After the events of the following section, where a village is massacred, Clive and Jill are upset and suddenly decide they want to help Cid free all the slaves, even though up until this point they have been pretty lukewarm on the idea of joining the liberation effort. I don’t feel like the threads between events are clearly drawn to show how the characters changed their minds. Instead, it’s sudden. They see a massacre (that includes non-Bearers as well as former slaves) and decide slavery is wrong.

Normally, you’d think that since Clive and Jill have, you know, been slaves themselves for the past thirteen years, that alone would be enough to give them a new perspective on slavery. But apparently not. Apparently they had to go through a journey in Rosaria to come to the conclusion that all the slaves should be freed, and even then it doesn’t feel like a perspective change that is earned or that makes sense. The scene with the mayor could have been a great opportunity to show that transition – just have Clive be like “oh, fuck...my dad did this too” – and boom, his character arc starts to make a lot more sense.

Instead, Clive proudly wears his father’s old clothes and later goes so far as to claim that he is carrying on his father’s ideals. At one point, when viewing the atrocious crimes against humanity that Anabella’s men perpetrate against former slaves, Clive mutters something along the lines of, at least in Elwin’s time Bearers weren’t “spit on as slaves.” Fam, what in the world are you talking about? We literally just talked to one of Elwin’s former kitchen slaves? We talked to a man in the Rosalith courtyard in the prologue named “Slaveowner?” It would be one thing if he was in deep denial, but the game doesn’t play it like that. The game plays it straight, like we are supposed to take what Clive is saying as truth. Later, Clive tells Byron that he won’t take back rule of Rosaria, because instead he’s fighting for the world his father believed in, where all people can live freely. Clive explicitly tells us that his father’s beliefs and the goal of ending slavery are one and the same. This does not make sense at all.

I spoke with a friend about this who argued that Elwin did believe in ending slavery, but he didn’t outright do it because he would have had revolts on his hands and so on – it would have been too sudden of a change for the free people to accept since the hatred of Bearers was so entrenched (my thoughts: oh dear, not the free people having hurt feelings, not the revolts! Better keep those people enslaved to avoid such a horror), so he was trying to change attitudes over time. According to my friend, this is what Clive meant by following his father’s ideals - moreso in spirit than in actuality. I think this is a bit of a stretch to assume this is what Clive was thinking since the game doesn't really make it super clear, if I'm being honest, and it's still a very unflattering portrayal because he's essentially excusing his father's policies of slavery. I agree with my friend that such behavior makes perfect sense for Elwin as a character, but owning slaves is still 100% wrong, Elwin was wrong, and the problem is the game’s narrative never really acknowledges this. It's obvious to us, but the game needs to acknowledge it, and it doesn't. (Also, if the reason he didn’t end slavery was truly because he was afraid of the chaos it would cause (eyeroll...it’s giving Northern liberals in 1850s United States...), then why did he himself also own slaves? Surely that wasn’t required if all he wanted was to avoid revolts. It's because he needed to use them as resources and he'd rather use free human beings in forced labor than use up the meager supply of crystals they have, right? Isn't that the real reason?) I bring this up not to discredit this friend, who is great, but because I hadn't considered this perspective before and it helped me understand Elwin's thought process a bit more, so I thought it would be helpful to mention.

What we get, as a result of all this, is a main character who comes across as extremely putzy and tepid. Sure, Clive thinks slavery is wrong, generally. He definitely thinks treating slaves badly is wrong, at least. He probably thinks having them at all is wrong...probably. (Unless you’re his dad, Archduke Elwin.) But at the same time, he doesn’t bat an eyelash when he comes across random NPCs that are in the process of abusing their slaves. And I mean including after he takes over Cid’s role as the international slave liberator and removes his brand. He doesn’t even have an emotional reaction. He just moves on like it’s to be expected. Clive is the most powerful man on earth by this point and he doesn’t lift a finger to help any Bearers he comes across in the wild. Cid the Outlaw, everybody, Clive the great liberator of slaves. What a stand-up guy. If I were a slave in Valisthea, I wouldn’t want this guy to be the one advocating for me. Personally.

It is incredibly difficult for me to emotionally connect with this character when this is how he is characterized, and when the slavery storyline is handled so tactlessly. Like it’s just tacked on to make the world more dark and fucked up, but the developers didn’t care to follow through with exploring it.

FFXVI’s portrayal of the badness of slavery is mostly limited to the cheap, low-hanging fruit of showing horrific atrocities and abuse being perpetrated against slaves by awful slavemasters. But it mostly avoids the true insidiousness of slavery, which is how normal it could be, and has been. How normal, otherwise nice people, could and have been complicit in it. Slavery doesn’t need horrific treatment to be bad. Owning other people is inherently bad. And FFXVI somehow doesn’t seem to get that.

There’s a fun, interesting, comedic relief type character with a lot more personality than most of the other main characters: Clive’s uncle, Byron. He’s wonderful. I wanted to love him.

Except - nagging at the back of my mind from the second we met him was the thought that this guy probably owned Bearers as slaves back in the day, and even if he was somehow the only noble in Rosaria that didn’t, he was close with his brother and could have made an effort to convince Elwin to end slavery, but didn’t.

You can’t have the fun quirky comedic relief uncle character also be a former slaveowner (or, optimistically, a guy who used to help maintain the system of slavery). Tonally, it just doesn’t work.

It would be one thing if Byron ever addressed his past, or his failure to act, or ever somehow recanted his former beliefs and complicity in a way the player can see. But he doesn’t. The slavery in Rosaria thing goes completely unaddressed. Byron easily slides into his role as the benefactor of the Freeing the Slaves Group as if he was one of them all along. It’s confusing and distressing to see the insidiousness of “good” slavery in Rosaria go totally unaddressed.

There’s also this uncomfortable feeling when you go around as Clive after he removes his brand and suddenly no one treats you like shit anymore, and you can’t help but thinking, “Are all of these NPCs actually racist assholes and the only reason they’re not showing it is because they think I’m not a Bearer?” Steph Sterling (The Jimquisition) has a great video where she talks about how everyone in the world of Valisthea comes across as an irredeemable bigoted monster and it makes it hard to care about saving the world. I agree. Like, saving the world is obviously still the right thing to do. I know this logically – but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel any attachment to this world or the awful people in it. This makes it even harder to connect with the “role” I’m supposed to be playing in this “RPG.”

Then the slavery storyline is forgotten halfway through the game for more Final Fantasy-like and less complicated nonsense like killing gods. (Probably for the best.)

There’s also the obvious issue of there being very few people of color in the game, and many of those being white passing to boot, but I feel that has already been touched on elsewhere better than I could say it. It’s obviously stupid and it makes their bungling of the slavery storyline even worse.

There are other flaws with the story, but I can’t even pay attention to those because the slavery thing overwhelms all the comparatively small writing problems for me. I feel like one of the 2.5 people on the Internet who is actually bothered by the portrayal of slavery in this game and it’s making me a little insane. Are people really not bothered by this?

Listen. The slavery storyline had a lot of potential. Episode 2 (or 3?) of Resonant Arc’s FFXVI analysis podcast series on YouTube goes into a really great deep dive about the portrayal of slavery in Valisthea and it made me realize it was more nuanced than I had initially given it credit for. Particularly, the fact that the reason people treat Bearers with such comic book villainy and abuse is because they have to buy into the idea of Bearers being sub-human in order to justify enslaving them and slowly murdering them, and they have to buy in hard. This is extremely true to life. In order to justify treating people like objects, they dehumanize them. There is probably guilt and shame involved over taking advantage of Bearers as a resource, which they have been brainwashed into thinking they must do in order to survive, so they channel that shame into hatred and abuse. Even many slaves themselves have been brainwashed into buying into this system, and as a result they value the “good” slavemasters compared to the “bad” ones. The system has been so entrenched for generations that there is buy-in even from the lowest rung. It’s realistic and true and I definitely get what the developers were going for, I think. But there’s still a problem:

The game never does condemn the “good slavery” in Rosaria. That coming-to-terms, that realization that it seems like the game should be building up to within Clive – it never happens. Clive never has the character growth he needs in order to make the slavery storyline land properly. By the end of the game, Elwin is still a great, admired guy, Rosaria’s slavery is still good, and it is presented as fundamentally different from, say, imperial slavery. This is really just...wrong. So all of that potential for nuance that I just discussed in the previous paragraph ends up falling flat.

Anyway, I don’t like adult Clive. I think he’s a loser. For all the game’s talk of strength of will, I don’t see much strength of will in Clive. He comes across as uncommitted and wishy washy in nearly every instance, with a side dose of angst. He doesn’t compel me in the slightest; in fact, he outright disgusts me at points, and I’d have given my left arm to play as his twinky brother instead.

The women

Okay, so I’m just gonna touch on it briefly. The women in this game...could be better. Like, they’re not bad, but I came out disappointed. Especially in Anabella.

Benedikta’s storyline has already been criticized a lot for being too short and not giving her enough depth so I won’t rehash all that, but we have to talk about Anabella. Clearly, the woman’s inspiration is Cersei from Game of Thrones, unless there’s another beautiful blond traitorous kingmaker who is a total monster that I’m forgetting about. But Cersei is a great villain because in spite of all the horrible things she does, she still feels like a real person. A fucked up person, but a real person nonetheless. Her past is carefully explored so we understand the institutional misogyny, insecurity, horrible monster of a father, and toxic relationship with her brother that led her to grow up into this person. On top of that, Cersei shows a glimpse of humanity – in spite of how she may feel about everyone else, she truly loves her children. She isn’t really a monster – she’s actually just a really fucked up, evil human being.

On the other hand, Anabella is a total monster with no redeeming qualities. We get an indication at the very end that she did genuinely love Joshua and Olivier in...her own way, perhaps...but it’s just a glimmer and then she gets killed off immediately. We watch her commit horrific act after horrific act with no idea why she would do such a thing for tens of hours, and we only just manage to learn what her motivations were the whole time when she spews it out in a rush right before she dies. And the motivations are surprisingly shallow. She was just tired of people gossiping about her behind her back in Rosaria, so she had them all killed. Cool. Why is she like this? I guess we’ll never know.

I love evil women, but Anabella doesn’t even feel like a real person. Such a missed opportunity. I still kinda love when she’s being deliciously evil, though.

*tiktok autotune voice* and I’m not saying she deseeerved it – but god’s timing is aalwaaays riiiight

Oh, you want me to talk about Jill? How did they do? You mean other than her entire life revolving around her love for a man? (Just kidding...sort of.) Well, she’s fine, I guess. Personally, I find Jill to be kind of bland as a character, but that’s just me. I think we needed to get more from her backstory than what we got. As it is, she’s too Clive-focused. She’s giving Dollar Tree Tifa but not in a good way...Tifa definitely still had her own goals and motivations independent of how she felt about Cloud, and she had much more personality. (I also don’t really understand how Jill had the patience to wait for this dude for 18 years, but we don’t really get to see how she feels about that. Or was he the one waiting for her to make a move, and she was the one hesitating? Unclear, but unlikely.) Jill is just totally gung-ho to go at Clive’s pace, in all things. The Hideaway’s goals, their relationship, talking about their feelings, anything and everything is whenever he wants and no sooner or later. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that if it makes sense for the character - We’re just never in her perspective, so we don’t know why, and I find that a shame. But I do love Jill’s design, her voice acting is great, and I like that the narrative treats her like an equal to the men when it comes to combat prowess and general agency. My problem with her giving up her powers to Clive isn’t unique to just her – I hate it in every case that it happens – it just happens to sting a little bit more since Jill is the only female party member in the game.

I like the Jive ship, by the way, even though I'm not very fond of them individually. Like many people (especially fellow adults lol), I appreciate the refreshing maturity and healthiness they have. Not exactly common in Final Fantasy (as much as I love other FF ships).

So close and yet so far from greatness

For those thirsting after Clive and Cid, I raise you, Barnabas? He’s weirdly hot, right?

I feel like fixing FF16 wouldn’t be hard. Not nearly as hard as fixing FF15. It would take some redesigning the way the story plays out a little bit to give us a permanent party, but it would be worth it. The party could include Clive, Jill, Gav, and Tarja for the duration of the game. Characters like Cid could drop out when it’s their time to drop out, and characters like Dion, Josh, and Mid could jump in after crossing paths with the party, and then stay there. When the characters go off on their little quests, like when Dion sneaks off and goes back to the Crystalline Dominion, instead of having them go alone, have the whole party accompany them. This would help organically build the bonds between the characters instead of just having the game tell us that they have bonds.

There are even classic FF archetypes to work with, if they wanted to balance the party accordingly. Clive is a knight/jack of all trades, Jill is a black mage, Gav is a rogue, Tara is like a white mage or an alchemist, Cid and Mid are machinists, Dion is a dragoon, and Josh is a red mage. See? Not that they have to be called this, but I’m just making a point that balance-wise, the party is RIGHT THERE. Then allow the player to outfit them with unique gear and maybe have a couple options for how they want the AI’s playstyle to be, like offensive, defensive, attack Clive’s enemies, attack enemies other than Clive’s enemies...just simple options (if I wanted to be really greedy I’d say add a gambit system but I’m trying to keep it “easy” here--).

But if I can be a bit greedy – how about you allow us to return to the areas featured in the one-off missions and, more than that, how about you actually let us roam around in the fantastical set pieces we only get to see in cutscenes, like Oriflamme? It wouldn’t have to be a big area. Just give me like one little town square. One tiny itsy bitsy little town square per city. Nothing too graphically intensive. Something, anything to help me feel more immersed in this world, because the game desperately needs it. The world is so cool, conceptually, but I can’t really immerse myself because I can't explore most of it.

For the story, just include some deeper revelations for Clive, Jill, Josh, Byron, even Dion, where they regret their complicity in slavery in the past (well, Josh was basically a baby so I wouldn’t necessarily call him “complicit,” but you get it, his family owned slaves, that’s a lot to swallow). Instead of having the boring ass side quests that exist now, create some side quests that are like Clive and gang actually going out and freeing more Bearers on the side, even while they’re dealing with the Mothercrystal shit, so that the freeing the slaves storyline can continue even after the plot shifts to be about the crystals. Have the quests be about unique, fleshed out characters where they have agency in freeing themselves and building a better life for themselves so it’s not all about helpless slaves with Stockholm Syndrome who need to be saved (because that’s both historically inaccurate and gross).

Of course, I think the RPG elements need to be fleshed out, but I think if you just change these two major things (a permanent party and improving the slavery storyline) the game turns from being a uncomfortable and often dreary slog into an absolute banger.

Demake

Okay hear me out – a Switch demake in the pixel art style of, say, Final Fantasy VI (like the sprites we see on the menu). The party that I mentioned above exists. I don’t care if it makes sense with the story or where the characters are supposed to be located in the world. If you’re fighting, you’ve got the party. They’re just there, get over it. If you want it to make sense, you can play the original or watch a Let’s Play of the original. You can choose four of those fuckers at a time. It’s turn-based, for the hoes (I’m the hoes).

The Eikon battles though – the Eikon battles are a 2D side scrolling brawler. How fucking sick would that be? Hell, if they really wanted to keep it entirely action-oriented even in a pixel art demake, the regular combat can be a 2d side scrolling brawler too, and maybe you can control your other three party members with, like, their own assigned buttons. Kind of like TWEWY. So it would be chaotic but in a fun way. And maybe (also for the hoes) they can insert some of the epic cinematic cutscenes as FMVs.

Have I mentioned my emphasis on having a party?

Would this not be sick as hell?

Conclusion

I needed somebody to scream at about this and my only friends who are playing this game are still early in, so I turned to the Internet instead. I welcome discussion if you for some reason actually read all of this and feel so inclined. This isn’t a comprehensive review (in spite of being this long) and there’s room for debate and there are certainly more things that could be touched on.

I wrote all this about a 6/10 game because I love Final Fantasy that much – if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have this much to say about it. Ultimately, I love all Final Fantasy games, even the ones I don’t like. If you get it you get it.

[greenmagic-oilspill]

Spoiler-Free FFXVI review

Going to keep it under a Read More because it’s pretty long...

FFXVI is a really ambitious game, and from beginning to end I was invested in the plot and characters -- but it's missing just a couple of things that would really make it great. It’s a beautiful game, no doubt about it, with an amazing score and environments, rich lore and deep worldbuilding, fun gameplay, and some really compelling characters. When it excels, it really excels. But where it falters, I really felt it. I’ve got some recency bias here, working for and against the game (since I only beat it yesterday), so I’m not really sure how my thoughts will change over time. I’ve definitely changed my opinions of many FF games after revisiting them a second time, so this one could benefit from the same.

I’m going to start with the characters and plot, because those are the most important parts of a FF game to me, but I’ll also delve into the worldbuilding, gameplay, and music of the game.

Characters

With as many cutscenes as this game has, the characters really find their time to shine. It’s primarily Clive’s story, and over the course of the game we really see him change. His development is a bit cyclical in some ways, but there are definitely events that shape him and who he becomes over the story, and he really feels different from every other FF protagonist. I like him well enough – I think he’s among some of the better FF protagonists for sure. Clive shows such a wide range of emotions and his VA did a stellar job of capturing them.

My favorite character in this game is a spoiler, so I’m not going to go into that in this review.

One character I really wanted to like more was Jill. She’s got all the makings of a compelling character and a compelling story, but a lot of the time it just felt like she was there. The other day @faerantstory and I were discussing how they’d heard that every female character in this story fell under the umbrella of “Pure,” “Sexy,” or “Evil,” and at the time, I had just finished a sequence of the story where Jill most certainly veered away from “Pure,” but after that she fell right back into it. And then she was just an ever-present support to Clive who did little else. I liked the part of the story that focused on her a lot, but it felt so brief and they could have done a LOT more with her past that they didn’t do – she just felt so underutilized. To be honest, she feels a lot like Tifa 2.0, for better or for worse.

Benedikta and Hugo were both extremely disappointing. I expected more from them. Without going into spoilers that is all I am going to say. Barnabas too, to a lesser extent – they went in a direction with him that I didn’t really expect and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. Dion, however, was pretty great, and Joshua’s story at the beginning of the game made for a really compelling start. Continuing with the umbrellas that female characters fall under, Benedikta fell under both “Evil” and “Sexy” and not much else.

The villains in general (including the main villain) didn’t really do it for me. The main villain didn’t really do anything new that past FF villains had already done before, and better. Their motivations were interesting and followed the overall theme of the story, and there were some twists, but as a character they kind of fell flat. One of the other villains even felt cartoonishly evil.

Honestly, where this game REALLY shines with its characters is primarily in the supporting cast. This genuinely might be one of my favorite parts of the game. You meet a TON of characters over the course of this game (some might even say too many) and I found some of them more compelling than the characters who got more screentime. The world feels so alive with all of their stories, many of which play out over both the main scenario and also through side quests. Many of these characters live in the Hideaway, the main hub of the game, but just as many appear in the various towns and settlements you visit. They all felt like they had a purpose, and many of them had a surprising amount of depth. I definitely encourage doing all of the side quests and taking the time to talk to them after many of the story beats. Also, none of these really fall under a bland Pure, Evil, Sexy umbrella! That was great! But maybe that’s why they’re side characters. :/

The Plot

It’s hard to really go into it without spoilers, but overall I really liked the plot itself and the structure of it really worked to help tell the story they needed to tell. They had clearly defined goals and the characters never felt like they were simply reacting to everything happening around them. I’ve seen some criticism for the “MMO style storytelling�� this game has, and that makes sense coming from the team who made XIV, but if you like the story progression in XIV I feel pretty confident in saying you’d like it in XVI. It feels really similar and follows the same pattern of go to new area -> help people with their problems -> gain the trust of the populace. It worked for me. At times there are parts that may feel like “filler” (I’ve always hated this term because people tend to use it wrong), but all of it helps further the characters or worldbuilding. My biggest problem with it is that at times it felt predictable.

At times things felt really bleak, but it never got too bleak for me, and overall the story has a hopeful message so that really helped.

Worldbuilding

Stellar. The Active Time Lore system is a huge help to understanding and conveying the lore and politics of this game – I can’t stress enough how much I loved that system and the dedicated characters in the Hideaway who discuss these things and tell you more about them. The lore in this world is rich and it feels so alive, as I mentioned earlier with the side characters, who are perhaps the primary reason for it. Everything and everywhere really has such a great atmosphere. The marketing stressed that things would change a lot over the game’s time skips, but I didn’t really feel it to be honest – things changed more after big plot events regardless of how much time passed.

Three of the six nations of this story felt extremely underutilized, though, which was a huge shame. Two of those in particular were being really built up but due to story events nothing really happened.

I don’t know how to describe this criticism, and this is more personal preference than anything, but XVI didn’t really feel like it offered anything “new” or original to the overall series to make it feel like it has its own identity distinct from the others. Every FF game offers some new summon that doesn’t appear in other games, maybe a new marketable/cute/iconic monster, a unique airship or something, a unique race, etc. I don’t know if that makes sense, but every concept introduced in XVI felt like a reference to a previous game in the series (even, to some extent, the main villain, whose very name is a name used before). Because of that it almost feels like it doesn’t stand on its own, in a way.

Gameplay

Battles were a ton of fun once I got the hang of it. Loved how smooth it felt, loved the gameplay changes for certain boss battles. I played with one of the accessories to help with evasion – with it, at times the game felt a little too easy, but that’s not a criticism from me. I like easy. I knew if I took it off I’d have died a lot more often. The battle system itself was the best part of the gameplay.

Customization could have been better – sometimes I felt like I had a lot of options for different Eikon abilities to equip and not a lot of space to equip them, leaving some abilities completely unused despite how I wanted to equip them. Weapons and armor were pretty much always straight upgrades that increased your stats and did nothing else. Accessories had the potential to switch things up a bit and offer some variety, but with only three accessory slots you couldn’t really do much (especially if you have one of the accessibility options equipped, like I did). Character progression was mostly achieved through story events, because leveling up is just a straight stat increase, which I can understand is very boring for some people.

I loved that this game was not open world, and instead used four separate and very large maps. Of those four, one felt considerably smaller than the others though. Open world games tend to be really overwhelming for me, and too easy to get lost, so I typically don’t care for the exploration aspect of a lot of those games. But with these four separate areas, I did actually want to explore them – the problem is, aside from finding beautiful vistas or the locations of certain hunt marks, there was not a whole lot to do. Any treasures to find were mostly just filled with useless crafting materials or gil. Not the highest priority for me, but I can see why people would count the exploration against this game. Speaking of gil, once I got past the early game I almost never had to spend any, so it just kept building up and felt pointless.

My biggest gameplay criticism is the enemy variety. All of the enemies in all of the maps were the same, just in different colors. Every map had crabs, or scorpions, or antelopes, or bandits, or chocobos, or goblins, or spiders, or plant monsters, or a couple different species of dragon, maybe an adamantoise or coeurl. Again, there was nothing new – no fantastical creature that the FF series never introduced before, and many of the series staples (like tonberries and cactuars) were missing altogether. It got particularly egregious when they went as far as to double up on some bosses.

Music

Fantastic, as expected of Soken. Not much to say there. I like his work better overall in XIV, but that’s unfair with the sheer amount of songs XIV has. He was allowed to experiment a bit more in XIV, but in XVI he took some opportunities to use different genres here and there.

Overall - 7/10

I can honestly say I really liked it overall – it’s a beautiful game with really rich characters and lore, and where it excels it really excels. I’m not a big fan of the way it ended but I think that is mostly due to personal preference. There were several unanswered questions and I don’t know if they have plans to go into DLC or even a sequel, and I don’t think there’s enough for that anyway – it ended pretty neatly. I will let this game sit with me and I’ll read up on some discussions from other people to see if my thoughts will change, but I don’t know if I’ll end up liking it more or less.

Thanks for reading this really long review!! I will write up a more spoilery one in a couple of days.

[supreme-burrito]

I want everyone to know that I did Hugo's 20-30 minute boss fight TWICE to get these screenshots.

Happy Pride

[hardcoregamer]

Review: Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide

The Rising Tide is a fitting end to Final Fantasy XVI. It delivers more stellar gameplay and an interesting narrative, all while further solidifying the legacy of the franchise's sixteenth title. 

Read more!

[uncrownedjules]

Three Accidental Shortish Reviews

They asked us to write a few, like, "staff's picks" at the shop and if you know me I love getting to ramble about video games I think people should play. I figured those little blurbs are worth sharing/preserving here too.

So I guess here's three mini reviews/recommendations from yours truly. No spoilers or anything really.

Titanfall 2 feel like if you approached designing a first person shooter with the inventiveness and sheer tightness you find in Mario games. It’s not hard for me to say that Titanfall 2’s campaign is far and away the best FPS campaign I’ve played, with singular levels more memorable than some entire games I’ve played. If you’ve played Apex Legends at all you’ve already got some baseline familiarity with the mechanics at play, although instead of a battle royal playground you’re instead led through impressively thought out levels with gimmicks each more memorable than the last. It’s not the sort of shooter where you’re just hiding behind cover mowing down waves of enemies in a generic warzone. Instead you’re running across walls or jumping into your mech while fighting through an assembly line or playing with reality bending mechanics straight out of Portal. 

If you consider yourself a fan of shooters, especially those with satisfying movement and creative levels- Titanfall 2 is a must play. It is as important to the genre as something like Half-Life or the original Modern Warfare, Titanfall 2 not only helped form the basis of modern movement shooters, but its engine and core mechanics have been adapted into further projects from the company. Even if you never touch the multiplayer, Titanfall 2 is a game well worth your time and one that will make you wish for more shooters that are half as creative with their run time and level layouts.

Viva Piñata is one of those little gems that’s only so underappreciated because it lives on the Xbox. If it were a Nintendo title people would be intensely angry every time a new entry wasn’t announced any given Direct. Instead Viva Piñata lives on the console of Halo and Gears of War, and thus this novel little garden tending simulator lives in the periphery of most peoples’ memories. It doesn’t help that the 4Kids produced cartoon anthropomorphized the cute Piñata animals into over the top 4Kids caricatures and likely gave many people an impression that Viva Piñata was something it wasn’t. In the actual game the piñatas act much closer to their real world counterparts than they do cartoon characters, with the game’s main focus centering on cultivating a garden that welcomes a wide variety of piñata to live in it. You’re essentially a backyard ecologist, helping bolster populations and keep the circle of life in check with not too many predator or prey piñata overtaking your garden. 

In what feels like a marriage of Pokémon and Harvest Moon, Viva Piñata's a simple game that offers just enough depth to engage more adept players and overflows with charm that’ll enrapture most anyone who likes the idea of tending a fantastical animal sanctuary. If you pick only one Viva Piñata game, Trouble in Paradise is essentially feels like the original game with an added expansion built in. However if you wish to play on modern consoles both games are included in Rare Replay, a collection of 30 games from Rare’s history including Banjo Kazooie, all of which are playable in 3D on your current gen Xbox. And if that wasn’t good enough, Rare Replay comes in a double pack with Gears of War Ultimate Edition that sells for like thirteen dollars. So if everything said about Viva Piñata wasn’t enough to convince you, it also comes with a few dozen other games just in case you weren’t convinced it was worth a shot.

Most everyone well versed in the gaming sphere knows the tale of Final Fantasy’s origins. A desperate Square on the verge of collapse poured all their passion and effort into a last ditch effort- their Final Fantasy. A few decades later and Final Fantasy stands as a monolith of the industry, standing as perhaps the most dominant MMO of the modern day and with more entries than most franchises could ever dream of. So perhaps it was only fitting that for their sixteenth entry they decided to radically shift the course of the franchise. Final Fantasy XVI is no turn based RPG, in fact one could say its RPG elements at times feel borderline vestigial. But despite this brazen turn away from the genre it once defined, Final Fantasy confidently steps into its new future by asking one simple question. What if these fights felt and looked as cool as we always imagined they’d be?

In what feels like an earnest embrace of the bombastic nature of blockbuster games and cinema, Final Fantasy has turned itself into a feverishly fast character action game in the same sorts of conversations as Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. It helps, of course, that both DMC 5’s director and Platinum Games worked on the combat of Final Fantasy XVI. All star developers all came together to create a game that truly feels bombastic and triumphant. The story has shades of Game of Thrones in all the best ways with political machinations a plenty and villains so vile you’ll want to yell at the screen. Each combat encounter is a frantic dash as you cycle through abilities and dodge massive attacks at the last possible second. When you get in the zone the game feels incredible, with such freedom of expression in your combat even from early stages that by the time you hit midgame you’re swimming in ways to style on all of Final Fantasy’s most iconic foes. If any game justifies the PS5, it is Final Fantasy XVI. It’s an angry game about overthrowing horribly corrupt systems, a game about not just earning a good death, but living a good life- and what doing so requires. And even if you don’t care about that narrative stuff, it’s the most electrifying action game I’ve played since Hades. Final Fantasy may have stepped away from what it is known for, but I am confident it was a step firmly in the right direction.

[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.

[xpiester333x]

Final Fantasy 16 Review!!

Good god, what a game.

All review is going to be under a cut since this is a new game and limited to a single system so not everyone has the chance to play it yet. I'm also gonna break the review down from like least spoilery to most spoilery. So if you're on the fence about it you can read the less spoilery parts to get a feel for if its your thing or not. Each progressively more spoilery section is going to be divided with BIG warning letters so you have the opportunity to flee.

This is gonna be a long one.

SPOILER LEVEL: NON-EXISTENT (BASIC GAMEPLAY)

First let me just give a generic gushing about this game. This is absolutely my pick for GOTY. I loved the story, I loved the characters, I loved the game play, I LOVED the music.

I do not typically play action games, like ever. I have old lady reflexes and usually they feel really difficult to me, and then I get frustrated and then I stopped having fun. This game did everything in its power to appeal to people like me as well as people who enjoy suffering. I played this game in story-focused mode which (I'm assuming) has a lower difficulty. It didn't feel braindead simple by any means. It still felt challenging enough without making me mad.

There were also a ton of accessories to help with gameplay if you're having trouble. Accessories that heal instantly for you, or give you a pop up with a prompt to dodge, or one that does auto combo's for you. I didn't end up using these, because I felt I had enough grasp on how to move and dodge that I didn't need them but they definitely offer a lot of accessibility if your like me and inexperienced (and old).

If you like the challenge and suffering there is an action-focused mode with (assuming) a harder difficulty mode meant for people with more experience. They also have challenges in the game where you can replay the "levels" at increasing difficulties.

My first playthrough was about 75-80h. I did all the side quests but I skipped a lot of the challenges. There's a NG+ mode, and like I mentioned a lot of challenges of increasing difficulty so I think your time/dollar value in this game is well worth it, even at the $70 price.

Also if you're ever lost in the story (or if you're just a huge lore nerd) there are "live" lore points available at any point in the game that can provide a quick recap of what's relevant to where you are in the story at any given moment. There's also a loremaster you can visit anytime that holds a compilation of ALL the information in the game. And about half way through the game you get another character that can break every moment down in a timeline that shows you what you've done so far.

AND THE GRAPHICS. My god, they really made use of that new gen tech. The characters were so lifelike in some scenes. I cant even tell you how amazing it was to watch their faces make the most minute twitches, subtle movements that just really brought them to life and it was incredible to see how far tech has come.

THE MUSIC. Oh my god. Soken is really a genius. And the way he managed to marry a lot of FF14 music into some of the fight music really felt like being in on a secret. Idk it was a very epic soundtrack that didn't disappoint.

Also you can pet the dog. As much as you want. And he's the goodest boy.

SPOILER LEVEL: MINOR (CHARACTERS MENTIONED, MINOR PLOT DISCUSSION)

I had high expectations for this game as an FF14 player. I had total faith Yoshi P (producer) would not put his name on anything that would be disappointing. I was not let down.

First I could not get over how much of a world they managed to build. Sometimes it was almost staggering how they managed to not just create a world with various environments and people but fleshed out that world with history, political turmoil, a class system, rebellion, secret organizations... It was like playing Game of Thrones (fun fact, it was an inspiration) with how much was going on and how deep the world building ran. There were times I really just paused the game and went "My god they created a literal universe here".

It did have some plot holes. At then end while my boyfriend and I were exchanging our thoughts, we both had kind of a few "uh weird how they never mentioned ____". I feel like sometimes the game just expected you, the player to suspend disbelief. That aside though, it was a beautifully told story, and while I was playing, none of the aforementioned did anything to detract from my enjoyment of the story as I went.

If I did have one complaint for the story and the lore though, it's how overwhelming and immersion ruining the side quests can get as the game progresses. At the start there's not many side quests. You finish and arc and there is maybe 2-3 side quests available after. But towards the end of the game? You finish a single quest and theres 7-10 side quests to do. The side quests added so much to the game for side characters and lore and world building so I didn't want to skip them. But at some point it also started to feel tedious and distracting to have to do them.

It was VERY MUCH a JRPG. I heard a lot of people saying it didn't feel like an FF game and that it lost the spirit of the franchise but did we even play the same game? This was every bit a JRPG that was very true to its roots and it was the breath of life this franchise frankly needed.

The CHARACTERS. First let me just say:

A CANON GAY?!?!? IN MY FINAL FANTASY?!?!? AND HES NOT A JOKE?!?!

When Dion kissed his lover I fucking screamed and cried. And that the game didn't make him like... stereotypical? He wasn't overly flamboyant, he wasn't used as the butt of any jokes, he wasn't predatory. He was actually an incredible character, very complex, very good hearted. (Also beautiful to look at but they all were.) and when I mentioned minute facial movements earlier, I was specifically impressed by Dion. I feel like they told so much of who he was through just his face that it was stunning.

On the negative side though, I was really unimpressed with Jill's character. There were a lot of interesting and strong female side characters, but some how Jill stayed so flat the whole time. I felt like she was nothing but Clive's girlfriend and they didn't really develop her a whole lot beyond that? Even her entire arc just kinda felt... incomplete? Cobbled together at the last minute and rushed through? I think if there is one super critical thing I have to say about this game its Jill.

Oh and did I mention all the characters in this game are "old"? Like 30s, 40s, 50s, a few in their late 20s. Unheard of for an FF game but it really made a difference.

SPOILER WARNING: MAJOR!!!! (DETAILED CHARACTER AND PLOT DISCUSSION)

Let me just do a little character gush break down:

Clive: Absolutely the best FF protag ever. Like they built him like some meme edgelord but actually he's a cinnamon roll. I am actually so heartbroken for Clive because he had a troubled life from the very start with a mom that absolutely hated him, being the first born but not being the Dominant of the Phoenix, carrying the guilt of killing his brother around with him for 13 years. My heart actually breaks for him

Joshua: Baby boy. Sweet sweet baby boy. I sat in fucking suspense about this boy the whole game. From the moment he was revealed (adult him anyway) I fell in love with him and then spent the rest of the game saying "please don't kill Joshua please don't kill Joshua" I bit my nails down to nothing every fight sequence. My one criteria for not quitting this game on the spot was if he died before he reunited with Clive. If that had happened, there wouldn't be this 3000 word review rn.

Jill: The most disappointing character. I couldn't even hate her, because I didn't feel like there was enough to her to hate. She loved Clive. They worked in the whole deal about her feeling guilty (suddenly) for all the death she caused as Shiva but then as soon as Clive won the battle for her she didn't feel bad at all ever again? Idk I feel like they just didn't really care about Jill but needed a female lead so she was made?

Cid: Daddy. Cid was a great character that wasn't with us nearly long enough.

Gav: GAV. G A V . I LOVED Gav. Like from the moment he appeared I genuinely thought he was going to be a pretty minor side character and I was sad because I really loved him right from the start. But then we got to spend more and more time with him and man I LOVED him. He was such a ray of sunshine, big golden retriever energy, loved this baby boy so much. There was one point in the game where the party was Clive, Joshua, Gav and Torgal and I said to my boyfriend "they have such potential to ruin my life right now". Anything happening to Gav was my other condition that would make me stop playing the game lmao.

Anabelle: Listen. I have never hated a character so much. This bitch ruined her children's lives with a smile on her face. This bitch massacred bearers for funsies. And at the end she got to commit suicide ezpz? There really is no justice in the world.

Dion: I think I gushed enough about Dion up above but man I can just do it again. I don't know how they made me love a character that was like, barely in the game so much but they did. They made him bear all the guilt and pain and deny himself anything good and become a martyr and they just made me love him.

Now about the FIGHTS. I said the combat system was fun but I didn't even mention the Primal fights. That fight with Titan Lost? FUCKKK. It was so epic my blood was bubbling. The fight with Bahamut? CHILLS. I thought Primal fights were gonna be kinda gimmicky and cinematic and to some extent they were (VERY cinematic) but they felt so high stakes and fast paced it made your heart pound, even if you were only minimally participating during a cut scene. The devs kept saying they really wanted to give the primal fights a sense of enormity and they 100% accomplished that.

SPOILER WARNING: BIG BIG MAJOR!!!! (ENDING DISCUSSION)

The fucking ending. This fucking ending.

First of all when I say this was every bit a JRPG, I mean it so literally. The formula is all there. Pick a human trait and then fight god about it. In this case human will making them prone to destruction means god, Ultima, should take back what he gave them. And then it all cumulates in to this end fight where Clive is powered by friendship and punches god in the face lmaooo.

But it was good. Even recognizing it was cheesy at all get out didn't make it less good. (I mean ffs he says "The only fantasy here is yours. And we shall be its final witness"). It made me giddy tbh. It was an exciting fight, and epic battle, and I felt so nostalgic because it felt so classic at the same time. It was beautiful (even if I really sucked at it and forgot to get pots beforehand lmao).

And then the fucking end. Listen. Listen. Was that flashback of Clive meeting baby Joshua really necessary. Was any of that flashback really necessary? Trust the writing and dev team that killed Haurchefant to throw that in there and make sure my heart was thoroughly crushed.

I already said I was biting my nails about Joshua dying but I really wanted to believe they were gonna some how rez him and everything would be fine but no they just left him there dead. And then they also killed Clive? I did not see that coming at all. I saw Joshua coming, I dreaded it the whole game for a reason but killing the main protagonist?? I never saw that coming.

And I sobbed. Like a baby. From the moment Ultima was finally defeated until the end credits I literally just sobbed (quietly to myself so that my boyfriend who was a little behind me in the game wouldn't hear). In fact I cried so much I'm pretty sure this whole review is a grammar and typo mess because my eyes are sticky. It left a hole in my chest.

I DID read a comment that said they both lived because in the post credit scene there is the book Final Fantasy written by Joshua Rosfield and I understand that but idk it didn't feel like they lived? Aside from that book being there nothing about the end really confirmed anything? Idk it was a weird post credit scene or maybe I'm just dumb and didn't understand. SO if you finished the game and actually sat through my garbage so far, you tell me what I missed.

I'm sure I will come up with another 30 random things to gush about when I post this and I know I didn't cover everything I even wanted to talk about before I started, but this is like, way too long already for a review. Basically, in conclusion, I really loved this game. I really highly recommend it to anyone and everyone that can play it.

[cew644]

Thoughts about FF16 (Spoilers for everything)

I beat FFXVI last week and have just been thinking, and I need to organize my thoughts. Spoilers for everything: characters, lore, and ending. It's very long and scrambled, so bear with me!

So first things first, I absolutely adored the game. Easily one of the top 5 FF games of all time for me. Maybe even top 3 (my favourites are XIV and IX for context). No game is ever perfect, and I do have some nitpicks.

First, I'll start with the characters.

Clive is just hands down one of the best protagonists in gaming, and it is not even close. He's kind, caring but not a pushover. He wears his heart on his sleeve. Everything he feels, YOU feel. This is in large part due to Ben Starr's absolutely amazing performance. His character works really well for the story they are trying to tell as well. He wants to help people and make the world a better place. Any time deviating from the main quest makes sense for his character and helps really flesh out the world in turn. My one issue with him, and it's by no fault of his own, is that he IS the protagonist. Traditional FF parties do not apply to this game and it does affect all secondary characters.

Jill is amazing. I've seen many people call her boring compared to other heroines in the series, but I have to disagree with that. She's an adult, not a quirky teen or an anime girl with a gimmick to sell figurines. Her arc in Drake's Breath is fantastic, and up until they get to Ash, I don't really have much to say that's negative. But she is, however, the person that suffers most from the shift to a singular protagonist. Because Clive needs to get Shiva's powers, she's written off to the sidelines. Her constant presence and agency are cut out of nowhere in service of Clive, and it sucks. Her absence from the ending is also jarring, but I will discuss that more when I talk about the ending.

Cid is best Cid. He works perfectly to establish the themes and motivations for the cast. The sidequests outside of the main quest are also amazing for fleshing him out and reiterating how important Cid's legacy was to everyone involved. I like that he's basically an anarchist.

Joshua is incredibly charming. I would have liked to see more of him and Jote. He comes in pretty late into the story, but you do get the sense of how sheltered he was in small moments (like with Mid), and it's super cute and goes a long way to show his character. I would have really liked to get a couple more scenes with him. Like a conversation with Clive about Pheonix Gate or why he never reached out to the group. So that leaves things up to speculation. I personally think that he was worried about Clive being possessed or influenced by Ultima. I mostly just would like a bit more closure is all.

Dion is my second favourite Dragoon and character in the game (after Freya and Cid, respectively). In every scene with him, I was enthralled. Every scene with the empire and he was just so well directed. Despite not joining the group until the end of the game, he really feels like one of the most important characters. His resolve to die for his sins pushed me to finish all the side quests I could. Like the hideaway is an airship, and Mid's sidequest was all about making a ship! I really thought we could get a secret ending where we could save him! That being said, he's fantastic. I hesitate to call his death "burying the gays" cause of how ambiguous and open-ended it is (and how everyone could live or die depending on interpretation), and how his sidequest ends, but I digress.

Last is Ultima. Super creepy and inhuman, his demeanour, voice and design all work fantastically to make something so close to humanity but also so far. He is also one of the more Christian-coded Gods we've had in a while. His beef is basically, "I made this garden of Eden and these creatures gained consciousness." It is, in very literal words, the original sin. The way he gains followers is also the self-same "paradise" or heaven that features more heavily in Christian faiths compared to Judaism or Islam. I like the twist that all of it was so that he and his breather (which are a sort of singular mind according to the secret tomes) are just using humanity to get there alone. I DO prefer the earlier high fantasy and political intrigue from earlier in the game, but I think if they were going to do a classic FF god ending, this was a good way to do it.

Just a quick mention for the side characters too. I love them all! They're all fantastically written, and I highly recommend doing all their quests. I also like the "leaders" of the towns. Martha, L'ubor and the Dame are so essential to their communities, and you really feel that. I also liked how L'ubor was very trans-masc coded. It was a cool touch!

Lore-wise, FFXVI is really only close to XIV in terms of world-building. And in some ways is much better. Every part of the game is built around magic and how it functions in this world. It's not just a medieval world with magic added to it. How every nation reacts to, and treats magic is very grounded and unique. The Iron Kingdom was especially interesting cause of how they interpreted the bearers as sins rather than tools. That juxtaposed with the Empire, which reviles Bahamut. And Waloed which elevates the dominants, while treating the bearers the worst out of any of the nations. I'm starting NG+ soon just to read through and get all the lore, cause it's so expansive and well-written.

This all comes with some unfortunate and dark implications. Namely slavery and how it plays into the world. Today, slavery is incredibly tied to race, and it's almost impossible to ignore, but historically race wasn't really a concept. Slavery had more to do with prisoners of war and religion. I'm just saying this to point out that slavery here reminds me much more of Greek or Roman forms and not the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This all leads me to Yoshi-P's comments about the lack of diversity in Valesthia. There are PoC in the Republic, which is important to note. But that being said, I don't have faith that CBU3 could have written a story about PoC and slavery without it coming off horribly, and I think the team knew that. Having PoC as bearers would have made it so that Clive was a white saviour. Having PoC as non-bearers would have been even worse as a sort of white person victimization fantasy. Having Valesthia as an isolationist nation works to tell this story without engaging in colonialism but still relating the message of slavery to free will. In short, it's still messy and could have been handled MUCH better, but I think they knew they were not equipped to tell that story and handled their themes in the best way they could. They could have still probably have found a way to have a more diverse cast too.

The environmental messaging was also excellent. I almost wish we got to see it more. I was really second-guessing myself as we went along, and things kept worsening, but I think that was intentional. The whole theme of freedom and change worked really well in a more grounded and relatable way. As in "change is hard, it will hurt people in the short term, but it needs to be done for the betterment of the future." It doesn't chicken out like FF7 does.

Which all brings me to my interpretation of the ending. But first, I need to bring up Jill again. So I think the writers had a very clear idea of how they wanted the game to end. They said their main theme was brotherhood, and that's obvious. But I don't think they could do that with Jill dying in the final boss, so they just dropped her completely. It REALLY bugs me a lot, and I think is the one area where you can argue that Jill's writing is sexist. Cause it is here! Prior to this point, I disagree though. But back to the ending, It's very ambiguous and up for interpretation, which I enjoy a lot. I'm glad they went this route cause if they did go a definitive ending where Joshua dies and Clive lives, I woulda been pissed. It's still a valid interpretation, don't get me wrong, but just hear me out.

The whole time, Jill goes on about Clive saving everyone else except for himself. It's a cool hook, but I never felt it. Clive choosing how he lived, to me anyway, was helping others. He lived to end the bearer system and destroy the crystals that were draining their world, becoming an outlaw to do that. He did that! Which is why I think he chose to die for Joshua to bring him back. An ending where Clive lives while Joshua dies just does not sit right with me. Maybe it's cause I'm an older sibling too, but even though Joshua didn't die, he never really lived either. He's clearly very sheltered, he doesn't have anyone outside the undying, and he was isolated his whole childhood. The whole reason Clive chose to become his shield is to help bear the burden together. Clive dying to "rebirth" the world where his brother and all other bearers can live freely I think is a beautiful way to end his story. Though I can understand why people may disagree.

Another interpretation I also could get behind is that they all live. Clive just loses his arm to the curse. But I think that's a bit cheap.

Anyways sorry for the extremely long review/thought piece. It's by no means perfect, but it's still an easy GotY for me, it's a solid 9/10. I just needed to lay out my thoughts, and I'm happy to discuss with anyone who wants someone to talk to!

ALSO if they do DLC, I would want it to be about Jill, Dion, Joshua, or Leviathan.

[the-island-and-the-dream]

disappointed in ff16. the big bad is hilariously uninteresting (like maybe a 3-4/10 on the Cool and Interesting Villain scale kind of bad), the ideologies are generally either incoherent enough that they're incomprehensible until the characters actually state the intended message or the most brain dead idiotic takes imaginable through the annihilation of nuance. character interactions tend to be fantastic, but the overarching plot is boring and the initial premise (that could have been much more interesting !!!if done well!!!) gets pushed aside into sidequests territory like a fifth if the way in. sidequests are pretty good, although anything with any emotional tension tends to be resolved in the least satisfactory way possible. when you defeat the big bad the Big McFucking Problem isnt actually resolved in any way and just gets handwaved aside with a 'no but itll totally be better tho, look at all this hope for the future imagery'. reasonable chance that the heroes actions would have actually made it worse without the mysterious handwave. best character gets killed off early, boo, but that's more of a personal gripe. generally really fucking depressing, so if you're into that you might like it more. just-

from the start of it it looked really, really cool and I'd hoped it would live up to that. enthusiasm waned pretty fast after Best Character death and plot direction swing established pretty firmly what kind of game it was gonna end up being. meh

[avoutput]

The Beautiful and Exhausted || Final Fantasy XVI

Since the release of Final Fantasy VIII, there has never been any way to tell what a Final Fantasy game would be like. The reason I point to FFVIII in particular is because, had Final Fantasy VII been less popular or an outlier, we could count it as a once in a series event. But with the release of FFVIII, we could see the beginning of a pattern. This would be even more obvious if you looked at the Squaresoft Playstation 1 lineup as a whole; and even more clear if you look at the Fifth console generation in its entirety (which included the Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64). This was the beginning of the third dimensional era of gaming. A place to turn games into a more cinematic affair. A time to change the way we interact with the media of gaming. It produced blockbusters in the way of fever dreams. It paved the path for gaming today. But across generations, we had franchises like Final Fantasy; a franchise that would come to embrace this experimentation as part of their DNA. This alchemy of gaming and storytelling has led to some of the most memorable moments in the history of this hobby. But experimentation has a downside. More often than not there are failures. You can’t create gold from lead; a hard truth we have had to learn as both fans and developers. Some of us take to fool’s gold as if it were the same; it shines the same but lacks the value. This might not be the most glowing introduction for a review, but I want you to know that Final Fantasy XVI was the desire to return to the days of old while maintaining modern standards. It’s a messy affair, this alchemy. The melding of generations of gaming. Final Fantasy XVI caused me to feel a mixture of frustration and admiration. It made me believe the developers had a desire to lead into gold, but just weren't sure what the recipe should be. In the end, it was all placed on a single protagonist’s shoulders.

Everything leading up to the release of the Final Fantasy XVI led me to believe I wouldn’t like it. That it wasn’t a game built for the fans of Final Fantasy, but the fans of a completely different medium, like television’s Game of Thrones or the worlds of The Witcher. And while I have no aversion to the latter and no love for the former, I still couldn’t help but feel immediately displaced by the look, feel, and direction of all the media. A purchase to be made in favor of a completely different medium. While gaming as a whole seems to be escaping me into the hands of another generation, I thought I could find solace in the old guards from my youth. Squaresoft had an air of measured science. Creating and innovating in a way that favored an entire generation of fans while pulling in new ones with their modifications of play. They built an empire that has long since rested on its laurels. And like every empire unhappy with complacency, they are trying to conquer new lands in spite of the cries from their constituency. But, let me be clear, that doesn’t make Final Fantasy XVI a bad game. It doesn’t make it an experiment gone wrong. What it means is that it’s different. It’s a new battle plan finding its legs. What it means is that, as a long time fan, I had a very strong reaction that led to very nuanced feelings.

This was the first Final Fantasy I thought I wouldn’t buy the moment it came out since the release of Final Fantasy VIII on 9/9/99. But like many stans, the demo changed my mind almost immediately. It was fast, sleek, and brutal. It delivered that delicious vertical slice of everything the game had to offer. It knocked me out of my chair by the end of the demo. A mainline Final Fantasy putting a real blade to the neck of our heroes and drawing real blood? The performances were the perfect mix of melodramatic and serious. Theatrical and operatic. Essentially, I was praising Final Fantasy for actually trying to do outloud what it had always done behind the veneer of a PG-13 rating. Like a fish after a lure, I was hooked. The day I finished the demo, I *dun dun dun* PRE-ORDERED THE GAME! I gave into the beast. Though, to be fair, I already mentioned that I have been doing that for years in the case of this series. Anyway, the demo did its job unlike any ever had. And if this one page introduction wasn’t proof of that I have a lot to say, then the next several pages will. Buckle in. We have the story, the gameplay, the presentation, and the impact to discuss.

The biggest selling point of the demo was the bombastic end. Essentially, what struck me most in the vertical slice was the story. Not necessarily any one part of the story either, but the veritable roux of all of its elements. The characters by themselves are not very compelling, neither is the world of Valestha or the countries that carved up its landscape. The Mother Crystals, the magic, the slaves, the townspeople, all of them are spices awash in a story that at first taste goes beyond quenching your thirst or satiating your hunger. It makes you believe that something profound is going to happen, that you are just at the beginning of a story with depth. The story starts as a portrait of one young man, Clive Rosfeild, first son of the duchy's ruler, and head guard to his younger brother Joshua who was born with the generational gift of a god that appears in the family line. The immediate implication of this familial line is that we are going to get a series of history lessons throughout our game that will enrich the decisions around our characters, but ultimately, the story remains focused on a single character, Clive Rosfield. And from the first moments that we get to control Clive as an adult, we spend several hours focused solely on his need for revenge. The world takes a backseat to Clive’s journey through it. Looking at all the previous games in the series, the world was just as much a character in a Final Fantasy game as any of the people in it. Even in Final Fantasy X, in which Tidus is whisked away to a world he knows nothing about, we get to learn everything about the world through his eyes. And on the other hand, in Final Fantasy VIII, all the characters grew up in the world we are exploring, but each of them have their own opinions, come from different places, and give the world a little more depth than it otherwise would have had. But with Clive, a bit of lone wolf, we don’t get to experience this depth, particularly for two reasons. First, it's not that there are no other cast members, there are plenty and they all come from different places and backgrounds. It's more that, because of the nature of the story, all the places they are from are inaccessible, either because it was destroyed or because it will at some point be destroyed in the near future so that when you arrive, it isn’t the same place anymore. Secondly, the characters we play are all aristocrats and very educated about the world around them, and as such, they don't spend time talking about the world around them beyond the direct nature of what they have to do. This means that Clive bears not only the burden of saving the world, but also holding our undivided attention. Unfortunately, he can do the former, but not the latter.

This leads me to our roster of characters, some of whom have come under considerable fire for their lack of emotion, while others are lauded for the breadth of their voice. Clive is wrought with feelings of loss and failure. His woes seem to be endless. And yet, he finds a way to be the kind of hero you can get behind. He is the theater of this story. He is constantly in the depths of tears and pain. He is unlike any other character in the Final Fantasy series, possibly because he has a fantastic voice actor and because he got all of the writer’s attention. That being the case, every other character suffers for it. They are merely there to give depth to Clive. They don’t become anymore than who Clive sees them as. And sadly, because Clive is constantly in the midst of pain and responsibility, he only has a few notes, and no matter how many times they play them, he doesn’t make for a more compelling song on his own. But in the accompaniment of his friends and allies, we get a very passable verse that sounds great, but still doesn’t make up for the lack stories lack of awareness of the history of their surroundings, especially because there is both and in-game historian who plays a background role, and because all of our characters are especially privileged and educated. My gripe is that the story writer’s can’t have it both ways; a huge political story and a very centralized character at the heart of that story if neither in turn recognizes the other. In the end, it doesn’t matter how great Cid was or how good of an independent female protagonist Jill was because they only are there to serve the forward momentum of a single character at the cost of the vibrant world the framing tries and fails to establish at almost every turn.

Now we can zoom out and look at the world of Valisthea and the history surrounding it. At best, it is incredibly confusing. From the moment the game shows you the world map and gives you access to the history, you aren’t entirely sure that its trustworthy because it is in constant conflict with its own language and the world at large. Simply reading through the “Active Time Lore” and speaking with Hipocrates “Tomes”, you are never truly sure if Valsithea is the entire world or if it is a smaller offshoot of the world, like a zoomed in map of Australia. It turns out that this is a little of both. Largely because it doesn’t matter to the story that other places exist, but even the people of Valisthea are not entirely sure anyone has been “overseas” despite some people claiming to hail from there. At points in the game, they gesture to Samurai through sword making, and at other points to ingredients from “the West”. The issue I have with this is that the game wants us to take it seriously. That the world of Valisthea and the people in it have a rich history akin to Game of Thrones, but as soon as you go looking, it fails to provide anything more than a mishmash of incomplete speculation and fan service for the player. One could argue that in a world as fractured as Valisthea, the history would also come up short, but this isn’t entirely framed as the case to the player. We are given knowledge from this Lore Menu that their tomes would never have, made up entirely of our current knowledge and flavored with lore from the game. It was meant to outright explain the reality of the game’s world, to help you frame the actions of the people in it, and explain everything happening around you. However, it fails to make clear things that should be. And as a side note, it contradicts itself at times, saying one thing happened and then saying another. For instance, there is a battle between two nations in which two entries say the other won. It could be flavor, if it had been framed correctly, but I think it was simply an honest mistake.

The more you examine the world of the game, you realize it was meant to be smoke and mirrors for Clive’s journey. The various makeup of each of the nations that make up Valisthea seem deep, and admittedly it is more than nothing, but every other Final Fantasy did a whole lot more with a whole lot less. The governments for each are completely different, but it hardly matters to the story as a whole. None of this does anything to alter the course of Clive or his party or how they handle any situation. No one they deal with has any level of political intrigue that interferes with the story, with the exception of Dion, but it only has to do with Dion and simply leads him to do something completely outlandish that ultimately makes this intrigue completely flaccid. One of the best aspects of this game is that it absolutely shocks you. It throws curveballs that you don’t see coming exactly when they need to. But these curveballs undermine the entire purpose of setting up the foundation of the governments and countries of this world. Even attacking the Mother Crystals, the thrust of this games story, are consistently caught with a lack of meaningful defense or even realistic concern for their wellbeing in a world that both relies on and reveres them. Again, only because the game begs us to take it so seriously do I find this to be such an egregious issue. They set up so many things, only to have Clive basically mow down the world around him without ever considering any other way than knocking down the front door. I hate that the various countries amount to nothing, especially when they could have had something to say about our world or even their own. They are simply Legos for Clivezilla to knock over while we play superheroes vs monsters. It’s simply a shame.

The presentation of the game is meant to be in a state of constant forward motion, but the popularization of chapter based gameplay as of late really makes the world feel less like a place you might role play and more like a classic platformer. By that I mean that the game is a series of stages instead wherein you hold right, interchangeably fighting monsters and listening to dialog, until you reach the end of the stage. While this might work in favor of books and film, this really changes the entire frame of an RPG as we classically know them. This design is taken further once you unlock the Arete Stone. This allows you to repeat any of the main stages of the game, from start to finish, collecting points to try and get a high score. It furthers that the main design of the game was around completing scenarios in tight packages, which could have been fine all on its own, but by calling attention to it, I can’t help but feel taken out of the moment. The landscape never feels like a continuous world because we have to be told to stop and recognize a “new” stage or moment is beginning. I like to escape into the world of Final Fantasy and this format ultimately pulls me out of “the world” and back into “the game” instead of the seamless merging of the two in the classic format. And it would have been one thing if it mentioned chapters at big moments, but it does it at every turn. To put it mildly, it puts a damper on the experience as a whole.

While the framing of the game was not exactly to my liking, the gameplay was a fresh change for the series. A fresh change, but not entirely welcome. It felt like this game deserved a subtitle instead of the mainline marquee of the 16th entry. If they had called this Final Fantasy Valisthea, or Final Fantasy Action in the same way Final Fantasy Tactics was to the point, I think it would have matched the fans tastes a little better. No one wants to order pizza, take a bite, and taste fruit punch. This is a hill I would rather not die on, and while I feel this way, it ultimately would not have changed my feelings on the game as whole, but instead is more of a judgment of the decision makers at SquareEnix. On one hand, it’s great for marketing and ensures a certain number of sales and general interest. On the other hand, you are basically walking into the room and asking for fans' forgiveness. “Everyone, I know this isn’t exactly what you expected, but we promise it will be worth your time. Please give it a chance.” I want to point out that the issue isn’t that the game is completely action focused, but rather that the game is comprised of 40 to 80 hours with an entire cast of characters, and you only get to play a single one. Other RPG’s have taken the action route, but most of them have the sense to offer you access to some of the cast. It would be one thing if they didn’t have any good examples of this, but their own Final Fantasy VII Remake gives you access to play, equip, and customize the entire team, all while giving you a complete action based game. And while Final Fantasy XVI gameplay is fun and has some strengths, it has many competitors that did a better job in the current generation (like God Of War) and several that did it better in generations past.

Where the game really shines, truly surprises, and earns some forgiveness is in the moments where Clive is pitted against the various Dominants of Valisthea. The game is largely broken into three portions. Clive’s quest for dialog. Clive’s battle through monsters. And Clive’s transformation into the kaiju-like god-beast Ifrit, a being they called an Eikon (which I have to point out begrudgingly is pronounced like icon). This final play style creates bombastic scenes of epic proportions. It feels like 3 separate teams were all given completely different instructions on the tone of the game and that no one at any point during the final construction batted an eye when putting it all together. The Eikon battles are so jarringly different from the rest of the game that, like the chapter style, it completely removes you from your immersion in the world. You are shaken from the dark and dour world one team created and into the Godzilla/Tokusatsu, B-Movie of your dreams. It is both entirely welcome and completely incongruent with the rest of the game. At one point in the game, you could swear they forgot that it wasn’t 2008 or that they weren’t making a Sonic the Hedgehog game. And in another moment, you think they were going for Gundam meets Transformers or that Freeza was about to roll onto the scene. This is just another place where the game further deserved a subtitle instead of the titular 16. And while the actual functionality of the battles as an Eikon are simply mirrors of playing as Clive, replacing his sword with claws and firebreath, knowing that these moments are fleeting is a little disappointing. Unlike your battles in the rest of the story, these are clearly numbered. But it is another feature that kept pushing me through the game and a very powerful Phoenix feather in its cap.

As for playing as Clive outside his Eikon form, from the moment you start training as a young upstart knight, it shows promise. It’s simple with the promise of depth. Playing as Clive and zipping around the battlefield feels right. The game grows to give him a myriad of skills that, when used right, allow you to become the god he truly is. I found early on that it is best to cycle through the various control schemes and decide which one fits you best, as it enhances the game as a whole. Growing your skills is limited by the story, unlocking new abilities as you encounter other human-god hybrids called Dominants and taking their power. You begin to look forward to what kind of abilities you will get next. Looking back, it was the most motivating thing,  after the story, that motivated me to continue pushing Clive to the end of the game. And while none of them are entirely disappointing, you will be hard pressed to use many abilities beyond the first two trees unlocked. It’s not that the later skills are useless or even hard to use, there are just too many advantages to the first set to bother experimenting with the others. On the bright side, they allow you to completely change out any skills at any time outside of battle by letting you refund the skillpoint necessary to unlock the skills. This gives you complete freedom to try out any combination of skills as long as you have the necessary ability points.

Still, in the moment to moment play of the game, what you come to realize is that it suffers death by a thousand cuts. On the next stop on our autopsy, we get to dissect beyond the good points because every single choice they made beyond those detracts from any enjoyment the game offers. A series of very common, modern tools and shortcuts are completely absent. The first thing is that there is no mini-map. I can understand that this may have been removed in favor of immersion, but because each area ultimately feels like a stage with a very obvious beginning and end, you end up checking your map just to make sure you explored everything. It’s very easy to keep going the “right way” at all times and miss places to explore, treasure chests, or even battles. You essentially can’t get “lost”, which when well balanced, can make RPG’s very fun to explore. At some points the game offers several paths to get to the same endpoint, but you would have no idea if you weren’t checking the map. I must have hit the map button a million times to make very simple checks that the mini-map could have easily solved and kept me playing instead of pausing. 

 Another immersion choice I imagine was not letting Clive traverse the game at any other speed than a slow, agonizing crawl. You have no ability to choose your run speed, and only get to “run” outside of towns after having held down forward for 7 or so seconds. And if you stop, get ready to wait for the sprint again. You eventually get a Chocobo, but it doesn’t move any faster than Clive’s run. It simply gives you the ability to use a run button. Inside towns, you can only move at a light jog and you can’t at any point use any of your teleportation battle techniques to traverse any faster or just have fun being weird in the town. And yet, this game has giant monster battles and yells fuck at every awkward moment. You do get fast travel, but another weird point of the game is that it recognizes the points (large stones similar to the Arete Stones) are activated because of Clive’s presence, but then the rest of the game acts like what we are doing is not “teleporting”. This means that everyone walks or rides everywhere in Valisthea, including your own party, even though the game recognizes these points. Another very weird choice, as it would have been better to simply ignore it if the game wanted to be “serious” over being “fantasy”. You even have a boatman at one point that I never spoke with unless I was prompted, found in an entire section of your hideout completely unused after you first meet him. It’s a burden to get to know the people living in the hideout because of how large it is and how slow Clive moves, making you want to skip any conversation I would normally have enjoyed having. The dialog is actually a good point of the game for the most part, not exactly in the content of what is said but rather how it is said. 

For the most part, the extra conversations feel natural, if not a little too slow. They have weird pauses in their speech, but that isn’t really an issue of the content as much as the delivery. The real sin is that they frame most conversations in this one on one, switch screen between Clive and the target that feels so shamelessly lazy and boring, you are thankful that at least the words themselves aren’t boring. In these moments they pass each other invisible items that make the same sound no matter what it is. And while every item has some small art and very detailed descriptions that mix lore and colloquialisms, it's a real shame that almost every item has no in-world design. The most obvious place you can feel this is absent is in your gear. The only visible gear is Clive’s sword. He can equip a belt and a bracelet, but these are never visible. There is no menu to view your sword as the 3 dimensional object it is without setting Clive up in the perfect position in the Photo Mode. So many RPG’s at this point allow you to view the in-game model in a special menu so that you can really appreciate it. This became a major point that made the game feel so much cheaper than it was meant to. It almost feels like they went out of their way to remove this feature instead of adding it. It would have been minor if there weren’t so many other issues, particularly these kinds of features that are in other games I always felt were minor, but when they are all absent at once, it's very noticeable.

While the pacing of the story is pretty brisk, the disbursement of sidequests is outlandish. Sidequests are a staple of the genre and have increasingly become part of all sorts of games. You would think that a company full of people steeped in the RPG genre would do better in this arena, but this game may rate as one of the worst in both meaningful content and pacing. Most of the quests are not available until the very end of the game, and the ones you play along the way dole out minimal amounts of character content. You do meet and learn more about the characters in the game and the world at large, but none of it feels worthwhile. There are moments where you feel as though you have accomplished something significant, but it makes no difference to the storyline at large. There is no interaction between the quests and main plot, which for a game that is supposed to live in a world of political intrigue, it feels like a completely missed opportunity to deepen the lore. The other facet of the sidequest system are the Hunts. The hunts are largely the standard enemies with extra movesets, hit points, and color changes. They are actually pretty fun for the most part and a fun change on the basic enemy formula. However, the slightly deeper lore and expanded enemies is the only highlight of this whole portion of the game, largely because thats all you really get for doing any of this. 

The spoils for quests and hunts are often crafting materials, which already have a limited use. The only person you can equip is Clive, and he can only equip 3 craftable items at a time, and you can’t build accessories. This means that you are constantly getting completely useless materials, that while you can sell, the only thing you can buy are healing items, accessories, or waste on beer and music (which sounds pretty great if this were real life or if it had any effect on Clive and company). The accessories are also largely useless in the grand scheme of the game, as most of them only shorten the rest period of your special moves by minor amount of seconds. You are rarely in need of any special move at any given interval, and simply waiting an extra few seconds for the skill to return is not difficult by any means, especially outside of boss battles. The accessories that increase your stats are also completely invisible. Because of the speed of battle and the general design of the HUD, you can’t really tell how much any stat increases are working in your favor. The HP bar has no numbers visibly attached to it, so when you get hit, you have no real idea how much 50 defense points is really helping, and ultimately it doesn’t really matter anyway. Another staple of RPG’s missing is that Status Effects are almost completely absent in the game, both positive and negative. You can basically up your defense or your attack, but that's about it. Even if they do exist, they must have happened so infrequently, that I hardly found any use for them or was ever hindered by them.

In battle, your only real ally is Torgal, your faithful pup. His abilities are pretty limited and his basic function is to help you continue or finish combos. He also has a heal ability, but it can only heal your most recent set of damage, and by such a small percentage at a time, his heal is largely useless. But not as useless as the rest of the characters feel. You can’t control or request assistance from any other character that works with you throughout the entire game. You don’t have any traditional party aspects. While Jill might be able to freeze enemies, because you can’t control who she is doing it to or when, it’s mere coincidence if it works in your favor. Still, the game shines when you blow away your opponents with your entire arsenal. And maybe in an effort to balance Clive’s overpowered abilities, many of them obstruct the field of battle so completely, that the stronger enemies can still make strikes even though you can’t see them. At times, because of this, the camera is your worst enemy, always focused on Clive’s “sexy little waist” (a line from a completely different review that I can never unread). While your moves continue to destroy the battlefield, the best you can do is dodge around and counter blindly. Clumsy fun is what you might call Final Fantasy XVI’s battle system. It can be easily broken in your favor but that never stops it from being fun.

The backdrop of Valisthea is often a visual treat, but in spurts. Large swaths of the game are simply rock backgrounds or bland terrain. But when you run into ruins or waterfalls, it is quite a sight to behold. Just before XVI came out, I got obsessed with a feature of video games I never thought I would use; Photo Mode. And while Ghostwire: Tokyo was its own special kind of gaming hell, its photo mode was exhaustive. It was like using a real camera and photoshop in a game. I can recall games as recent as Red Dead Redemption 2 have photo modes and graphics so good, they tricked local television stations into thinking they were real photos of their own towns. And this is yet another place that XVI comes in last, with an overly basic photo mode with very minimal options. Hilariously, the camera is not free to move around anything other than Clive, so you have to work really hard to take shots of other people or things. And if you want to remove Torgal or Jill from a shot, tough shit, you can only toggle Clive in and out of pictures, so get ready to maneuver a bit. A quick aside, on the most disappointing aspects to the game is actually one of the most beautiful; the ruins. Throughout the game, ancient societies’ powerful ruins and ships have been hollowed out and used as city centers or bridges or highways. They, at best, get a few lines of dialog explaining them, but never come to fruition beyond that. They are simply pyramids, spectacles hinting at an ancient world, but go nowhere. This might be a little too realistic. The beauty of Final Fantasy and RPG’s is that in most cases, this kind of scenery ends up becoming something other than background information. Another shame because it was not just beautiful, but it looked and sounded interesting. Below you will find an album of every picture I took throughout my time. Seeing it all lined up like that felt like I hadn’t spent 2 months leading Clive through his journey.

As much as I wanted this to be a review, it really turned into a list of grievances. Because the save file doesn’t have an hours played clock, my best guys is what the PS5 recorded as my playtime. I put 88 hours into Final Fantasy XVI, and another 5 or so if you count writing up this article. As I have made clear, Final Fantasy games are an event for me. I look forward to them even if they don’t have a story, setting, or characters that appeal to me. It’s a bit of stockholm syndrome, held hostage by nostalgia. Since the release of Final Fantasy X, I have felt the franchise walk further and further away from me. It made the battles slower and more methodic, added a turn gage, and put a stop to general feeling of exploration. The XIth entry moved online and bloated the experience into a slog with lengthy hours spent leveling up and somewhat trivializing the personal nature of the stories that used to be relegated to a collective cast of characters. In XII, the world of Ivalice brought a broader, impersonal nature to the adventure, giving you deep characters and a wide world, but very little glue keeping all the pieces together. With XIII, we were on rails where there was little strategy  in battle, but a bombastic scenery and convoluted story encompassed the cast. The legend of XIV’s epic failure is only encompassed by its meteoric rise from the ashes as one of the best online games still played today, and while it is loved for its story and cast, everyone essentially being the main character in their own right never passed for me. The road trip dramedy of XV and its splintered sales tactics of Anime, Film, and DLC just to keep up with the bland and incoherent story was still blessed with some heartfelt moments between its lead boys. And of all of these games, XVI is the one I have had the hardest time with. There are so many missed opportunities to be a great game, simply by absence of features alone. This game is marked by its absence of not just things that are sacred to Final Fantasy and RPG’s, but by basic gameplay features that would have otherwise elevated and erased this deeply held sentiment expressed before you. This game only treads water on good graces of the old fans and the surprise of new ones. It holds its breath on the talent of its voice cast and how well they express what little they are given. And most of all, makes land on the backs of its grand beast battles which, while tone deaf to the rest of the game, break through the malaise that otherwise would have compromised the game as a whole. Final Fantasy XVI makes land, but only barely. There really is nothing left to say except for, “I forgive you, and I look forward to XVII. Godspeed and Thank You.”

[jorrmungandr]

Final Fantasy XVI Review: Towards a Better Tomorrow

Hey, remember when I used to review video games? Well, I never did it very much, since I do not finish video games very often, and even less often do I feel strongly enough about them to sit down and write something. Also, whenever I have the energy to return to this blog, I usually continue on my sisyphean quest to finish the Moby Dick project. But no longer! It’s time for another…

[umjogoquejogueioutrodia]

Final Fantasy XVI - Review

Lembro como se fosse ontem o dia que o Final Fantasy XVI foi anunciado durante um State of Play. Eu mal podia acreditar que aquele anuncio era real.

Então no dia 22 de Junho de 2023, os três anos de espera chegaram ao fim.

O jogo já se inicia com a porrada rolando entre os Eikons, você no controle da Fênix lutando contra o Ifrit.

Depois dessa sequência frenética e épica, você vai para o presente no controle de Clive por um breve período, mas depois disso o jogo te joga para o passado, onde você irá presenciar os eventos que colocaram Clive na sua jornada por vingança.

Nas duas primeiras horas do jogo, você já está apegado aos personagens e eles só melhoram ao decorrer do jogo. Final Fantasy XVI conta com um cast de personagens muito bons, e não só se tratando dos personagens principais, mas também dos personagens secundários.

O jogo também conta com a presença de loadings bem rápidos.

Eu joguei ele no Modo de Taxa de Quadros e as vezes ocorria uma queda de fps quando eu estava andando pelo mapa, mas durante as batalhas isso nunca aconteceu. E mesmo jogando no modo de taxa de quadros o jogo continua muito bonito.

Um dos grandes destaques do Final Fantasy XVI de quando ele foi anunciado foi a sua jogabilidade, que agora está totalmente voltada para para o hack'n slash. A jogabilidade desse jogo está simplesmente uma delícia, ela é extremamente divertida, fluida e responsiva. A princípio você só possui o poder da Fênix, mas conforme você vai progredindo no jogo, novos poderes Eikônicos vão sendo desbloqueados. Alguns dos poderes dos Eikons não causam muito dano nos inimigos mas são muito úteis para conseguir quebrar a barra de stagger e deixar os inimigos vulneráveis.

As lutas contra os dominantes e eles na forma de Eikons são set pieces deslumbrantes e simplesmente absurdas de lindas, são intensas, brutais e épicas. As boss fights vão escalando cada vez mais, quando você acha que já viu de tudo, o jogo vai lá te surpreende e isso acontece muitas vezes.

O jogo faz um bom uso do dualsense, em algumas partes é possível sentir bem a resposta tátil nos gatilhos.

O jogo também conta com a presença de alguns QTE( Quick time events), que aparecem durante a luta e também para interagir com o cenário. Eu pessoalmente não me senti incomodada com isso em nenhum momento, eles costumam serem mais recorrentes nas boss fights contra Eikons.

Uma coisa que eu senti falta é de ter mais coisas para serem feitas nos mapas abertos. Além das side quests e caçadas, você pode fazer as Trials do Chronolith, que são basicamente desafios que você tem que completar em um tempo determinado e usando apenas um tipo de Eikon.

Eu gostei muito das missões secundárias, elas conseguem de uma maneira muito eficaz ampliar ainda mais a sua compreensão sobre o universo de Final Fantasy XVI. Apesar de ter gostado, eu acho que a parte de gameplay, o que você tem que fazer nessas missões, é bem mediano e basicamente sempre consciente em você ir conversar com certo personagem, entregar um item ou derrotar um inimigo. Acho que poderia ter tido uma variedade maior de ações que você faz durante essas missões. Mas dito isso, a verdadeira recompensa que você ganha ao fazer essas missões é lore, ganhar mais conhecimento sobre aquele mundo e os personagens que nele vivem.

Enquanto a história principal é focada mais no macro, em acontecimentos grandiosos que ocorrem ao redor dos personagens principais, as missões secundárias são focadas no micro, em aprofundar mais os personagens secundários e também os npcs.

As missões secundárias não abrem todas de uma vez, conforme você vai progredindo na história, novas side quests vão aparecendo, porque o que acontece nelas tem ligação com a história principal, inclusive alguns personagens importante aparecem nelas.

O jogo também conta com a presença de um Hub, que é onde você poderá comprar e vender itens, criar e reforçar armas e equipamentos.

A história de Final Fantasy XVI me surpreendeu muito, eu já esperava que iria ser boa mas não imaginava que iria ser nesse nível. A trama é excelente, plot twist atrás de plot twist, novos mistérios sempre vão aparecendo.

E claro que uma das estrelas do jogo é o Torgal, o fiel companheiro do nosso protagonista Clive. Durante o combate você pode dar algumas ordens para ele, mas não é nada de muito complexo. E fora das batalhas é claro que você pode fazer carinho no cachorrinho.

O jogo se esforça muito para que você entenda a história, que você sabia quem são aqueles personagens.

A construção de mundo é simplesmente impecável. E o que ajuda muito nisso é o sumário dinâmico, ele pode ser acionado a qualquer momento durante as cutscenes, e ele mostra em tópicos coisas que estão aparecendo naquela cena em específico, como por exemplo quem são aqueles personagens e qual é o lugar que eles estão. E as informações que aparecem naqueles tópicos vão se atualizando conforme a história vai progredindo.

Outra ferramenta que ajuda na compreensão da história é o Hapócrates, que é um npc que fica no Hub. Ele é basicamente uma enciclopédia sobre Valisthea e os seus personagens.

E outra maneira que o jogo usa para expandir ainda mais a história são as cartas que você recebe de feedback das missões que você fez.

Final Fantasy XVI conta com uma grande variedade de cenários, que vão desde ruínas, campos abertos, pântanos, desertos e até ambientes dentro de castelos.

Apesar de eu achar esse jogo maravilhoso, ele não é isento de defeitos. Um coisa que me incomodou um pouco foi que a as personagens femininas não possuem tanta urgência na história, ou seja, a narrativa não avança por causa delas. E outra coisa que também me incomodou foi a animação facial dos npcs, que não é muito boa.

Uma coisa que esse jogo faz de uma forma até que sutil na medida do possível é passar a mensagem de esperança, mesmo que seja uma esperança muito vaga, mas que vale a pena ser sentida.

E não tem como falar de Final Fantasy sem mencionar a sua trilha sonora, que por sinal está espetacular, não tinha como esperar menos do compositor Masayoshi Soken. O seu trabalho anterior com o Final Fantasy XIV já era extremamente aclamado e aqui com o 16 o legado dele continuou.

Eu terminei o jogo com 49 horas, fazendo todas as missões secundárias e as caçadas.

Final Fantasy XVI conseguiu superar todas as minhas imensas expectativas que eu tinha e digo mais, ele foi muito além do que eu podia imaginar. É um jogo que entrega tudo, eu me diverti muito do começo ao fim. Mesmo sendo um jogo longo, eu nunca senti que ele deveria ter acabado antes, na verdade eu até queria que ele durasse mais. Foi uma jornada extraordinária e fascinante, que eu nunca vou me esquecer.

Fico muito curiosa em como o próximo jogo da franquia vai ser, eu pessoalmente gostaria muito que fosse algo bem sci fi com robôs gigantes e uma pitada de terror lovecraft.

[dumbfinntales]

After a little over two weeks of play I’m done with Final Fantasy XVI. It was one hell of a ride. I have a lot to say about this game, both good and bad. There’ll also be story spoilers below so if you haven’t beaten the game don’t click read more. Seriously, experience the story for yourself. It’s a journey unlike any other.

Final Fantasy XVI is an action RPG set in a fantastical world of magic, beasts and oppression. Loads of oppression, death and misery. But also joy and love. The game is more action than RPG, in fact the RPG elements in this game are very shallow. You have “levels” but stat ups are automatic and the little gear you can get only boost up numbers. So it’s more Devil May Cry than Final Fantasy. But this didn’t bother me because the gameplay is fucking awesome.

The combat is without a doubt the highlight of this game. The combination of different Eikon powers and Clives basic moveset make for very satisfying action. If you don’t use those assist accessories (and I don’t know why you would, the game plays itself with those on) you have a lot to keep track of and sometimes the combat feels like your fingers start cramping because you wanna keep the damage going. Although the combat is flashy and cool the game isn’t very challenging. I only died on optional hunts and died once to a story boss. But even then the game is generous, re-filling your potions and the boss doesn’t even start with full health. But the main point is that the combat was fun and I never bored of fighting small mobs or bigger monsters.

The bosses in this game were amazing. Not particularly super difficult, but they made up with cool presentation and memorable set pieces. Some of the bosses reach the ridiculous levels of Platinum Games’ bosses, especially during Eikon fights like Titan and Bahamut. I honestly wasn’t expecting these kinds of bosses, but I was happy to see them. The final boss was also perfect. I was slightly disappointed by Barnabas, while he was a fun fight in a DMC kind of way, I was expecting Platinum Games’ levels of ridiculous, but the final boss delivered in spades. It truly felt final and each phase could have been a final phase.

Another thing that I ended up loving way more than I expected was the story. Not just the story, but the characters and the world itself. The story of FFXVI is without a doubt my favorite video game story of all time. It is the only story out of many story heavy games where I actually cared. I cared about the characters, the world and their struggles. The story was very dark at places with tragedy and death behind every corner. And the oppression of the bearers was especially brutally depicted. But also there were good times and triumphs. I honestly don’t know what this game did different, but I cared so much for almost all the charactes and I talked to them not just to exhaust dialogue, but because I cared what they had to say about current events.

I admit that due to this I got emotional a few times during the story, and I felt a special kind of euphoria to see Clives journey to the end and that he realized his and Cids dream. A world without magic, and we even get to see this world they worked so hard for towards the end. One thing I did find odd however. The mother figure we see at the end says that Eikons and magic are just a fairy tale from a book, but that makes no sense. Even if magic is gone, magic used to be a thing for hundreds of years. Clive ridding the world of magic doesn’t erase the entire history of the world where people wrote books and shared stories. Magic would be a thing of the past that people would talk about, but not something they’d deny as a fairy tale. I dunno, I guess that line was there to show off Clives success. I’m still glad their stories lived on.

The world of Valisthea is honestly amazing, but the ending felt very final with magic being gone. I don’t know how they’d be able to make DLC or continue this world in any way. Either they have to explore the past, or we see a resurfacing of magic. Although I hope not. If magic came back it would kinda invalidate Clives journey.

I’ve sung the games praises, but it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. I had some problems with the game. Some major problems. Let’s start with the pacing of the story. Yes, the story was amazing, but it wasn’t all the time. The game had a very strange pace where you’d first experience the most thrilling amazing action and story twists of your life, and then everything comes to a screeching halt as you have to walk around talking with people for an hour. I said I enjoyed the characters, but not all of them, and they didn’t always have interesting things to say. Coming from an amazing boss fight to doing fetch quests where you talk to a bunch of people is jarring, and not very exciting.

Not to mention if you’re like me who feels the need to complete all side content. Holy shit the side quests in this game were ass. They wary so much in quality, some of them I admit are interesting and they build up the world and characters wonderfully. Without side quests you would never find out the backstories of many supporting characters like Charon, Blackthorne, Gav etc... And there were some really interesting ones (and dark) like the one where some noble man and his son send bearers to their death for fun, or a little girl whose lost pet was a bearer. Really highlighting how fucking dark this world was.

However, most side quests were just uninteresting. Go here and talk to this person, hunt down this monster or could you find my missing friend? At some point I just sort of stopped caring about the side quests and started spacing out during the excessive amount of dialogue they had, but I did do all of them in the end.

The game was also very cut-scene and dialogue heavy, but that didn’t really bother me as I did care about the story. Most of the time at least. I do feel like sometimes things dragged on for too long, or some things were too cinematic. Like the first “phase” of the final boss was literally just an interactive cut-scene where you get to press buttons sometimes. Like I said, the pacing of the story was just all over the place and there was a lot of fluff.

I’m not gonna say that FFXVI is a masterpiece 10/10, but it was one of the most enjoyable triple A games I’ve played in a long time. It’s a game that’ll divide people, you either really hate it or really love it for what it is. Some people expected a more RPG oriented game. And some are fine with the game being a medieval Devil May Cry with Dragonball Z boss battles. I might not be replaying this game any time soon, but this experience will stay with me for a long time.

[marcel-0]

OBRIGADO POR TEREM GOSTADO. Postamos a Part2 mais cedo, mas o horario continua o mesmo 20:00. Vlw Pessoal, não se esqueçam de deixar o like pra ajudar.

[hardcoregamer]

Review: Final Fantasy XVI: Echoes of the Fallen

Final Fantasy XVI: Echoes of the Fallen isn’t going to blow your socks off, but it does expand the lore ever so slightly and introduce a beloved franchise antagonist. This is essentially a two-to-three-hour long mission going from room to room, clearing out baddies and taking down raid-approved bosses. 

Keep reading!

[meugamer]

Análise Final Fantasy XVI: Clive Rosfield e o seu legado no PC

Ainda em dúvida se vai jogar ou não Final Fantasy XVI no PC? Confira nossa análise para saber se vale adentrar na jornada de Clive Rosfield. #review #gaming #finalfantasyxvi #squareenix #steam #pc #ffxvi #finalfantasy