#i'm sure mold horses are good individual bois

[soliloquy-unforgotten]

Final Fantasy XVI - Martyrs, Individualism, and other Review-like Stuff (Spoilers!)

As one might suppose by the title, I've recently finished Final Fantasy XVI. Playing the game I had a lot of Thoughts, which isn't uncommon, and happened to encourage me to create this little blog for me to store these thoughts for posterity. Therefore, while I'm not yet sure who this introduction is even for, at least it's over. Onwards!

I will start this by getting the easy part out, which I have prior dubbed "the Review-like Stuff" - how "good" are the game's, y'know, things. I'll be pretty direct on this paragraph: visually and musically, the game is a whole meal. The scenarios look amazing, the big magical effects look, well, big and magical (in the best way! also very colorful). I just don't dig the character design all that much, personally, but it does deliver on the sort of realistic medieval fantasy air they set out to deliver - and hey, Jill's clothes actually look like functional female fighting clothes! Progress, I suppose. And the music, of course, delivers just as well - Masayoshi Soken, not content with putting out banger after banger for Final Fantasy XIV (the critically-acclaimed MMORPG, etc) decided to grace XVI with a series of adequately epic-sounding tracks, going as far as to reference musical motifs from prior entries in the series and toss us franchise fans some delicious treats. Yum.

Alright, onto the meat of what I actually wanted to write here - the story and gameplay. I'm gonna bundle both of these up because I think they're intertwined to an extent - or at least, some of the criticism I have about the gameplay is a direct product of how they wrote the story. But I suppose I might be putting the cart before the horses here so let's take a step back.

When playing FF XVI, you control a single character - Clive Rosfield, Ifrit's Dominant and certified Chosen One. You get other companions fighting alongside you here and there, and for most of it you're also accompanied by bestest of boys Torgal, but you never get to control any of them, they have no customization in terms of equipment, and actually the effect they have on gameplay is very minor - mostly making it less annoying to fight large hordes of enemies. So much so that you also never choose who's tagging along, they just join or leave the party automatically according to the story beat.

I recall being a bit disappointed when the previous entry in the franchise, XV, came out - because I had three buddies with me for the journey but I never got to play with them, only edit their equips and perform some dual techs with them during fights. XVI seemed to double down on this departure from party member control, straying even further from the molds of a party-oriented game and coming closer to the likes of Devil May Cry, the Witcher, both of the Nier games, and so on. I should note the influence of the first I cited is quite noticeable.

"Alas, Daka, it could not be helped!", I hear you say. "For Clive is one of only eight people in the world who can freely use magic, AND even if he parties up other Dominants, he'll drain their power eventually! So it can't be helped!". Well, voice in my head who is trying to predict an argument, that's still just a narrative choice they made. Had they decided to make it a party-oriented game, they could easily have written the story in a way that doesn't have Clive strip other Dominants of their power (and even that's kind of finnicky, because Jill is still added to the party for the DLC, far after Clive absorbed her Eikon), or just strip them of the power to Prime but leave their magical ability intact. Or have his fellow party members all be non-Dominants like Gav. Or have them share Clive's power through some sort of covenant, like if he could donate them the power of any Eikons he's not currently using (you do end up with five more Eikons than you can wield in combat, after all).

All this to say that they made a very conscious choice in making Clive's journey be so solitary - he wields the power and bears the burden for it, since being magical in this setting comes with a side effect of slowly turning into stone. Even when he has his (long overdue and very awkwardly paced) romantic development with Jill, she doesn't even try to dissuade him from bearing all of the burden himself - just reassured him that she believed in him and would be by his side to the end. Kind of bold words when you're speeding your new boyfriend along the route of becoming an Ifrit-shaped piece of rock, but it sort of cements the narrative that Clive is the very special Chosen One, and it's useless to try to relieve him of his burden - best to simply give him emotional support when necessary and help in whatever ways a mere mortal can.

Eventually, the narrative reveals that what's been killing the land all along (through a drying out of all life called the Blight) is the usage of magic itself. It's been happening ever since a different race discovered magic, ages ago, in what one may call an Original Sin (!) of sorts. Clive's battle is to, ironically, amass as much of the capacity to use magic without crystals into himself as possible, to then destroy humanity's creator, who both discovered magic and gave humans the means to wield it, and finally use all this accumulated power to destroy the ("sinful") practice of magic and die in the process, overwhelmed by the weight of this feat.

So our dear protagonist is, to recap, a Chosen One, born to be the physical vessel of a godlike being, and he sacrifices himself to cleanse humanity of the sins that are plaguing them. You know who else reportedly did that? That's right, baby: it's Jesus Christ.

Did I write several paragraphs just to arrive at this allegory? Perhaps. But pointing out the symbolic connections between Clive and ol' J.C. is important to eventually arrive at my main argument regarding FFXVI and its place in the franchise: it is very Western. It is prominently influenced by an occidental zeitgeist and ideology (which are indissociable from Christianity as a cultural system of rules and values). This manifests in the narrative itself, yes, which also has a big focus on defending "free will" and rejecting what sort of amounts to what one might describe as, uh, spiritual communism; but it also manifests in the gameplay itself, which is both emblematic of this narrative (via having you control a solitary martyr upon whose shoulders solely relies success or failure), but also more literally influenced by the West - with the gameplay mechanics and quest dialogue structure more closely resembling western action RPGs than any other game in the franchise.

My intent here was not to say FFXVI doesn't have any community-oriented themes (many sidequest chains are explicitly about that), but to point out the ways in which the tone and feel of the game reflect certain staple Western values - individuality most of all - beyond the simple fact of the game's European fantasy setting. I'm also not saying that's a bad thing, just that it is a thing, and these are some of the elaborations I arrived at when I tried to ask myself questions like "why does this feel the way it does?". I'm also very particular about not saying things like "this feels or doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game" because this is a franchise that loves nothing more than reinventing itself, and XVI was but the latest one to do just that. And for what it's worth, the game was great! I had a blast. I have my nitpicks about it but, hey, none of them was a dealbreaker.

...I do wanna have a party again for the next one though.