Small thematic spoilers, nothing plot relevant or major
I’m not a huge Final Fantasy fan, but I enjoy the games enough to play through them and I love character action games. So when Square Enix announced a medieval character action take on Final Fantasy, I was pretty intrigued. Sadly that first trailer ended up being the only one I really liked, and the longer the marketing campaign went on the less and less invested I became as the game started to feel monotone and a little flat. Then the demo came out and nitpicks and all I became pretty hyped for the story and was really invested. I preloaded it, played it day one, and beat it in just over a week. And the results were … mixed to say the least.
Final Fantasy XVI is one of the weirdest games I’ve played in a long time, and not for the typical reasons you’d associate with the franchise. This isn’t a title that goes off the rails into crazy town to a point of no return, nor is any one plot twist completely irredeemable. Rather, instead it feels like a lot of what Square Enix marketed the game as isn’t actually delivered in any meaningful capacity, even early on in the game. That dark, mature, political drama with fantastic worldbuilding never really surfaces and not because it isn’t there, but because it’s not done well at all, and a lot of the writing involving any remotely mature topic is either stunted by actions in the game at best or straight up bad at worst.
The entire first act of the game is tied together by mere coincidences and characters chasing red herrings, which makes everything feel sloppy and haphazard. This becomes incredibly obvious when you map out the events of the first act: You meet a guy who happens to have your dog that you haven’t seen for over a decade then chase a guy because of your memories then realize it’s not the guy then the guy you met tells you to find the guy anyways to progress the story and go forward. It’s so awkward just how limp of a start to the story this is, but these are unironically supposed to be the plot threads that make you want to progress further through the game.
What’s worse, the first act is where a lot of the attempts at “mature” storytelling are in full effect, and it’s mostly terrible thanks in large part to characters not having any meaningful flaws or self-reflection. Clive isn’t a character with flaws, not really, because the entire premise of his trauma is that the traumatic event wasn’t under his control anyways. His guilt and remorse in the beginning of the game is valid and logical and a great theme to draw from, but the tonal clash between the writers both wanting you to feel bad for him as he accepts what he’s done while also reassuring you that he himself didn’t actually do anything wrong and it doesn’t represent his character in the slightest so it’s all ok and you can love him now is so absurd that it actually becomes irritating. This all culminates in a one-hour story dungeon centered around his self-actualization where the writers really want to earn the players pity through Clive’s self-hatred and acceptance, and it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever experienced in a game. What’s the point of creating an entire character arc about self-reflection if the self-reflection doesn’t say anything meaningful about the character? If the flaw isn’t really a flaw but a plot device? What’s worse, the entire arc is pretty much invalidated by the story anyways and made entirely unimportant. I’ve seen a lot of people say “Accept the Truth” is a highlight but really it’s just another hype anime moment and one of the worst written parts of the entire game. Sympathy porn is one hell of a drug.
In general consequences for actions are not this game's strongsuit, and it’s such a stark contrast from other games in the series. Just compare what the demo makes you think the game will be about and how much gravity and weight the situation has, to what it actually ends up being about and how little weight some of those events had. It’s a night and day difference. The game spends so much time sucking Clive’s royal sausage that some scenes feel entirely unconsidered. At one point, Clive literally meets the slaves that his dad owned and instead of taking the time to reflect upon the fact that hey maybe it was bad that my dad had slaves no matter how nice he was to them, he just kind of offhandedly says yeah you guys should be free or whatever. And look, I get it, the narrative establishes that his father is very sympathetic to bearers, but that excuse is the equivalent of shouting “Thomas Jefferson did nothing wrong”. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be something to think about and criticize especially from Clive’s perspective after all he’s been through as a branded. In fact, even that angle of the story is underdeveloped. This is a game where despite the entire point of the world being that magic users are an oppressed class of people, almost every major npc you meet in the first 15 hours is either an ally to your cause or an incredibly powerful magic user with lots of prestige, and Clive’s persecution amounts to what would be standard military service at that time anyway. Not the best worldbuilding if I may say so.
Luckily once the game devolves into Final Fantasy bullshit and anime politics the writing becomes increasingly better and more interesting, but it takes an entire act of the game to get up to that point and really I’m not sure if its just a case of lowered standards, you have to start thinking of Clive less as a Squall or a Cloud and more a medieval Batman. The second half gives the player a lot more room to breathe and it benefits so much from it. The slow development of you and your base as you build up relations with characters over time is incredibly strong, and while I didn’t care much about the cast in the beginning, by the end I cared about every character to some degree, even if I didn't love them. What really helps the story move along is the villains, which are a real highlight of the game, and while the conclusion to their characters is always a bit disappointing, they add so much to the game that its hard not to see them as a big success.
Unfortunately, even the second half has a new problem: filler. Lots and lots of filler. Final Fantasy XVI has no problem reminding you that the team that made it makes MMO timesinks by putting meaningless mandatory filler quests before each new mission, in the main story. This breaks the pacing of the game, especially since XVI is so cutscene heavy. It’s not enough to ruin what the story has going for it, but it does make it hard to want to play the game at times. The gameplay in general is luckily pretty strong to compensate, but that comes with some huge caveats. They’ve done a good job of transferring DMC combat into a Final Fantasy game, but it misses out on a lot of the subtleties that make Devil May Cry so great. Mainly that the enemies don’t really require different attack patterns or test any specific abilities. This can create a lot of repetition as most new bosses and enemies’ most unpredictable attacks are just another form of AOE that only requires a simple dodge. What this means is that any fight against a boss just boils down to dodge, attack, stagger, repeat, with not enough variety to last a 40 hour game. It’s great gameplay with a bad gameplay loop. You get new Eikons consistently enough to shake things up, and creating loadouts can be fun but some of them don’t feel particularly useful. And at times, I wish the controls were more tailor made for the kind of game this is. Instead of having style switching on the d-pad, you have it on the left trigger to make way for Torgal and potion commands which aren’t nearly as important to moment-to-moment gameplay as switching styles. Another example is that Garuda’s Deadly Embrace can start an aerial combo for bosses and mini-bosses, but not smaller enemies, which could have easily been alleviated by having the player hold down the button after the initial grab move, but instead the game would rather force you to use one of your two combo slots on an aerial starter. These flaws really stick out as the game trying to appear like more of a party-based RPG than it actually is, and it isn’t worth sacrificing character controls so heavily. Boss fights are mostly great standouts, though a lot of the most hyped up fights are also the worst and most monotonous, with very little real or engaging gameplay. These are the kind of fights that would absolutely be blasted in a Bayonetta game, but because they’re in a cinematic triple A package they gets tons of praise for spectacle alone. I don’t think the Eikon fights, specifically the movement and weight behind the Eikons, ever become quite as cathartic as the game wants them to be. Some of them are very cool, others were big misses for me.
Still, I have to commend how much better the game gets around this point. Even the sidequests improve more and more as the game goes on with some of them being legitimately great, though they never become consistent in quality. There are problems that plague the story through and through though. One area in particular that has gotten a lot of criticism is the writing of the female characters. To put it simply, while I think some of the criticism is maybe a bit harsh (Benedikta is probably the most three dimensional character in the game), there is a lot of problems with the way female characters are written. Jill is one of the least interesting characters in the main cast, and while I don’t think creating a quiet-type character is necessarily a bad thing, the fact that she has so little input in the story and literally ends her only arc with “Now, I can continue at your side with my head held high” is groan worthy. Great writing, Square. I also think the way that each villains’ arc ends is pretty disappointing, which becomes particularly egregious towards the end of the game when there isn’t even a story reason for their personalities to start deflating. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth when your last impression of certain characters is so underwhelming, and it impacts the final hours of the game pretty hard when villains start becoming completely generic.
That sort of sums up the entire Final Fantasy XVI experience. Every time it seems like the skies have cleared and it’s all smooth sailing ahead, another storm cloud approaches and ruins any momentum. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that has so many contradicting design choices. The sidequests in the late-game give meaningful rewards and important pieces of worldbuilding that recontextualize cutscenes, but why would you go out of your way to do sidequests when you’ve been trained by the game for dozens of hours by that point to recognize them as filler? The areas open up more and more as the game progresses, but why would you explore the overworld when content is bare and none of the rewards you get matter for the practically non-existent upgrade path? The game wants you to do hunt quests, but then doesn’t even tell you what materials you get from them on the off chance they might be useful. The games loadout system incentivizes thinking about Eikons and abilities in a similar manner to JRPG staples like the materia system, but then the game takes 20+ hours to really open up its own RPG mechanics to force the player to make meaningful decisions about what to use. And while the game is effective enough as a hero’s journey tale, the attempts at mature storytelling often clash hard and are poorly considered.
I mentioned in the beginning of the review that I’m not a huge Final Fantasy fan, but I still keep coming back to this franchise over and over again to play these games. That’s because for a few brief moments, Final Fantasy always manages to have some of the most inspired content you’ll ever see in a video game. Celes learning to live again, Barret reconciling his past, Vivi’s entire character arc, Vivi. With how impactful those moments are, it almost seems silly to complain about the consistency of a 35+ hour video game. Those moments are still here in XVI, but they’re more backloaded than ever before, and the characters aren’t strong enough to carry the quieter connective tissue that every RPG needs. It feels like a 20-25 hour game artificially lengthened to 40 hours, and more than ever there’s design decisions that I just can’t respect. The voice acting and cinematography are almost enough to carry it, and the way the story wraps up and connects to the beginning is phenomenal. But for the most part, when I think about how to write an effective video game story, Final Fantasy XVI will be the furthest Final Fantasy from my mind.
I’m not a huge Final Fantasy fan, but I enjoy the games enough to play through them and I love character action games. So when Square Enix announced a medieval character action take on Final Fantasy, I was pretty intrigued. Sadly that first trailer ended up being the only one I really liked, and the longer the marketing campaign went on the less and less invested I became as the game started to feel monotone and a little flat. Then the demo came out and nitpicks and all I became pretty hyped for the story and was really invested. I preloaded it, played it day one, and beat it in just over a week. And the results were … mixed to say the least.
Final Fantasy XVI is one of the weirdest games I’ve played in a long time, and not for the typical reasons you’d associate with the franchise. This isn’t a title that goes off the rails into crazy town to a point of no return, nor is any one plot twist completely irredeemable. Rather, instead it feels like a lot of what Square Enix marketed the game as isn’t actually delivered in any meaningful capacity, even early on in the game. That dark, mature, political drama with fantastic worldbuilding never really surfaces and not because it isn’t there, but because it’s not done well at all, and a lot of the writing involving any remotely mature topic is either stunted by actions in the game at best or straight up bad at worst.
The entire first act of the game is tied together by mere coincidences and characters chasing red herrings, which makes everything feel sloppy and haphazard. This becomes incredibly obvious when you map out the events of the first act: You meet a guy who happens to have your dog that you haven’t seen for over a decade then chase a guy because of your memories then realize it’s not the guy then the guy you met tells you to find the guy anyways to progress the story and go forward. It’s so awkward just how limp of a start to the story this is, but these are unironically supposed to be the plot threads that make you want to progress further through the game.
What’s worse, the first act is where a lot of the attempts at “mature” storytelling are in full effect, and it’s mostly terrible thanks in large part to characters not having any meaningful flaws or self-reflection. Clive isn’t a character with flaws, not really, because the entire premise of his trauma is that the traumatic event wasn’t under his control anyways. His guilt and remorse in the beginning of the game is valid and logical and a great theme to draw from, but the tonal clash between the writers both wanting you to feel bad for him as he accepts what he’s done while also reassuring you that he himself didn’t actually do anything wrong and it doesn’t represent his character in the slightest so it’s all ok and you can love him now is so absurd that it actually becomes irritating. This all culminates in a one-hour story dungeon centered around his self-actualization where the writers really want to earn the players pity through Clive’s self-hatred and acceptance, and it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever experienced in a game. What’s the point of creating an entire character arc about self-reflection if the self-reflection doesn’t say anything meaningful about the character? If the flaw isn’t really a flaw but a plot device? What’s worse, the entire arc is pretty much invalidated by the story anyways and made entirely unimportant. I’ve seen a lot of people say “Accept the Truth” is a highlight but really it’s just another hype anime moment and one of the worst written parts of the entire game. Sympathy porn is one hell of a drug.
In general consequences for actions are not this game's strongsuit, and it’s such a stark contrast from other games in the series. Just compare what the demo makes you think the game will be about and how much gravity and weight the situation has, to what it actually ends up being about and how little weight some of those events had. It’s a night and day difference. The game spends so much time sucking Clive’s royal sausage that some scenes feel entirely unconsidered. At one point, Clive literally meets the slaves that his dad owned and instead of taking the time to reflect upon the fact that hey maybe it was bad that my dad had slaves no matter how nice he was to them, he just kind of offhandedly says yeah you guys should be free or whatever. And look, I get it, the narrative establishes that his father is very sympathetic to bearers, but that excuse is the equivalent of shouting “Thomas Jefferson did nothing wrong”. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be something to think about and criticize especially from Clive’s perspective after all he’s been through as a branded. In fact, even that angle of the story is underdeveloped. This is a game where despite the entire point of the world being that magic users are an oppressed class of people, almost every major npc you meet in the first 15 hours is either an ally to your cause or an incredibly powerful magic user with lots of prestige, and Clive’s persecution amounts to what would be standard military service at that time anyway. Not the best worldbuilding if I may say so.
Luckily once the game devolves into Final Fantasy bullshit and anime politics the writing becomes increasingly better and more interesting, but it takes an entire act of the game to get up to that point and really I’m not sure if its just a case of lowered standards, you have to start thinking of Clive less as a Squall or a Cloud and more a medieval Batman. The second half gives the player a lot more room to breathe and it benefits so much from it. The slow development of you and your base as you build up relations with characters over time is incredibly strong, and while I didn’t care much about the cast in the beginning, by the end I cared about every character to some degree, even if I didn't love them. What really helps the story move along is the villains, which are a real highlight of the game, and while the conclusion to their characters is always a bit disappointing, they add so much to the game that its hard not to see them as a big success.
Unfortunately, even the second half has a new problem: filler. Lots and lots of filler. Final Fantasy XVI has no problem reminding you that the team that made it makes MMO timesinks by putting meaningless mandatory filler quests before each new mission, in the main story. This breaks the pacing of the game, especially since XVI is so cutscene heavy. It’s not enough to ruin what the story has going for it, but it does make it hard to want to play the game at times. The gameplay in general is luckily pretty strong to compensate, but that comes with some huge caveats. They’ve done a good job of transferring DMC combat into a Final Fantasy game, but it misses out on a lot of the subtleties that make Devil May Cry so great. Mainly that the enemies don’t really require different attack patterns or test any specific abilities. This can create a lot of repetition as most new bosses and enemies’ most unpredictable attacks are just another form of AOE that only requires a simple dodge. What this means is that any fight against a boss just boils down to dodge, attack, stagger, repeat, with not enough variety to last a 40 hour game. It’s great gameplay with a bad gameplay loop. You get new Eikons consistently enough to shake things up, and creating loadouts can be fun but some of them don’t feel particularly useful. And at times, I wish the controls were more tailor made for the kind of game this is. Instead of having style switching on the d-pad, you have it on the left trigger to make way for Torgal and potion commands which aren’t nearly as important to moment-to-moment gameplay as switching styles. Another example is that Garuda’s Deadly Embrace can start an aerial combo for bosses and mini-bosses, but not smaller enemies, which could have easily been alleviated by having the player hold down the button after the initial grab move, but instead the game would rather force you to use one of your two combo slots on an aerial starter. These flaws really stick out as the game trying to appear like more of a party-based RPG than it actually is, and it isn’t worth sacrificing character controls so heavily. Boss fights are mostly great standouts, though a lot of the most hyped up fights are also the worst and most monotonous, with very little real or engaging gameplay. These are the kind of fights that would absolutely be blasted in a Bayonetta game, but because they’re in a cinematic triple A package they gets tons of praise for spectacle alone. I don’t think the Eikon fights, specifically the movement and weight behind the Eikons, ever become quite as cathartic as the game wants them to be. Some of them are very cool, others were big misses for me.
Still, I have to commend how much better the game gets around this point. Even the sidequests improve more and more as the game goes on with some of them being legitimately great, though they never become consistent in quality. There are problems that plague the story through and through though. One area in particular that has gotten a lot of criticism is the writing of the female characters. To put it simply, while I think some of the criticism is maybe a bit harsh (Benedikta is probably the most three dimensional character in the game), there is a lot of problems with the way female characters are written. Jill is one of the least interesting characters in the main cast, and while I don’t think creating a quiet-type character is necessarily a bad thing, the fact that she has so little input in the story and literally ends her only arc with “Now, I can continue at your side with my head held high” is groan worthy. Great writing, Square. I also think the way that each villains’ arc ends is pretty disappointing, which becomes particularly egregious towards the end of the game when there isn’t even a story reason for their personalities to start deflating. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth when your last impression of certain characters is so underwhelming, and it impacts the final hours of the game pretty hard when villains start becoming completely generic.
That sort of sums up the entire Final Fantasy XVI experience. Every time it seems like the skies have cleared and it’s all smooth sailing ahead, another storm cloud approaches and ruins any momentum. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game that has so many contradicting design choices. The sidequests in the late-game give meaningful rewards and important pieces of worldbuilding that recontextualize cutscenes, but why would you go out of your way to do sidequests when you’ve been trained by the game for dozens of hours by that point to recognize them as filler? The areas open up more and more as the game progresses, but why would you explore the overworld when content is bare and none of the rewards you get matter for the practically non-existent upgrade path? The game wants you to do hunt quests, but then doesn’t even tell you what materials you get from them on the off chance they might be useful. The games loadout system incentivizes thinking about Eikons and abilities in a similar manner to JRPG staples like the materia system, but then the game takes 20+ hours to really open up its own RPG mechanics to force the player to make meaningful decisions about what to use. And while the game is effective enough as a hero’s journey tale, the attempts at mature storytelling often clash hard and are poorly considered.
I mentioned in the beginning of the review that I’m not a huge Final Fantasy fan, but I still keep coming back to this franchise over and over again to play these games. That’s because for a few brief moments, Final Fantasy always manages to have some of the most inspired content you’ll ever see in a video game. Celes learning to live again, Barret reconciling his past, Vivi’s entire character arc, Vivi. With how impactful those moments are, it almost seems silly to complain about the consistency of a 35+ hour video game. Those moments are still here in XVI, but they’re more backloaded than ever before, and the characters aren’t strong enough to carry the quieter connective tissue that every RPG needs. It feels like a 20-25 hour game artificially lengthened to 40 hours, and more than ever there’s design decisions that I just can’t respect. The voice acting and cinematography are almost enough to carry it, and the way the story wraps up and connects to the beginning is phenomenal. But for the most part, when I think about how to write an effective video game story, Final Fantasy XVI will be the furthest Final Fantasy from my mind.