El juego que lo inició todo... Y bueno, es un juego arcade de los 80's, así que de base la dificultad no es su punto fuerte, debido a que como el objetivo de las empresas en aquella época era sacarte hasta el último centavo, se encargaron de hacer el juego lo más frustrante e injusto posible para que llegar al final sea casi imposible, con enemigos cuya hit box llega a ser impredecible, con poco o nulo tiempo de reacción, obligándote a moverte constantemente con tal de ponerte en la posición adecuada para poder golpear a los enemigos (mayormente fallando), sumado a unos controles lentos y tocos de a ratos, y que los enemigos por momentos vienen en hordas, da como resultado una jugabilidad frustrante y muy mal planteada. Jugablemente es bastante endeble en cuanto al combate, ya que solo consiste en machacar el boton de golpe hasta que el enemigo caiga, de vez en cuando usando la habilidad de lanzarlos y que a veces aparece una espada como power up momentáneo para poder vencer a los enemigos más facilmente (ryu lleva una espada todo el rato pero solo la usa si consigue un power up, lmao). Los jefes no destacan realmente, más allá de ser más grandes y hacer más daño que el promedio de enemigos (por no mencionar que los jefes del último nivel te matan de un golpe), y bueno, lo más positivo que puedo decir de este juego es que su presentación es competente, el diseño de nivel intenta variar con algunos gimmicks para que la travesía no solo sea de ir de punto A a punto B, y su banda sonora es muy buena, pero en general es un juego muy de su época, y envejeció fatal.

Well, what was the point of all that?

I have been racking the question in my head occasionally for bordering on two months now.

There is enough "good stuff" in FFXVI to carry 5 different games on their own. The performances, especially Ben Starr's exceptional turn as clive, are pretty universally excellent. I like the characters, as dirtily done as basically any woman is by the plot. Soken's score is excellent and the sheer level of bombast in it's action scenes is top tier. It is in many ways, a game where a bunch of top-tier creatives are putting out their best work.

And I feel nothing!

Final Fantasy XVI might have a bunch of good shit in it, but it's overall creative direction is very poor. The first half of the game gets carried hard by being focused Clive, who is so brilliantly portrayed (and often, improvised) that when the focus of the game shifts to the larger scale conflicts, and some of the other good characters get less time, it just meanders around towards an eventual ending which might have been good had the back half of the game not just, completely failed to make compelling stakes and interweave this conflict with the characters at all well. This has been a problem with FF before - when the character focus basically departs from FF9's final disc the game limps to the line, for instance - but XVI feels like it has even less of a point and it's lull lasts the majority of the runtime.

This leads to the back half in particular becoming a game of awesome peaks - usually in the Eikon set pieces where it feels like all the talented people in development were actually on the same page - amid a sea of mediocrity, especially on retrospect. I am currently talking to a friend who's playing through FFX and even though it's not my favourite, seeing just a scant screenshot or two of "filler" scenes from Luca or Zanarkand, and I feel right there. With XVI it's been like a month and I had to google the name of the main antagonist of the second half, and that guy has like, a really obvious name too.

Another thing comes out of FFXVI in the end is how... careless it is, to put it nicely. The game's poor direction and failure to make it feel like it's trying to make a point or idk, be art, makes its borrowing of tropes from game of thrones feel all the more egregious. Carelessly throwing about implied sexual violence and its whole slavery thing without having, like, a point - at best it's just weird and uncomfortable and unneccessary, at worst its very suspect, lets just leave it at that. The game's treatment of women in particular ends up as an extremely bitter note that is probably a result of a piling up of uncocious biases rather than malice, but that's not good either!

This is to say nothing of the continually weak sidequests and questionable game structure, that it should have culled way more RPG elements, that its way too easy on the first run and more! But these are incidental problems in a game that just fails to make me feel anything when that was clearly what the intention was.

I love parts of XVI. I love Clive, Gav, Cid, Mid and Jill even if the game doesn't. I love the Eikon fights. I love the music. I can't love the game they're in, which in poor direction just wastes what good it's got.

It really should not be the case that Final Fantasy XVI, a game produced by a development team of legends with a nigh-infinite budget and all the time in the world should not be a legitimately more careless and harder to love game than Wanted: Dead, the follow up to devil's third where a lot of the creative decisions were made by an eccentric Swiss billionaire who has probably defrauded the russian state and really likes Stefanie Joosten. But here we are.

I had such high hopes for this game only to be completely disappointed.
It started incredibly well for me but just went downhill after maybe the first 8 hours. Horrible pacing, terrible side-quests, inexistent characters (minus two or three). It had so much potential, the setting is great and the combat is pretty ok too but then it goes nowhere.
By the end I was dreading my time with FFXVI, trying to finish it only to get more and more filler and random encounters that frustrated me more.
It had VERY HIGH highs, but as the game drags on it goes from excellent to just mediocre.