Reading over my review of FFXVI before I posted this, I realized that this is by far my longest review I've written and probably ever will write (ended up being exactly 2500 words when the most I've done before is a little more than 1000) so if you're not interested in reading that, I'll sum things up with one sentence. Final Fantasy XVI had the potential to be great, but it just ended up being boring.
Final Fantasy XVI is a perfectly serviceable video game. It doesn’t feel like it was hampered by external pressures, a tight development schedule, or constant rewrites and redesigns like the mess that was FFXV was. It doesn’t suffer from any game breaking bugs, egregious performance issues, or any of the other problems that most modern AAA titles release with. It feels like a (mostly) complete product that was what the development team wanted to make. They wanted to make a “dark” Final Fantasy game that’s heavily inspired by western dark fantasy with flashy action combat. The problem is that the game they wanted to make is, as a whole, incredibly dull. I’m not the kind of person to normally whine about the casualization of video games, but FFXVI’s core gameplay is so unbelievably basic when compared not just to the character action games it’s trying to emulate, but also to Square’s own catalog of action RPGS that it feels like a clear attempt to dumb things down for a larger audience. In the last five years, Square Enix has released Trials of Mana, NEO The World Ends with You, NieR Replicant ver. 1.22, two different Star Ocean games, both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, Stranger of Paradise, Harvestella, and Valkyrie Elysium. Dragon Quest Builders 2 as well if you want to count that as an action RPG. Go just a little further back and you have to add NieR Automata, The World Ends with You Final Remix, and Kingdom Hearts III + ReMind to that list. I have not played Valkyrie Elysium or Second Story R myself, but I have played all of the other games I listed for at least a few hours and every single one of them has a better combat system and at least a slightly more interesting plot than FFXVI. If the game was made by a different studio and pushed out as a new single player epic exclusively for the Sony Slopbox 5, then I’d probably look at it a bit more favorably when having to compare it more to games like Horizon or God of War than to NieR and TWEWY. That’s not the case, though. This is a flagship product from Square Enix. Square. Fucking. Enix. One of, if not the biggest names in RPGs and Japanese games as a whole spent years on this game and developed it alongside some absolutely fantastic titles, but somehow it ended up being overshadowed by their own back catalog and paling in comparison to its more direct inspirations.
On paper, FFXVI sounds rad as hell. You play as a guy who can turn into a giant fire monster in order to fight other people who turn into giant elemental beasts, swap between a bunch of different elemental powers, and even has a dog companion. You fight alongside characters like your childhood friend who wields both a rapier and the power of ice, a charming outlaw who smokes and can call down lightning at will, and several other less colorful companions. You’ll travel the world and destroy the very foundations of society in order to save mankind as a whole, all while fighting against an unjust system and freeing magic users who are seen as little more than monstrous tools by their own families. It’ll be a flashy action game with things like air juggling, perfect dodges and parries, and even a stagger system for larger enemies. The game definitely has potential, but it just doesn’t live up to that. Moreso on the gameplay side than the story side, so I’ll start by getting my story complaints out of the way first.
Starting with the characters, I actually like Clive as a protagonist. Yeah he’s kind of a standard brooding JRPG protagonist, but he has enough personality to keep things interesting and isn’t quite as aloof as someone like Squall or as generally disinterested as Noctis. Jill has a few decent moments, but just stands around or fights alongside Clive for most of the game. For being the main heroine, she has way less of an impact on the story than characters like Aerith, Rinoa, Yuna, and Garnet. Cid is great, though. I’m always a fan of that kind of dashing rogue character, but Cid steals the show whenever he’s around. Not only is he the driving force for almost all of the game’s first act, but his animation and voice just nail the whole devil-may-care persona he’s developed for himself while still making him come across as serious when he needs to be. Hugo Kupka is an asshole, but that makes for an effective villain so I didn’t mind it. Some of the side characters, especially the ones that populate the hideaway, are rather likeable, too. Everyone else just kind of sucks. Joshua is little more than a plot device for most of the game, serving to show up and either save Clive or dump lore on what the fuck Ultima is. Ultima himself is a pretty bland main villain, and even his mortal agents like the whole Waloed gang or Olivier are just boring. Anabella’s one-dimensional obsession with power and noble bloodlines is kind of funny, at least. The main plot itself also isn’t that bad, but it feels like the different arcs of the game (Finding the second Eikon of Fire, trying to save bearers, taking over as Cid and destroying the mothercrystals, Primogenesis, and finally the final showdown with Barnabas and Ultima) are kind of disconnected, especially everything that happened before the second timeskip. Clive pretty quickly just starts acting like he’s fine with having destroyed Phoenix Gate, killed hundreds of his own countrymen, and effectively having caused the downfall of Rosaria. As soon as Cid starts talking about how the mothercrystals are draining the aether from the world, any developments regarding the plight of the bearers is sidelined and shoehorned into side quests that are scattered throughout the game and then thrown in your face right before the ending. The same goes for most side plots such as the aether flood in Lostwing or Blackthorne’s whole character arc. Yeah they handwave this as needing to save the world itself before saving the people in it, but that’s a pretty bad excuse for dropping an entire core theme of your game in favor of leaning back on a somewhat standard FF elemental crystals and otherworldly evil plot. A lot of the Eikon fights also feel kind of shoehorned in, which is weird considering how heavily they were advertised. It’s almost like the fights were thought up first and the story was made as way to justify moving the player between them. Overall I thought it was fine, but a pretty average story overall. For a series that’s fondly remembered for its storytelling (I don’t think most FF stories are all that great, but they’re definitely a big reason as to why the series is as popular as it is) , that’s a pretty big failure.
If the gameplay was great, then it could make up for a kind of dull story, but sadly it isn’t. Clive is limited to a single sword combo, a few special attacks (a stinger, a charged attack, an air combo, and the ability to press triangle to shoot an incredibly weak magic shot at the enemy or to add little magic flourishes to your normal sword combo), using the d-pad to make Torgal attack an enemy, and his Eikonic abilities. He also gets a limit break which basically functions like a DT/transformation in other action games that changes your combo into an unintelligible mess of swirling sword strikes without making it feel that much stronger. You can equip up to three of these at once, and outside of changing the element of your magic (this never seems to matter but maybe there are a few enemies with actual weaknesses), they give you access to different special attacks on a cooldown timer and a different ability mapped to O. These range from basic things like Titan’s block/parry or Phoenix’s pseudo-teleport dash to some things that are actually kind of neat like Bahamut’s Megaflare that’s charged up by dodging attacks while stuck in a mostly-defenseless charge mode or how using Odin’s ability completely changes Clive’s combo (every Eikon should have done this IMO). You can also equip up to two special attacks on each Eikon, and even mix and match them once they’re mastered. They can kind of change the way you play, but the combat’s core flow never changes. For small enemies, you just wail on them with your basic combo and Eikonic abilities, and with big enemies you just chip away at their stagger bar until they get knocked down, then you cycle through all of your abilities on cooldown for the damage multiplier. There are no branching combo paths, no changes to Clive’s basic move set with different eikons, or even different weapon types, and there are really only three kinds of Eikonic abilities: ones that are attacks, ones that are counters, and ones that add a passive source of damage. Yeah things like Rising Flames and Upheaval may seem different, but the only reason you’ll ever choose one over the other is because one is on cooldown. Since the overwhelming majority of your damage comes from the stagger window where you can build up a damage multiplier, the fastest way to beat an enemy is to stagger it and then just use all of your Eikonic abilities in order, assuming they aren’t on cooldown. This becomes even more apparent if you decide to use the “ultimate” abilities for each Eikon like Flames of Rebirth or Gigaflare that have significantly longer cooldowns than the normal abilities. Because of these things, every encounter plays out exactly the same, regardless of what enemy you’re fighting. You can’t even really mess around with different moves or try to fight more stylishly. The only real change between normal fights and boss fights is that bosses have some QTEs scattered between them and get interrupted by cutscenes three or four times per fight. I have no problem with the skill floor being low in a game like this, but when every single fight is so similar and the skill ceiling is just about as low as the floor is, it makes for a boring experience. Eikon battles are a little more interesting since Ifrit actually has different combo finishers depending on how far into the base combo you are when you press triangle, but that mostly begs the question of why Clive couldn’t also have more than one way to end a combo. The combat would have been tolerable in a 10-15 hour game, but since a playthrough of XVI can take well over 60 hours if you decide to do most of the lackluster side content like I did, it’s nowhere near deep enough. Since there are also only the absolute basics of an RPG system underlying it, there’s not much of a wider reason to fight enemies other than because you find it fun.
One Eikon fight comes close to redeeming this game, however. A little after the halfway point, Clive fights Hugo Kupka, Titan’s Dominant. Kupka has been on a five-year long crusade against Clive since Clive killed his manipulative lover/one true love Benedikta Harman. Clive wins the first fight by cutting off Hugo’s hands, only to be interrupted by soldiers from the kingdom of Waloed before he can finish the job. They take Kupka back to his home and give him a pair of iron hands. This is an excuse to stretch out the Kupka arc of the game, move the actual fight with Titan from Rosalith to the middle of nowhere in Dhalmekia, and to have a scene where Kupka struggles to eat with his hands and throws a temper tantrum while yelling fuck. When Clive finally arrives, he finds Kupka having a schizophrenic episode where the naked ghost of Benedikta is convincing him to use the power of the mothercrystal to finally kill Clive. A pretty standard fight between Titan and Ifrit ensues, but when Ifrit is about to win, Titan finds and promptly eats the magical crack rock that is the heart of the mothercrystal. Turning into a giant tentacled monstrosity, Titan erupts from the earth and this theme starts playing.
https://youtu.be/7L_6atLQouc?si=g40adyLy3WVG776G
It is important to note that almost every track in the game up this point has been pretty standard fantasy fare (a few songs like the hideaway themes are actually quite nice but most of it is kind of forgettable, especially compared to other FF soundtracks). A fight ensues between Ifrit and the newly born Titan Lost that involves Ifrit running up the tentacles like a Sonic the Hedgehog boss fight, ripping one of them off, and plunging it into Titan Lost from above while yelling “Heads up, Hugo” The fight continues with Hugo now back in his normal Titan form and Clive/Ifrit using the power of the magical crack rock to create a pair of giant hands that he uses for a grand total of one attack. It’s pure chuuni nonsense, and it’s great. The fight isn’t particularly good, but the spectacle and sheer stupidity of it all makes it an absolute joy to play through. The fight with Bahamut comes close, as Clive and Joshua end up fusing to make a super Eikon of Fire that’s just Ifrit with some more spikes and some feathers coming off of him, then they chase Bahamut into space and stop it from using Zettaflare (made famous by Donald Duck during his heroic act of self-sacrifice in Kingdom Hearts III) and destroying the planet.
FFXVI could have benefited so much from having more of that stupidity in it, or otherwise embracing the goofier side of the series. It alco could have just been more fun to play, but considering this was made by the director of an MMO I don’t think that was ever really on the table. As it is now, the game is mostly just dull, and the story isn’t nearly good enough to make it worth sitting through. It’s much more competently made than the absolute mess that was FFXV, but that’s a particularly low bar to pass. It’s not comically shitty, but that also means it’s not the kind of trainwreck that’s interesting to play through. I feel like I SHOULD give this a 2.5/5 just to be consistent since I gave XV a 2 and XVI is definitely a better game, but I think I actually enjoy XV more than this despite its laundry list of flaws so they get the same score. There are other things like how the game makes you hold R2 to open a bunch of doors or how Clive is never shown to use any abilities other than Ifrit’s/Phoenix’s outside of gameplay until the final boss, or how the Ultima Prime fight is just a cutscene with some QTEs thrown in that I could say, but I feel like I’ve complained enough to get my point across.
I do really like how you hear Torgal from the speaker on the Dualsense whenever you pet him, though.
Final Fantasy XVI is a perfectly serviceable video game. It doesn’t feel like it was hampered by external pressures, a tight development schedule, or constant rewrites and redesigns like the mess that was FFXV was. It doesn’t suffer from any game breaking bugs, egregious performance issues, or any of the other problems that most modern AAA titles release with. It feels like a (mostly) complete product that was what the development team wanted to make. They wanted to make a “dark” Final Fantasy game that’s heavily inspired by western dark fantasy with flashy action combat. The problem is that the game they wanted to make is, as a whole, incredibly dull. I’m not the kind of person to normally whine about the casualization of video games, but FFXVI’s core gameplay is so unbelievably basic when compared not just to the character action games it’s trying to emulate, but also to Square’s own catalog of action RPGS that it feels like a clear attempt to dumb things down for a larger audience. In the last five years, Square Enix has released Trials of Mana, NEO The World Ends with You, NieR Replicant ver. 1.22, two different Star Ocean games, both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, Stranger of Paradise, Harvestella, and Valkyrie Elysium. Dragon Quest Builders 2 as well if you want to count that as an action RPG. Go just a little further back and you have to add NieR Automata, The World Ends with You Final Remix, and Kingdom Hearts III + ReMind to that list. I have not played Valkyrie Elysium or Second Story R myself, but I have played all of the other games I listed for at least a few hours and every single one of them has a better combat system and at least a slightly more interesting plot than FFXVI. If the game was made by a different studio and pushed out as a new single player epic exclusively for the Sony Slopbox 5, then I’d probably look at it a bit more favorably when having to compare it more to games like Horizon or God of War than to NieR and TWEWY. That’s not the case, though. This is a flagship product from Square Enix. Square. Fucking. Enix. One of, if not the biggest names in RPGs and Japanese games as a whole spent years on this game and developed it alongside some absolutely fantastic titles, but somehow it ended up being overshadowed by their own back catalog and paling in comparison to its more direct inspirations.
On paper, FFXVI sounds rad as hell. You play as a guy who can turn into a giant fire monster in order to fight other people who turn into giant elemental beasts, swap between a bunch of different elemental powers, and even has a dog companion. You fight alongside characters like your childhood friend who wields both a rapier and the power of ice, a charming outlaw who smokes and can call down lightning at will, and several other less colorful companions. You’ll travel the world and destroy the very foundations of society in order to save mankind as a whole, all while fighting against an unjust system and freeing magic users who are seen as little more than monstrous tools by their own families. It’ll be a flashy action game with things like air juggling, perfect dodges and parries, and even a stagger system for larger enemies. The game definitely has potential, but it just doesn’t live up to that. Moreso on the gameplay side than the story side, so I’ll start by getting my story complaints out of the way first.
Starting with the characters, I actually like Clive as a protagonist. Yeah he’s kind of a standard brooding JRPG protagonist, but he has enough personality to keep things interesting and isn’t quite as aloof as someone like Squall or as generally disinterested as Noctis. Jill has a few decent moments, but just stands around or fights alongside Clive for most of the game. For being the main heroine, she has way less of an impact on the story than characters like Aerith, Rinoa, Yuna, and Garnet. Cid is great, though. I’m always a fan of that kind of dashing rogue character, but Cid steals the show whenever he’s around. Not only is he the driving force for almost all of the game’s first act, but his animation and voice just nail the whole devil-may-care persona he’s developed for himself while still making him come across as serious when he needs to be. Hugo Kupka is an asshole, but that makes for an effective villain so I didn’t mind it. Some of the side characters, especially the ones that populate the hideaway, are rather likeable, too. Everyone else just kind of sucks. Joshua is little more than a plot device for most of the game, serving to show up and either save Clive or dump lore on what the fuck Ultima is. Ultima himself is a pretty bland main villain, and even his mortal agents like the whole Waloed gang or Olivier are just boring. Anabella’s one-dimensional obsession with power and noble bloodlines is kind of funny, at least. The main plot itself also isn’t that bad, but it feels like the different arcs of the game (Finding the second Eikon of Fire, trying to save bearers, taking over as Cid and destroying the mothercrystals, Primogenesis, and finally the final showdown with Barnabas and Ultima) are kind of disconnected, especially everything that happened before the second timeskip. Clive pretty quickly just starts acting like he’s fine with having destroyed Phoenix Gate, killed hundreds of his own countrymen, and effectively having caused the downfall of Rosaria. As soon as Cid starts talking about how the mothercrystals are draining the aether from the world, any developments regarding the plight of the bearers is sidelined and shoehorned into side quests that are scattered throughout the game and then thrown in your face right before the ending. The same goes for most side plots such as the aether flood in Lostwing or Blackthorne’s whole character arc. Yeah they handwave this as needing to save the world itself before saving the people in it, but that’s a pretty bad excuse for dropping an entire core theme of your game in favor of leaning back on a somewhat standard FF elemental crystals and otherworldly evil plot. A lot of the Eikon fights also feel kind of shoehorned in, which is weird considering how heavily they were advertised. It’s almost like the fights were thought up first and the story was made as way to justify moving the player between them. Overall I thought it was fine, but a pretty average story overall. For a series that’s fondly remembered for its storytelling (I don’t think most FF stories are all that great, but they’re definitely a big reason as to why the series is as popular as it is) , that’s a pretty big failure.
If the gameplay was great, then it could make up for a kind of dull story, but sadly it isn’t. Clive is limited to a single sword combo, a few special attacks (a stinger, a charged attack, an air combo, and the ability to press triangle to shoot an incredibly weak magic shot at the enemy or to add little magic flourishes to your normal sword combo), using the d-pad to make Torgal attack an enemy, and his Eikonic abilities. He also gets a limit break which basically functions like a DT/transformation in other action games that changes your combo into an unintelligible mess of swirling sword strikes without making it feel that much stronger. You can equip up to three of these at once, and outside of changing the element of your magic (this never seems to matter but maybe there are a few enemies with actual weaknesses), they give you access to different special attacks on a cooldown timer and a different ability mapped to O. These range from basic things like Titan’s block/parry or Phoenix’s pseudo-teleport dash to some things that are actually kind of neat like Bahamut’s Megaflare that’s charged up by dodging attacks while stuck in a mostly-defenseless charge mode or how using Odin’s ability completely changes Clive’s combo (every Eikon should have done this IMO). You can also equip up to two special attacks on each Eikon, and even mix and match them once they’re mastered. They can kind of change the way you play, but the combat’s core flow never changes. For small enemies, you just wail on them with your basic combo and Eikonic abilities, and with big enemies you just chip away at their stagger bar until they get knocked down, then you cycle through all of your abilities on cooldown for the damage multiplier. There are no branching combo paths, no changes to Clive’s basic move set with different eikons, or even different weapon types, and there are really only three kinds of Eikonic abilities: ones that are attacks, ones that are counters, and ones that add a passive source of damage. Yeah things like Rising Flames and Upheaval may seem different, but the only reason you’ll ever choose one over the other is because one is on cooldown. Since the overwhelming majority of your damage comes from the stagger window where you can build up a damage multiplier, the fastest way to beat an enemy is to stagger it and then just use all of your Eikonic abilities in order, assuming they aren’t on cooldown. This becomes even more apparent if you decide to use the “ultimate” abilities for each Eikon like Flames of Rebirth or Gigaflare that have significantly longer cooldowns than the normal abilities. Because of these things, every encounter plays out exactly the same, regardless of what enemy you’re fighting. You can’t even really mess around with different moves or try to fight more stylishly. The only real change between normal fights and boss fights is that bosses have some QTEs scattered between them and get interrupted by cutscenes three or four times per fight. I have no problem with the skill floor being low in a game like this, but when every single fight is so similar and the skill ceiling is just about as low as the floor is, it makes for a boring experience. Eikon battles are a little more interesting since Ifrit actually has different combo finishers depending on how far into the base combo you are when you press triangle, but that mostly begs the question of why Clive couldn’t also have more than one way to end a combo. The combat would have been tolerable in a 10-15 hour game, but since a playthrough of XVI can take well over 60 hours if you decide to do most of the lackluster side content like I did, it’s nowhere near deep enough. Since there are also only the absolute basics of an RPG system underlying it, there’s not much of a wider reason to fight enemies other than because you find it fun.
One Eikon fight comes close to redeeming this game, however. A little after the halfway point, Clive fights Hugo Kupka, Titan’s Dominant. Kupka has been on a five-year long crusade against Clive since Clive killed his manipulative lover/one true love Benedikta Harman. Clive wins the first fight by cutting off Hugo’s hands, only to be interrupted by soldiers from the kingdom of Waloed before he can finish the job. They take Kupka back to his home and give him a pair of iron hands. This is an excuse to stretch out the Kupka arc of the game, move the actual fight with Titan from Rosalith to the middle of nowhere in Dhalmekia, and to have a scene where Kupka struggles to eat with his hands and throws a temper tantrum while yelling fuck. When Clive finally arrives, he finds Kupka having a schizophrenic episode where the naked ghost of Benedikta is convincing him to use the power of the mothercrystal to finally kill Clive. A pretty standard fight between Titan and Ifrit ensues, but when Ifrit is about to win, Titan finds and promptly eats the magical crack rock that is the heart of the mothercrystal. Turning into a giant tentacled monstrosity, Titan erupts from the earth and this theme starts playing.
https://youtu.be/7L_6atLQouc?si=g40adyLy3WVG776G
It is important to note that almost every track in the game up this point has been pretty standard fantasy fare (a few songs like the hideaway themes are actually quite nice but most of it is kind of forgettable, especially compared to other FF soundtracks). A fight ensues between Ifrit and the newly born Titan Lost that involves Ifrit running up the tentacles like a Sonic the Hedgehog boss fight, ripping one of them off, and plunging it into Titan Lost from above while yelling “Heads up, Hugo” The fight continues with Hugo now back in his normal Titan form and Clive/Ifrit using the power of the magical crack rock to create a pair of giant hands that he uses for a grand total of one attack. It’s pure chuuni nonsense, and it’s great. The fight isn’t particularly good, but the spectacle and sheer stupidity of it all makes it an absolute joy to play through. The fight with Bahamut comes close, as Clive and Joshua end up fusing to make a super Eikon of Fire that’s just Ifrit with some more spikes and some feathers coming off of him, then they chase Bahamut into space and stop it from using Zettaflare (made famous by Donald Duck during his heroic act of self-sacrifice in Kingdom Hearts III) and destroying the planet.
FFXVI could have benefited so much from having more of that stupidity in it, or otherwise embracing the goofier side of the series. It alco could have just been more fun to play, but considering this was made by the director of an MMO I don’t think that was ever really on the table. As it is now, the game is mostly just dull, and the story isn’t nearly good enough to make it worth sitting through. It’s much more competently made than the absolute mess that was FFXV, but that’s a particularly low bar to pass. It’s not comically shitty, but that also means it’s not the kind of trainwreck that’s interesting to play through. I feel like I SHOULD give this a 2.5/5 just to be consistent since I gave XV a 2 and XVI is definitely a better game, but I think I actually enjoy XV more than this despite its laundry list of flaws so they get the same score. There are other things like how the game makes you hold R2 to open a bunch of doors or how Clive is never shown to use any abilities other than Ifrit’s/Phoenix’s outside of gameplay until the final boss, or how the Ultima Prime fight is just a cutscene with some QTEs thrown in that I could say, but I feel like I’ve complained enough to get my point across.
I do really like how you hear Torgal from the speaker on the Dualsense whenever you pet him, though.