For all the lip service paid to Game of Thrones through the marketing, aesthetic, and tone of Final Fantasy XVI, there is very little DNA shared between the two at their respective cores. While the bevy of options to explore the lore entries written for the game are interesting reads, they are seldom needed to understand the events of the game’s world. Conflicts happen isolated from one another, ever following the protagonist and bending to the needs of his story. This is not a knock on the game’s story, but it is emblematic of the fact that it is exactly what the title claims. For better and for worse, the latest entry in the series that refuses to stagnate is much more Final Fantasy than its creators and online discourse would lead you to believe. While at several points the attempts to forge a new identity clash with the story’s tendency to err toward series tropes, the end product nonetheless succeeds in almost all of what it sets out to do. The fact is that one will be far more satisfied with this game by expecting a reaffirmation of what is a known love rather than a reinvention.
Despite all of this, the first half of this game will fool you into thinking that a reinvention is happening before your eyes. The story’s tight focus on the branded, magick, and the devastation wrought on the world by the mothercrystals is a sharp left turn for the series, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. Much of the world is convincingly hostile toward Clive’s visible brand, and this is communicated expertly through the sidequests. While nothing mechanically interesting is ever asked of the player, many of them are successful in their goal to either endear or disgust. The hook of Clive’s initial journey, as it shifts from revenge to self-loathing to hero, is a path that follows naturally from the world he exists in. Cid (who is easily the series’ best version of the character) passes on to Clive one of the series’ most defining themes, and what identifies this game as Final Fantasy to its bones: that there is never enough suffering in the world to give up fighting for a better one. In the transition to Clive falling into this archetype though, the game’s narrative becomes strangely unfocused. Once five years are skipped over, the game plays catchup to try and please its many audiences. Suddenly it’s Jill’s time to get some (weak) depth to her character, and then there’s an invasion of the Crystalline Dominion (which so little information is given about that I was begging for Vivian to give a PowerPoint dedicated entirely to it), and then Barnabas finally awakens from his apparent slumber to have an epic faceoff against Clive. This all works for the second half of the game, as Ultima eventually drags the narrative firmly into JRPG territory, but it clashes harshly against the first half as the world becomes centered almost entirely around Clive and the other Dominants. This is not a slight against JRPGs as a genre. Much of the discussion around this game’s narrative and its use of the genre’s tropes have been emblematic of the continued blight (lol) that western games journalism has inflicted upon Japanese Game Discourse. The issue here is that on several levels, it feels like there was some assent to this bashing of the genre as “too weird” that this series was arguably subject to the most of any. In this way, the game is somewhat a victim of its own indecision—unwilling to fully commit to the western aesthetic that it clearly adapts or the tropes that its own series trailblazed.
This all seems very overtly negative for a game that I largely love the hell out of. The Eikon fights are a stroke of genius that come at the intersection of Shounen pathos, ludonarrative synergy, and genuine “next-gen-ness” on a level that this game broke the glass ceiling of. Each one ups the ante, making you question how the next one can possibly be better, achieving it before your eyes, and making you feel like a fool for ever believing that what you did 5 hours ago was the coolest thing that you had, up to that point, experienced. The only aspect that isn’t continually ratcheted up throughout the game is the music which, from the very first fight to the last, is excellent. In a series that has the most impossible expectations for music set for itself, Soken will knock your socks off and convince you that he is probably the best composer in the game right now. It’s his mastery over a litany of genres that rockets this soundtrack to the upper echelons of the series’ offerings. Motifs dance through these genres, making Titan’s theme a pulse-pounding J-Rock riff at one point that flows seamlessly into the triumphant chants that the game turns to for its flourishes. While they never becoming difficult in the slightest, these fights expertly communicate Clive’s growing mastery of his Ifrit form, as you go from a hulking and unwieldy kaiju to an elegant fire-dancer.
By no means am I an expert on action combat, but this game’s flavor of DMC-lite kept me satisfied for most of the experience. Continually getting new Eikons to overhaul your style of play injected a lot of life into a fundamentally simple affair. I’m sure an optimal mix of stagger meter burn and pure damage has been found already, but plugging in a new ability into your existing set and reaching a new level of efficiency was good fun. The only thing clawing at this fun is the enemy variety, which is the most puzzling thing about this game. The first half is exploding with unique enemy types. I was shocked to find that nearly every new area offered a unique set of enemies that, although way too passive, livened up encounters a great deal. However, once the second half rolls around, the developers seemed to be content with reusing old enemies to the point of inducing groans every time I saw another Large Man with an Axe. In a strange way, this turned the combat into an Opus Magnum/Factorio-like, where all my effort was being poured into figuring out the path of least resistance to the Enemies Defeated screen. If you are an action game head, you already knew this game’s combat wasn’t for you, but I think any player would benefit from going in with the expectation to simply enjoy the spectacle of it all.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this game is its characters. This is less so directed at the way they are written as a whole, but at the way they are utilized. The game’s insistence that, apart from Jill and Torgal (who doesn’t speak), Clive be nearly constantly alone, left me begging for more interactions with these people. The idea that being surrounded by trusted friends and allies will better you as a human being is a distinctly Final Fantasy one. One of this game’s core themes is that Clive cannot save the world by himself, and yet the game presents very few gameplay arguments against that. I’m not asking for a controllable party, or even a robust collection of party interactions, but a steady party at all would have sufficed. Byron was sorely needed as a mood lightener in many parts of the game that he is absent from. Every section of the game with Joshua left me wanting so much more of his unrepentant optimism. In many ways this conspicuous lack of Joshua throughout the second half made the ending hit me harder (read: when Joshua said “Thank you for being my brother” I sobbed uncontrollably), but I’m not sure that was intended in that specific aspect. Being relegated to Jill, whose character goes through the fraught states of “I need closure” to “I now have closure” with the subtlety and heart of a Persona 5 arc, is unacceptable for any game let alone a game in this series. For all the effort and soul that was clearly put into this game by everyone involved, I just wish it was more confident in itself. 16 is at its best when it’s leaning entirely into its own spin on the roots that it grew from: loving someone, experiencing a beautiful world, and saving it from a god because you felt that love viscerally, and you saw beauty first-hand.