When a new FF mainline game drops, its hard to look away. This old franchise's only constant is that it keeps changing, and its always exciting to see whether this is truly the one for you. Took me a while to beat this game, but I can safely say that is is indeed for me.
Lets start with the story. What impressed me the most about it is how well it satisfies on both fronts of main and side stories. The main story has a rollercoaster-esque pace to it, with slow-ish buildups leading into the incredibly epic Eikon fights, where most of the biggest story revelations usually occur in close proximity, and it almost always delivers. Meanwhile, the side quests are nothing to write home about gameplay-wise, but the stories they tell successfully fleshes out many topics and themes that the main quest only hinted at or briefly showed. How cruel people can act towards another perceived to be lesser beings, the importance of fighting for the people you love, using your qualities for the good of everybody, and so on. Aided by the ingenious Active Time Lore system, allowing you to view supplementary information about the current story scene in a brisk manner, it's hard not to be instantly and continuously invested in FFXVI's dark but hopeful fantasy.
There are definitely kinks in the story's armor. The quality of the facial and body animations in most of the game's dialogues are passable at average, but the strength of its writing and voice acting are more than enough to compensate. The game nicely ramps up the amount of accessible side quest early on, but especially in the third act, the amount of side quests being thrown at you can mess with the main's story pacing in unnecessarily head scratching ways. If you're looking to do all the side quests like I did, its very much worth it since most of the side quest arcs have satisfying endings (shoutout to Jill and Torgal's quests, almost made me cry), but I feel that the pacing can be done better. I need not to look far behind, since last year's GoW Ragnarok achieved much better synergy between its main and side stories, although Ragnarok has less side content to grapple with.
You can't have a long story RPG without a cast of characters to fall in love with (or hate, oh boy we certainly got those), and XVI delivers with flying colors. Near the end of the game, there's a simple panning shot of all your allies in one place, and the fact that those few seconds almost drove me to tears just goes to show how much I care about these people. Hard to pick favorites but Jill, Gav, Byron and Cid are my instinctive picks. I also think that Clive is probably one of the best examples of the "punished main character" trope, he sincerely believes that his dream is possible, and that makes his every action much louder.
Moving on to the combat, I think it is quite successful on many layers. On the surface, the Devil May Cry-esque action is eye catching, intense, and hard-hitting. The act of playing it gets progressively more exciting as you unlock more of Clive's full potential, and you get to play with a wide variety of abilities that can be suited to your sensibilities. The common enemy types are fine enough, but the game absolutely delivers in the minibosses, monster hunts and bosses that you'll fight. And in its insides, the Eikon ability point and ability loadout systems manages to both limit the player to make it interesting and challenging, but also offer a substantial amount of freedom to thoughtfully maximize that which is available. I find it incredibly satisfying to discover how the new abilities interact with what I already have, and how I can "gain the system" to make my combination ideas possible. Being allowed to mix and match abilities of different Eikons and resetting your upgrade abilities at any time are some of the smartest game design decisions in this game.
The combat also has a few holes on it. For instance, its quite disappointing that the game never really fleshed out its air-to-air combat, since there's not a lot of moves and abilities that can support it, not to mention the lack of flying enemies other than the weak grunts. It gives me the impression that they chose to stop expanding the air-to-air combat in the middle of its development for whatever reason. There's also the problem of the common enemy grunts getting progressively less exciting to deal with as you get stronger, but the game also throws more tougher enemies at you later on, so it's almost balanced out. I also think that the progression and customization of your equipment and accessories can be done in a much more interesting way, it's pretty linear and basic for the most part. I wanted more accessories/equipment which changes a crucial aspect of the combat, like the Berserker's Ring, which temporarily gives you a different set of normal attacks after a perfect dodge. This could also be tied to the game's economy, where I had almost 400k in gil by the end of the game and there's nothing interesting to spent them on. It would be nice if I can buy some crazy accessories with only a lot of cash.
Now, lets talk about some other things before this review gets much longer. It's not exactly the most technically impressive game around, but I adore how beautiful many of the game's environments are. I only wished that we get to see more of the man-made landmarks outside of story missions, and I also thought that the weather got a bit too gloomy later on. The soundtrack is just so good, Soken-san killed it, I'm especially impressed by how much longetivity he squeezed from the main combat music motifs. And I think its wonderful how often the game updates NPC dialogues to respond to the most recent happenings in the world, even after side quests.
For its every single stumbling step, which are not few, FFXVI beautifully glides in many other areas, and I can't help but be mesmerized by what it has achieved. What you have here is a world filled with lovable allies, awe-inspiring rivals, and dark history; all connected by flashy combat and effective writing. There are a handful things in FFXVI that I feel mixed about, but ultimately it triumphs in its quest to deliver a meaty, heart pumping action RPG. This is easily my favorite game of the PS5 generation so far.
Lets start with the story. What impressed me the most about it is how well it satisfies on both fronts of main and side stories. The main story has a rollercoaster-esque pace to it, with slow-ish buildups leading into the incredibly epic Eikon fights, where most of the biggest story revelations usually occur in close proximity, and it almost always delivers. Meanwhile, the side quests are nothing to write home about gameplay-wise, but the stories they tell successfully fleshes out many topics and themes that the main quest only hinted at or briefly showed. How cruel people can act towards another perceived to be lesser beings, the importance of fighting for the people you love, using your qualities for the good of everybody, and so on. Aided by the ingenious Active Time Lore system, allowing you to view supplementary information about the current story scene in a brisk manner, it's hard not to be instantly and continuously invested in FFXVI's dark but hopeful fantasy.
There are definitely kinks in the story's armor. The quality of the facial and body animations in most of the game's dialogues are passable at average, but the strength of its writing and voice acting are more than enough to compensate. The game nicely ramps up the amount of accessible side quest early on, but especially in the third act, the amount of side quests being thrown at you can mess with the main's story pacing in unnecessarily head scratching ways. If you're looking to do all the side quests like I did, its very much worth it since most of the side quest arcs have satisfying endings (shoutout to Jill and Torgal's quests, almost made me cry), but I feel that the pacing can be done better. I need not to look far behind, since last year's GoW Ragnarok achieved much better synergy between its main and side stories, although Ragnarok has less side content to grapple with.
You can't have a long story RPG without a cast of characters to fall in love with (or hate, oh boy we certainly got those), and XVI delivers with flying colors. Near the end of the game, there's a simple panning shot of all your allies in one place, and the fact that those few seconds almost drove me to tears just goes to show how much I care about these people. Hard to pick favorites but Jill, Gav, Byron and Cid are my instinctive picks. I also think that Clive is probably one of the best examples of the "punished main character" trope, he sincerely believes that his dream is possible, and that makes his every action much louder.
Moving on to the combat, I think it is quite successful on many layers. On the surface, the Devil May Cry-esque action is eye catching, intense, and hard-hitting. The act of playing it gets progressively more exciting as you unlock more of Clive's full potential, and you get to play with a wide variety of abilities that can be suited to your sensibilities. The common enemy types are fine enough, but the game absolutely delivers in the minibosses, monster hunts and bosses that you'll fight. And in its insides, the Eikon ability point and ability loadout systems manages to both limit the player to make it interesting and challenging, but also offer a substantial amount of freedom to thoughtfully maximize that which is available. I find it incredibly satisfying to discover how the new abilities interact with what I already have, and how I can "gain the system" to make my combination ideas possible. Being allowed to mix and match abilities of different Eikons and resetting your upgrade abilities at any time are some of the smartest game design decisions in this game.
The combat also has a few holes on it. For instance, its quite disappointing that the game never really fleshed out its air-to-air combat, since there's not a lot of moves and abilities that can support it, not to mention the lack of flying enemies other than the weak grunts. It gives me the impression that they chose to stop expanding the air-to-air combat in the middle of its development for whatever reason. There's also the problem of the common enemy grunts getting progressively less exciting to deal with as you get stronger, but the game also throws more tougher enemies at you later on, so it's almost balanced out. I also think that the progression and customization of your equipment and accessories can be done in a much more interesting way, it's pretty linear and basic for the most part. I wanted more accessories/equipment which changes a crucial aspect of the combat, like the Berserker's Ring, which temporarily gives you a different set of normal attacks after a perfect dodge. This could also be tied to the game's economy, where I had almost 400k in gil by the end of the game and there's nothing interesting to spent them on. It would be nice if I can buy some crazy accessories with only a lot of cash.
Now, lets talk about some other things before this review gets much longer. It's not exactly the most technically impressive game around, but I adore how beautiful many of the game's environments are. I only wished that we get to see more of the man-made landmarks outside of story missions, and I also thought that the weather got a bit too gloomy later on. The soundtrack is just so good, Soken-san killed it, I'm especially impressed by how much longetivity he squeezed from the main combat music motifs. And I think its wonderful how often the game updates NPC dialogues to respond to the most recent happenings in the world, even after side quests.
For its every single stumbling step, which are not few, FFXVI beautifully glides in many other areas, and I can't help but be mesmerized by what it has achieved. What you have here is a world filled with lovable allies, awe-inspiring rivals, and dark history; all connected by flashy combat and effective writing. There are a handful things in FFXVI that I feel mixed about, but ultimately it triumphs in its quest to deliver a meaty, heart pumping action RPG. This is easily my favorite game of the PS5 generation so far.