Sunk about twenty hours into FF16 and was so disgusted by the thing that I actually found it in my heart to forgive this game, my previous most-hated Final Fantasy, and play it one more time. So vivid! Remember when there was actual conceptual rigor behind these game worlds and not just five or six setpieces glued together with a bunch of samey connective tissue?
It's obviously a smokescreen for this game's whopper of a central metaphor - every Final Fantasy since 6 is fundamentally about its own existence, and this game's thrice-underlined iterations on PURPOSE and CREATION drive it home - and the fact that when your cast's shared dilemma is "we don't know what our goal is," you can push them around wherever and however you want without any real need to adhere to the basics of character-driven storytelling. No need to revisit the hallway simulator complaints, but they miss the point of the game: the first half grants us no freedom because while Lightning et. al. are on Cocoon they have no freedom. They simply stumble into one beautiful locale or flashy disaster after another until they realize they have a "choice" (such as a video game story allows it) and escape to the virgin open-world terrain of Gran Pulse.
I respect and understand the approach, but I don't love it. Counter to conventional wisdom, I think the game is stronger in the first half. Cashing out the story's adrenal momentum to focus on the combat does neither any favors, and it's only once you've been given free rein over the RPG systems that you realize how shallow they are. You control only a small portion of what occurs during combat, much of which is relegated to Auto-Battle anyway, while several other semi-random variables tick away in the background. It rarely feels as if any meaningful strategizing is happening. Plus, for a game so reliant on scripting out decisions for you, it seems to make a lot of stupid choices. Am I actually being challenged, or did I suffer a bullshit KO because my party won't spread out and the AI Medic refuses to use two AOE heals in a row? Why doesn't Auto-Battle recognize that my leader has 400 more Strength than Magic? Did my Synergist really have to put Bravery on Vanille? Maybe the postgame plays differently but I doubt I'll ever find out.
There are a lot of problems here but its vulnerability is oddly appealing. Both director Toriyama and then-Square president Wada went on record about how difficult it was to find a working formula for the JRPG in the late 2000s. A developer with an uncertain future CREATING a game about finding PURPOSE in the face of an uncertain future... I appreciate the commitment to sincerity, a guiding principle that rings clear even through heavy jargon. It was nice to revisit a game I disliked for so long only to find new merit in it fifteen years later. Fuck Sentinels, Light/Sazh/Vanille best party!
It's obviously a smokescreen for this game's whopper of a central metaphor - every Final Fantasy since 6 is fundamentally about its own existence, and this game's thrice-underlined iterations on PURPOSE and CREATION drive it home - and the fact that when your cast's shared dilemma is "we don't know what our goal is," you can push them around wherever and however you want without any real need to adhere to the basics of character-driven storytelling. No need to revisit the hallway simulator complaints, but they miss the point of the game: the first half grants us no freedom because while Lightning et. al. are on Cocoon they have no freedom. They simply stumble into one beautiful locale or flashy disaster after another until they realize they have a "choice" (such as a video game story allows it) and escape to the virgin open-world terrain of Gran Pulse.
I respect and understand the approach, but I don't love it. Counter to conventional wisdom, I think the game is stronger in the first half. Cashing out the story's adrenal momentum to focus on the combat does neither any favors, and it's only once you've been given free rein over the RPG systems that you realize how shallow they are. You control only a small portion of what occurs during combat, much of which is relegated to Auto-Battle anyway, while several other semi-random variables tick away in the background. It rarely feels as if any meaningful strategizing is happening. Plus, for a game so reliant on scripting out decisions for you, it seems to make a lot of stupid choices. Am I actually being challenged, or did I suffer a bullshit KO because my party won't spread out and the AI Medic refuses to use two AOE heals in a row? Why doesn't Auto-Battle recognize that my leader has 400 more Strength than Magic? Did my Synergist really have to put Bravery on Vanille? Maybe the postgame plays differently but I doubt I'll ever find out.
There are a lot of problems here but its vulnerability is oddly appealing. Both director Toriyama and then-Square president Wada went on record about how difficult it was to find a working formula for the JRPG in the late 2000s. A developer with an uncertain future CREATING a game about finding PURPOSE in the face of an uncertain future... I appreciate the commitment to sincerity, a guiding principle that rings clear even through heavy jargon. It was nice to revisit a game I disliked for so long only to find new merit in it fifteen years later. Fuck Sentinels, Light/Sazh/Vanille best party!