“And thus did our journey begin…”

You’re a wide-eyed, adventurous youth, that sees the world through a vision painted in vibrant hues of wonder. It’s your friend’s birthday, and the stars align as you, along with two others are going to spend the night at his home. The thrill is palpable because it’s the first time you’re spending the night at a friend’s place—a realm usually off-limits according to the unwritten rules of your mother’s parenting playbook.

You love video games. You always have. Some of your first memories are sitting in your father’s lap as he plays Sonic the Hedgehog and X-Men on the Sega Genesis. Just last year the universe smiled upon you, bestowing a Nintendo 64 and a Gameboy into your eager hands. It’s lead you on a path toward infatuation with the worlds of Pokémon and Super Mario. Yet, in this tapestry of nostalgia, a new thread weaves in—the enchanting notes of a little game named Ocarina of Time, your sole deviation from the familiar.

But back in the present, the birthday boy unveils something else that is unfamiliar to you—the PlayStation. Prior encounters were confined to store kiosks, but now, in the warm glow of your friend’s living room, the PlayStation becomes a symphony of novelty. He pulls out a plastic case, revealing a disc for a game he says is called “Final Fantasy VII”. You didn’t know games could come on CDs, nor have you ever heard of Final Fantasy. You have no idea what to expect as he snaps the game disc into the console, and it begins to whirr.

You’re instantly struck by the visual allure of this game. The painterly backgrounds, the lifelike character models, and the music, unlike anything you’ve ever heard in a video game, leave you utterly astonished. It’s more than just a game; it’s a portal to an undiscovered realm where moments of joy become indelibly etched onto the canvas of your memories.

Captivated, you and your friends take turns between playing and watching each other until the first light of dawn breaks. In those magical hours, not a single worry occupies your thoughts.

Final Fantasy is not merely a series; it has inexplicably become a part of my personal growth, evolving synchronously with my own journey–a steadfast companion that has consistently stood by my side, much like a trusted friend.

While not every attempt at evolution has been an unqualified success, the enduring truth remained—Final Fantasy retained its distinctive essence. It was still the person you knew.

Through shifts in tone, aesthetic, mechanics, and lore, there has always been a discernible throughline that defines the essence of Final Fantasy. This enduring thread of continuity is what fuels my excitement when contemplating the new horizons the series will explore and why I was anticipating its arrival on new hardware.

Much to my chagrin, Final Fantasy XVI has left me more disappointed than I could have ever imagined a game in the series could. That’s because XVI is a confused, over-embellished mess resulting in a work that seems to have strayed far from the core of what defines the series’ identity. While continuing the series’ ethos of reinvention and eschewing all of its RPG systems is not an inherently adverse decision, the execution is often abysmal.

That’s because now Final Fantasy is a bleary action game that lacks the mechanical depth or focus necessary to produce an enthralling action experience. While flashy and well-animated, the combat system is woefully straightforward and repetitive due to being restricted to a singular combo sequence heavily reliant on Eikon abilities kept primarily on cooldown for optimal damage output.

Ironically, this makes the gameplay feel much more like three Final Fantasy XIVs in a Dante costume than embodying the essence of a Devil May Cry game. With a low skill floor and ceiling, the game falls short of delivering a truly gratifying action experience that fosters individual player expression. As a consequence, nearly every combat encounter unfolds in a uniform manner, requiring little more from the player than the management of cooldown rotations.

The game exhibits a persistent inclination to rip control away from the player, particularly during crucial boss encounters. Rather than allowing players to get into a flow, it frequently interrupts the player’s agency to initiate cutscenes or quick-time events. Furthermore, for an action-centric game, it notably lacks in challenge; I managed to navigate through the entire game without dying once.

Moreover, while most action games typically span 8 to 12 hours and steadily introduce upgrades and new abilities, this game follows a different trajectory. It extends combat in the same monotonous combat patterns for prolonged stretches of 5 to 8 hours before infrequently introducing new abilities through Eikons, disrupting the expected pace of progression.

Speaking of pace, XVI is one of the most poorly-paced games I’ve ever played. It falls into a predictable pattern that is not unlike the main story in XIV since you’ll be undertaking 45-minute to one-hour missions that are primarily cutscenes (that often have admittedly high peaks of spectacle) before spending hours running around performing errands like picking up dirt or killing wolves.

This may have been fine on its own since side content often enriches the world and imparts a distinct essence to it. VII Remake masterfully achieved this, as its focus on the ordinary in side quests significantly contributed to the overall humanist experience.

For instance, an early side quest involves Clive delivering meals to the hideout’s residents, a task that recurs later in the game.

Ostensibly meant to underscore Clive’s character evolution and his growing connection with those around him, the lack of endearment in both Clive and these characters results in this endeavor feeling more like inconsequential padding.

It doesn’t help that the world of Valisthea is an uninteresting dark fantasy facsimile that lacks any defining traits other than series pastiche. Despite attempts to convey vastness across the continent, the game predominantly features diminutive, quaint villages, failing to offer the grandeur of bustling cities seen in earlier titles. While large, distant cities occasionally tease the horizon, these remain inaccessible, confined to linear story segments. This limitation is regrettable, considering the considerable effort invested in crafting detailed and visually appealing landscapes.

There were so many instances where I felt something akin to what I often felt playing XV: a sense of exploration driven by intrigue from the environment. I’d catch sight of captivating landmarks on the horizon, enticing mu curiosity. Occasionally, they might appear trivial, but sometimes they would end up being legitimately impressive dungeons. All of this takes place in a seamlessly interconnected world, encouraging and emphasizing the joy of exploration with your party.

XVI regrettably fails to offer any definitive fulfillment in this aspect. The world is a series of barren, disjointed hubs that could fit into a thimble and merely pad the game’s run time.

Even the set pieces and boss fights are mostly glorified cutscenes with player control taken away, often at multiple junctures during combat, to set up a quick time event. Most of the game is on autopilot, and combat often feels like a formality… a genuinely great decision for an action game.

The vestiges of RPG systems in XVI serve as little more than window dressing, only coming off as lip service to previous titles. While you can level up and acquire or craft weapons, their absence wouldn’t significantly impact the gaming experience. Weapons merely serve as objective upgrades, enhancing damage and stagger potential without introducing any elemental advantages or trade-offs for specialized performance. Consequently, this lack of depth fosters a sense of hesitancy and a lack of confidence in the game’s new direction, leaving XVI feeling muddled and uncertain in its approach.

XVI falls short in delivering an engrossing narrative. The storytelling unfolds as a sluggish, uneven journey that veers away from its core thematic elements midway. The intricate exploration of themes like slavery and bureaucracy? Abruptly abandoned in favor of a divergent quest to confront a divine entity.

This makes producer Naoki Yoshida’s statements about the lack of inclusion of non-white people humorous since the game gets quite ridiculous and rarely finds itself grounded in “reality”. Hence, the idea that brown people can’t exist in a fantasy setting with kaiju battles in space is worthy of all the ridicule it received. It’s also really funny how it tries to justify Clive’s family’s slave ownership because they were nice to their slaves.

Final Fantasy XVI is a shallow and hollow experience with nothing to offer besides production values. Everything exists in service of spectacle, and what we are left with is a game so obsessed with cinematic prestige that it is bereft of substance.

There are flashes of brilliance. In a different world, this game, with its combat and scope, could have been a somewhat solid open-world RPG. Or if the scope was reigned in and more complexity baked into the combat system, a solid, linear action game.

Also, for a game that seems to harbor such an active disdain for its legacy, the ending tries desperately to tug on nostalgia strings to evoke pathos. The result is a lazy, intellectually insulting narrative climax that is entirely unearned.

The Final Fantasy series has always made reinvention the point. If one game in the series was not your favorite flavor, the next installment could be. However, I do not think that will be the case moving forward. With this game being a critical and commercial success, coupled with bloated budgets and long gestation periods, I believe this is the direction we can expect the series to take. This is a problem because XVI sacrifices so much of the essence of Final Fantasy without leaving much left to take its place.

If that’s the case, I fear I might have to disembark from the journey, left with nostalgia for what once was, rather than anticipation for what might come.

You’re older now. The weight of the years makes it increasingly challenging to muster the fervor for pursuits that once ignited your passion. It feels like just yesterday you were eagerly tearing through the packaging of a pristine PlayStation 2, enveloped in sheer elation at the prospect of delving into the world of Final Fantasy X. Yet, paradoxically, those moments now seem shrouded in mist. The vivid tapestry of memories has gradually receded into indistinct relics, their vibrant hues fading into a subdued palette of somber grays.

The friends with whom you forged a foundational memory on the day of discovering a beloved video game series have become mere echoes in the corridors of distant recollection. Decades have elapsed since your last exchange, and thoughts of them now rarely arise.

In the intervening years, new friendships have blossomed, and others have withered away. The ebb and flow of companionship has charted a course that, much like your own journey, has gradually distanced you from the familiar shores of home. As the currents of time carry you further away, the recollection of those once-cherished moments becomes increasingly elusive, obscured by the passage of experiences and the ever-expanding horizon of your life.

Have the hues of enthusiasm faded into a more muted palette? Is this a natural evolution of the human spirit as it traverses the landscape of age? Acknowledging the inevitability of change, you recognize that transformation can often herald improvement, even carrying the potential for exciting developments.

A new Final Fantasy’s release is imminent, and the initial spark of excitement dims under the weight of tempered expectations. A new friend, attuned to the significance this series holds in your heart, surprises you with a fresh copy of Final Fantasy XVI, blissfully unaware of the skepticism clouding your anticipation. Embracing the notion that change can breathe life into the familiar, you decide to immerse yourself in the new chapter.

Yet, after a few hours of exploring this new realm, a sobering reality settles in. It resounds a contemplation that has resonated within you concerning existence itself. The experience leaves you pondering whether a subtle cynicism has woven its threads into the fabric of your once-unbridled optimism. Your journey through the corridor of time has left you with a reluctant acceptance of the present—it is what it is.

“…and thus did our journey end.”

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

watch dogs had so much potential and material to work with to become THE commentary piece for sovereignty in the age of big tech oligopolies, especially considering the political events and scandals coinciding at the time, and Ubisoft leveraged none of that??? the Hollywoodification of the technical mechanism, the forced edgy writing with PG13 dialogues, the cookie-cutting art direction void of any identity, this game feels nauseatingly plain and unoriginal as a player.

as a media enthusiast, i fucking hate the corporate indoctrinated approach to media production and the braindead content taking up so much space in the public sphere. i would rather play horse boyfriend simulator than continue endorsing this piece of shit. fuck you ubisoft.

fans love to make erroneous arguments about how detractors dislike the game cos it's different, but the problem has always been that those differences amount to nothing of substance. if they're not completely insignificant they're fakeouts or walked back, if they're not fakeouts or walked back they're jj abrams mystery box bullshit to keep the online dustcloud with arms and legs kicking and howling about The Implications for another four years. this is a game more concerned with how to capture will they/won't they Engagement than its own thematic core; an impressively meticulous effort moored in goopy fanservice and speculation bait

control freak energy from top to bottom, sanitized to an extent that you'd think square report directly to the health department, and guided by one of the medium's most overbearing directorial hands. all slick and shiny bombast and spectacle, perfect skin, compilation pilled navel gazing, and endlessly wrested control. thirty long hours of red light green light meandering thru kidzbop cover acts of familiar events and environments before shunting all responsibility for unpacking anything it might have to say onto the next game

big win for folks who wanted tifa to be a noodle armed simp and sephiroth to have the presence of yakuza kiwami majima