There's nothing really bad here, especially not in terms of gameplay, which is generally fantastic. The fluidity of motion across the city is still so good that I only fast-traveled once, something I would never do in a normal 7 hour course of gaming.

But the characters and writing just leave something to be desired. The way pretty much everyone is written, Miles himself, Prowler, Phin and Krieger is just missing a little something to round them out. They're too one-dimensional, and in a way almost cartoonishly short-sighted? I know we're dealing with comic book characters, but I think you can still write comic book stories that respect the intelligence of the characters and audience. Someone lies, someone manipulates, people try to save their friends/family by doing ridiculous things, it's just all very well worn and tired. There's nothing wrong with well-trod stories, but if you're going to do it, the performance and presentation better absolutely knock my socks off. And it didn't here. It's a mid story with a mid presentation.

The "You ARE Spider-Man" and "Be Yourself" aspect of the story in particular really struggles because it's been done better with Miles in the recent Spider-Verse stories. And considering this game has way more time to ruminate on the theme (I beelined the story in 6.5 hours), it doesn't even remotely use that time to develop a story and character arc that is half as compelling as two movies with a combined run-time that's only about 4.3 hours.

I played this with very fond memories of the original base game and thinking it was prep for the sequel. I ended it wondering if I wouldn't love the original game as much if I revisited it now, and wondering if I'll actually spend $70 to play the sequel.

Surprisingly solid life sim with some nice work at baking in combat, relationship sim, multiple endings and an overarching world plot (that you scratch the surface of in your first playthrough).

If you've played Princess Maker, Long Live the Queen, Growing Up or Chinese Parents, you know what to expect here. The sheer number of endings and achievements makes this seem like a great game to replay again and again.

The game is good enough that I can look past the really mediocre translation and crashing, but not quite enough that I can give it the 8-9 that I would like to. Crashing isn't the hugest deal, but without mid-day saves, having to redo a whole 10-15 minute day you already did is super annoying. The translation also isn't unreadable, you can always parse out what it's trying to say, but it's just distracting enough that I found it taking me out of the game a number of times.

I'm going to come back in a month or two to replay it and see what the state of the grammar/translation and save system are like, maybe I'll be able to bump the score then.

This game feels like a development team from 2014 finished watching the first four seasons of Game of Thrones, developed a game, fell into hibernation, woke up in 2023, ported their game to a next-gen engine and dumped it out onto the market.

2014 called, it wants your QTEs, hallway dungeons and bad sidequests back.

On the pacing and story side, when the story is clicking along, the game is solid (and sometimes even great!). Every time it grinds to a halt so they can pad the game length with earning another annoying Boy Scout badge to prove you are Not a Bad Guy to the local town, it's awful.

On the design side, the dungeons feel like they're almost wholesale ripped from XIV in terms of layout: straight hallways to trash mobs -> miniboss -> trash mobs again -> miniboss -> repeat until you get to the end-boss. I think that design is getting pretty tired in XIV, but it works even less here in XVI since XIV at least comes with real-life human party members you can talk to.

On a writing side, there's a perfectly competent "grounded" political story to be found until about 45-50% of the ways through the game, at which point it gets thrown out for one of the worst tropes in JRPGs, weird pseudo-Jungian pontificating from mega-villains.

From a mechanics side, the Eikon battles are beyond sick, but the number of QTEs really started to kill me after the halfway mark. I literally said out loud to the game at least three times in the final third of the game, "You're taking control away from me again?"

And the biggest problem I have with the game is not that "this isn't a Final Fantasy game" or whatever variant of dweeb argument the internet is going to have about this game for the next decade. Final Fantasy games run the gamut from MMO (XI/XIV), Action RPG (Stranger of Paradise/Type-0), TRPGs (Tactics), fighting (Dissidia), rhythm (Theatrhythm) and even shooter (Dirge of Cerberus).

The problem I have is that this is being marketed (by SE themselves) as an Action RPG, and it simply is not. At most you could call this a Character Action game with RPG-lite elements. There isn't anything wrong with Character Action games (although they're not my favorite genre admittedly), but be honest about what your game is so I can have correct expectations.

Given that SE's own marketing literally calls this game "the first fully fledged Action RPG in the mainline Final Fantasy series," that's the expectation I went in with, and that is the bar by which I am going to judge it.

There is zero-roleplaying to be done here.

Here are five example elements I'd consider to be solid, basic building blocks of an ARPG:

• Visual customization: Some kind of options for changing components of your outfit. Allowing adjustments of hair/beard is a nice bonus that many modern games include.
• Playstyle customization: Options for different playstyles, e.g. allowing for someone to choose to build a two-handed weapon wielder, a sword and shield user, a ranged user or to take a stealth approach.
• Weapon customization: Something of a subset to the above point but a little different. Especially if a game can't allow for a wide range of styles from stealth to ranged to melee, then allowing for a variety of weapons with different status effects, bonuses, etc is an interesting way to allow player creativity.
• Controllable party: Controlling your party members, their leveling path and potentially therefore their job/class/skills is another way to increase player role-playing.
• Story input: Allowing for input on the final outcome of the main narrative isn't necessary (although nice), but if that can't be done, meaningful choice on sidequests is a good compromise.

Does every ARPG have all five of these? No. But having 2-4 of them is a heck of a lot better than FFXVI having literally none of them!

I can't believe I live in a world where Ubisoft is making ARPG Assassin's Creed games that are more ARPGs than Final Fantasy ARPGs.