Final Fantasy XVI is a complicated game for me to talk about. There are a lot of good things in this game I want to discuss, but there are even more bad things that outweigh them substantially. Forgive me if this is all over the place, I'm thinking off the top of my head right now. It's a frustrating experience, because when it's good, it's great, but then there's some extremely dire shit I can't get behind. Since Kingdom Hearts III's release, Square's been on a streak with excellent action RPGs releasing on a yearly basis from 2019 to 2022. XVI broke that streak for me. The story is intensely problematic, both in concept and execution. The game doesn't engage with its world and themes nearly as much as it should, and the way it portrays a lot of the cast is genuinely sickening. Elwin Rosfield is by all accounts a slave owner, yet everyone in the game speaks of him with such reverence and is portrayed as a paragon in the uncritical eyes of the masses in-game, including his own sons, long after his death. Yet his wife, whose name I can't remember for the life of me, gets labeled as a villain for wanting more power. My brother in The Founder, they're both fucked up. The cast in general may just be the worst of any mainline FF game. Clive is a very milquetoast protagonist, white bread is more interesting than Jill is, and nearly everyone else add absolutely nothing to the game. Speaking of Clive and Jill, I don't believe in their relationship at all. As someone who thrives on that shit whenever I play a game, the romance between them is so goddamn bare, the likes of which I haven't seen since Max and Chloe from Life is Strange. The only upside is I don't see their relationship as abusive unlike the example I just listed. Now, Clive's relationship with his brother Joshua is interesting and absolutely the best part of this game's story. It was the only time I felt genuinely captivated by FFXVI's narrative, and I wish there was more of it. Instead the game focuses on mundane side quests masked as story quests for what feels like hours on end without any real significance to the themes of the game. The game's pacing is all over the goddamn place, either feeling like it takes way too long for shit to happen, or feeling like certain scenes need a lot more breathing room. The game is nearly 40 hours long, about twice the length of your average KH game, but it says far less than those games do without half the thematic depth of those games. The pacing issues don't just stem from the story itself: the gameplay itself offers said issues as well. Battles go on for far too long to the point of overkill. I became legitimately exhausted at certain points fighting several of the boss fights simply because they overstay their welcome, and it ruins my view of them as a whole. They are not badly designed by any means, it's just if the length of these boss fights were cut down by about half, I'd enjoy them so much more. There's also the rate at which Clive's moveset opens up, and it is pitifully slow. Clive's basic combo sucks ass, and I wouldn't mind as much if the game at least paced itself out well enough, but you go such long periods of time in combat with it not evolving nearly fast enough to keep me entertained for such long stretches. I replayed Tales of Xillia 2 right after this, and it's night and day the difference in combat pacing between the two. Being fully decked out in FFXVI is like less than half the abilities you learn in Xillia 2, and that game has the extra advantage of not having 90% of the toolkit not tied to cooldowns. I'm not even gonna compare the combat to Kingdom Hearts II or III or even 1, because then it just starts getting sad for XVI. XVI is absolutely saved by its gamefeel however. It feels so goddamn great, from parrying to guarding to dodging, I have no real complaints in that regard. An action game can be raised significantly above its weight class if it at the very least feels good to play, and XVI more than succeeds in that regard. I just wish the rest of the faculties of the combat was as good as the gamefeel.

I don't like being overly negative when talking about video games. I'd rather focus my energy on games I like, like with my upcoming KH3 video, WHICH REFUSES TO BE FINISHED BECAUSE THE VIDEO EDITOR I'M USING IS A PIECE OF SHIT I WASTED 80 BUCKS ON- Anyway, FFXVI isn't without merit. It's got some great stuff in it, I just can't help but feel disappointed with what we got. After a string of great action RPGs where the worst game of that string is a high 8, FFXVI just feels so lacking by comparison. Maybe with time, I'll be more positive, but right now, I just wanna play something with more substance.