Transcript from the review:
Final Fantasy XVI is an epic, flawed, moving masterpiece, but why has it been so divisive for fans and reviewers? I’ve seen everything from Game of the Year reviews to 6 out of 10s, saying this was a huge disappointment.
Now that I’ve beaten it I think I know why there are such wildly different takes, and I think it has less to do with what Final Fantasy XVI is, and more to do with what the game isn’t.
This review will be spoiler-free. I’ll be showing scenes from throughout the game, but they’ll be out of context, so that’s just a heads up.
For some context about me, I’m a relative newcomer to Final Fantasy, so I feel like I’m in a good spot to judge this game objectively without any bias based on earlier games. I think some people expected the game to be a certain thing, to play a certain way, and it just doesn’t do that. I think the game actually takes a certain joy in subverting our expectations, for better or for worse.
This game gets off to an amazing start setting up a killer storyline and kicking off the world-building right out of the gate. It also finishes strong with with gameplay and story that kept me glued to my couch. Seriously, I was skipping side quests left and right just so I could get to the end of the story and see how this all plays out.
But as awesome as it is at beginning and at the end, it’s some of the middle parts that felt uneven, especially in the first half of the game. It took me about 50 hours to beat the game, and I’ll be honest, about 15-20 hours into the game the combat was feeling stale and I was starting to get bored with the gameplay loop and some pretty lackluster side quests. So let dwell on why this felt so uneven at times for a moment.
The pacing is jarring at first
Most modern action RPGs have several gameplay segments, like story, exploration, puzzles, and of course, combat. These segments are generally arranged in a way to keep things interesting and balance out the pacing, so there are moments to breathe between action sequences and the experience feels varied and fresh. In God of War, for example, a lot of the story is told while you’re playing the game. You use the traversal mechanics to figure out how to get from point A to point B. You have puzzles (don’t get me started on the side characters that won’t shut up in God of War), and, of course, you have combat with a variety of attack styles, enemies, and weak points.
But Final Fantasy XVI isn’t like that, and I think it’s a big reason some people were disappointed in this game. You could say it’s a more focused experience, because you have story, and you have combat, and that’s pretty much it. You see what’s at stake, and then you go do something about it. There’s no real exploration, you’re given a destination… and you just go there—no swinging or climbing segments. There are no puzzles or fishing min-games to mix things up. The only way Final Fantasy XVI tries to break the story & combat gameplay loop is with the side quests, but even those just come down to story and combat for the most part.
There’s also a crafting system, but I largely ignored it and never felt like I was missing out on anything. There are some endgame weapons and armor that require rare materials, but if you just plan on playing through once and not trying to platinum the game, then you don’t really need to worry about those.
So this all feels very different than what I think a lot of people expected. We all knew it wasn’t going to be a traditional RPG experience because the developers made it very clear they were leaning into the third-person action type game. But even that was a little misleading because it’s missing so much of what those games have to offer. So it’s not a typical RPG and not a typical action game.
Story
If your game is gonna be be mostly story and combat, you’d better have damn good story and combat. And in that, my friends, Final Fantasy XVI delivers. I would argue this is some of the best storytelling I’ve seen in a game. The world building is excellent, the voice acting is top-notch, and it’s presented in a way that’s pretty cinematic at times, like this scene where the camera moves as though we’re watching a movie. It’s gorgeous, and the cutscenes are incredibly entertaining. The soundtrack is also amazing, and really elevated the experience. My only complaint with the presentation of the story would be in some of the character animations. A lot of characters looked like lifeless mannequins, even when they had dramatic lines. Don’t get me wrong the voice acting was amazing from top to bottom, but sometimes the on-screen acting just didn’t do it justice. But this is a minor gripe and is outweighed heavily by all the amazing storytelling that’s just oozing out of this game.
And again, this is a spoiler-free discussion but I just want to say the ending of this game will have you wanting to find someone else who’s beaten it so you can talk about it. It’s that good.
Side quests
Let me just say that I thought they were pretty uneven, and I’d even say they were pretty lame earlier in the game. They give you a better understanding of and connection to the world around you, but they get pretty repetitive and uninteresting pretty quickly.
They do get much better as the game goes on, but for me I was so burned out on the early quests that I largely skipped them in the 2nd half of the game. I know I’ll catch some heat for that, but I have no regrets man. I was so invested in the story I just wanted to see where it went, and the game throws so many side quests at you near the end, when I wanted to play them the least, and I was just overwhelmed by it.
I can still play them in new game + or I can go back to an earlier save file, but I just wish they had spaced out the side quests differently, or at least given us better ones earlier in the game.
Combat
Your combat abilities grow slowly throughout the game, and the simple mechanics in the first few hours of the game slowly builds on themselves so that by the end you have a lot more options, and you’ve probably customized your abilities to the play style you want. I thought the combat was super enjoyable and I love the cooldown system and everything about it feels powerful and skillful and just a helluva lot of fun. But the game does take its time getting there. If someone played the first 20 hours of this game, they might think they have a pretty good idea of what the combat system is, but in reality they’re still playing with the starter kit.
It seems like a lot of people have complained about the difficulty of the game, mainly that it wasn’t difficult at all. The developers themselves said they wanted to create an accessible combat system that would be challenging but still enjoyable to less experienced players. Remember, this is supposed to be the game that puts Final Fantasy back on the map with a wider audience. By those standards, I think they nailed it. For me, the ring system is innovative and really effective at giving you a sliding scale of difficulty. But I get it, even at it’s most challenging, this game isn’t punishing you the first time through the way souls like games do, and frankly they never indicated it would. And I say the first time through because you can unlock a hard mode on the 2nd play through in New Game +. I haven’t played much of this mode, because that’s just not my thing, but the consensus seems to be that it does ramp up the challenge but by then your weapons and armor can get so advanced you can still win most battles fairly easily.
Where the combat does miss, in my opinion, is not in the abilities or the difficulty, but in the enemies. I’m used to enemies with different attack styles and weak points. Maybe you need to use the correct weapon or form of magic to take them down efficiently. Final Fantasy XVI isn’t like that. Every enemy in the game is a damage sponge that you just wail on with whichever ability is off cooldown, there’s not much strategy around which ability to use and when. I mean, there’s a little strategy, especially in the final stages of the game, but outside of that not much and it doesn’t change from one encounter to the next.
At this point, let me just take a moment to point out that if you’re enjoying this video be sure to hit that thumbs up and you might even consider checking out my channel and see if it’s worth a subscribe.
Throw out your expectations
I could say ‘man, there’s no traversal or puzzles, there’s no meaningful crafting, no switching up your attack for different enemy types, and the world feels pretty empty and lifeless between villages’ or I could say ‘hey you don’t have to climb around or mess with puzzles, you don’t have to grind for obscure crafting materials, you don’t have to get your ass kicked over and over until you figure out the weak point, you just kick ass and feel like a boss doing it and it feels great and I could do this all day. Because I did.’
Either way I’m really saying the same thing, I’m just coming at it from a different expectation. So to you I’d say this: if you want to play an RPG, this will feel pretty light. If you wanna play a third-person action game, you might feel like this is missing something. If you’re looking for souls-like combat, this game probably won’t challenge you enough.
But if you get rid of those expectations, and you’re ready to experience this game at its own pace and style for what it is (and not what it is not), then there’s a lot to love. This is great storytelling. This is great world building. There were several moments in the game where I felt like I needed to just pause and pick my jaw up off the floor, and that doesn’t happen to me in games very often. I don’t think it’s a 10 out of 10 for me because I do think it’s missing something to break up the gameplay loop a bit. To say it’s just story and combat, story and combat… well yeah. I think that’s a valid criticism but what saves it in my mind is that the story is peak storytelling, and the combat is incredibly fun and satisfying.
I’ll put it this way, in 30 hours of playing this game I wasn’t bored once. And that’s a feat, especially since I have the attention span of a 5-year old on a sugar rush. Now maybe that’s just because I skipped so many side quests, or who knows maybe I would’ve loved the game even more if I had? I can’t really compare this game to anything I’ve played before. It isn’t God of War with crystals. It isn’t a JRPG version of Game of Thrones. This is something new, and it’s a gaming experience I’ll remember for years to come.
That gets a thumbs up in my book, and probably my favorite game of the year at this point, flaws and all.
This game is out on Playstation 5. I’m sure it will be coming to PCs at some point, but no release date has been announced. That’s it. That’s all I got, so… let me know if this review has been helpful if you haven’t played it, or if you have played it do you agree with it? And as always, thanks for watching.
