Since the release of Final Fantasy VIII, there has never been any way to tell what a Final Fantasy game would be like. The reason I point to FFVIII in particular is because, had Final Fantasy VII been less popular or an outlier, we could count it as a once in a series event. But with the release of FFVIII, we could see the beginning of a pattern. This would be even more obvious if you looked at the Squaresoft Playstation 1 lineup as a whole; and even more clear if you look at the Fifth console generation in its entirety (which included the Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64). This was the beginning of the third dimensional era of gaming. A place to turn games into a more cinematic affair. A time to change the way we interact with the media of gaming. It produced blockbusters in the way of fever dreams. It paved the path for gaming today. But across generations, we had franchises like Final Fantasy; a franchise that would come to embrace this experimentation as part of their DNA. This alchemy of gaming and storytelling has led to some of the most memorable moments in the history of this hobby. But experimentation has a downside. More often than not there are failures. You can’t create gold from lead; a hard truth we have had to learn as both fans and developers. Some of us take to fool’s gold as if it were the same; it shines the same but lacks the value. This might not be the most glowing introduction for a review, but I want you to know that Final Fantasy XVI was the desire to return to the days of old while maintaining modern standards. It’s a messy affair, this alchemy. The melding of generations of gaming. Final Fantasy XVI caused me to feel a mixture of frustration and admiration. It made me believe the developers had a desire to lead into gold, but just weren’t sure what the recipe should be. In the end, it was all placed on a single protagonist’s shoulders.

Everything leading up to the release of the Final Fantasy XVI led me to believe I wouldn’t like it. That it wasn’t a game built for the fans of Final Fantasy, but the fans of a completely different medium, like television’s Game of Thrones or the worlds of The Witcher. And while I have no aversion to the latter and no love for the former, I still couldn’t help but feel immediately displaced by the look, feel, and direction of all the media. A purchase to be made in favor of a completely different medium. While gaming as a whole seems to be escaping me into the hands of another generation, I thought I could find solace in the old guards from my youth. Squaresoft had an air of measured science. Creating and innovating in a way that favored an entire generation of fans while pulling in new ones with their modifications of play. They built an empire that has long since rested on its laurels. And like every empire unhappy with complacency, they are trying to conquer new lands in spite of the cries from their constituency. But, let me be clear, that doesn’t make Final Fantasy XVI a bad game. It doesn’t make it an experiment gone wrong. What it means is that it’s different. It’s a new battle plan finding its legs. What it means is that, as a long time fan, I had a very strong reaction that led to very nuanced feelings.

This was the first Final Fantasy I thought I wouldn’t buy the moment it came out since the release of Final Fantasy VIII on 9/9/99. But like many stans, the demo changed my mind almost immediately. It was fast, sleek, and brutal. It delivered that delicious vertical slice of everything the game had to offer. It knocked me out of my chair by the end of the demo. A mainline Final Fantasy putting a real blade to the neck of our heroes and drawing real blood? The performances were the perfect mix of melodramatic and serious. Theatrical and operatic. Essentially, I was praising Final Fantasy for actually trying to do outloud what it had always done behind the veneer of a PG-13 rating. Like a fish after a lure, I was hooked. The day I finished the demo, I *dun dun dun* PRE-ORDERED THE GAME! I gave into the beast. Though, to be fair, I already mentioned that I have been doing that for years in the case of this series. Anyway, the demo did its job unlike any ever had. And if this one page introduction wasn’t proof of that I have a lot to say, then the next several pages will. Buckle in. We have the story, the gameplay, the presentation, and the impact to discuss.

The biggest selling point of the demo was the bombastic end. Essentially, what struck me most in the vertical slice was the story. Not necessarily any one part of the story either, but the veritable roux of all of its elements. The characters by themselves are not very compelling, neither is the world of Valestha or the countries that carved up its landscape. The Mother Crystals, the magic, the slaves, the townspeople, all of them are spices awash in a story that at first taste goes beyond quenching your thirst or satiating your hunger. It makes you believe that something profound is going to happen, that you are just at the beginning of a story with depth. The story starts as a portrait of one young man, Clive Rosfeild, first son of the duchy’s ruler, and head guard to his younger brother Joshua who was born with the generational gift of a god that appears in the family line. The immediate implication of this familial line is that we are going to get a series of history lessons throughout our game that will enrich the decisions around our characters, but ultimately, the story remains focused on a single character, Clive Rosfield. And from the first moments that we get to control Clive as an adult, we spend several hours focused solely on his need for revenge. The world takes a backseat to Clive’s journey through it. Looking at all the previous games in the series, the world was just as much a character in a Final Fantasy game as any of the people in it. Even in Final Fantasy X, in which Tidus is whisked away to a world he knows nothing about, we get to learn everything about the world through his eyes. And on the other hand, in Final Fantasy VIII, all the characters grew up in the world we are exploring, but each of them have their own opinions, come from different places, and give the world a little more depth than it otherwise would have had. But with Clive, a bit of lone wolf, we don’t get to experience this depth, particularly for two reasons. First, it’s not that there are no other cast members, there are plenty and they all come from different places and backgrounds. It’s more that, because of the nature of the story, all the places they are from are inaccessible, either because it was destroyed or because it will at some point be destroyed in the near future so that when you arrive, it isn’t the same place anymore. Secondly, the characters we play are all aristocrats and very educated about the world around them, and as such, they don’t spend time talking about the world around them beyond the direct nature of what they have to do. This means that Clive bears not only the burden of saving the world, but also holding our undivided attention. Unfortunately, he can do the former, but not the latter.

This leads me to our roster of characters, some of whom have come under considerable fire for their lack of emotion, while others are lauded for the breadth of their voice. Clive is wrought with feelings of loss and failure. His woes seem to be endless. And yet, he finds a way to be the kind of hero you can get behind. He is the theater of this story. He is constantly in the depths of tears and pain. He is unlike any other character in the Final Fantasy series, possibly because he has a fantastic voice actor and because he got all of the writer’s attention. That being the case, every other character suffers for it. They are merely there to give depth to Clive. They don’t become anymore than who Clive sees them as. And sadly, because Clive is constantly in the midst of pain and responsibility, he only has a few notes, and no matter how many times they play them, he doesn’t make for a more compelling song on his own. But in the accompaniment of his friends and allies, we get a very passable verse that sounds great, but still doesn’t make up for the lack stories lack of awareness of the history of their surroundings, especially because there is both and in-game historian who plays a background role, and because all of our characters are especially privileged and educated. My gripe is that the story writer’s can’t have it both ways; a huge political story and a very centralized character at the heart of that story if neither in turn recognizes the other. In the end, it doesn’t matter how great Cid was or how good of an independent female protagonist Jill was because they only are there to serve the forward momentum of a single character at the cost of the vibrant world the framing tries and fails to establish at almost every turn.

Now we can zoom out and look at the world of Valisthea and the history surrounding it. At best, it is incredibly confusing. From the moment the game shows you the world map and gives you access to the history, you aren’t entirely sure that its trustworthy because it is in constant conflict with its own language and the world at large. Simply reading through the “Active Time Lore” and speaking with Hipocrates “Tomes”, you are never truly sure if Valsithea is the entire world or if it is a smaller offshoot of the world, like a zoomed in map of Australia. It turns out that this is a little of both. Largely because it doesn’t matter to the story that other places exist, but even the people of Valisthea are not entirely sure anyone has been “overseas” despite some people claiming to hail from there. At points in the game, they gesture to Samurai through sword making, and at other points to ingredients from “the West”. The issue I have with this is that the game wants us to take it seriously. That the world of Valisthea and the people in it have a rich history akin to Game of Thrones, but as soon as you go looking, it fails to provide anything more than a mishmash of incomplete speculation and fan service for the player. One could argue that in a world as fractured as Valisthea, the history would also come up short, but this isn’t entirely framed as the case to the player. We are given knowledge from this Lore Menu that their tomes would never have, made up entirely of our current knowledge and flavored with lore from the game. It was meant to outright explain the reality of the game’s world, to help you frame the actions of the people in it, and explain everything happening around you. However, it fails to make clear things that should be. And as a side note, it contradicts itself at times, saying one thing happened and then saying another. For instance, there is a battle between two nations in which two entries say the other won. It could be flavor, if it had been framed correctly, but I think it was simply an honest mistake.

The more you examine the world of the game, you realize it was meant to be smoke and mirrors for Clive’s journey. The various makeup of each of the nations that make up Valisthea seem deep, and admittedly it is more than nothing, but every other Final Fantasy did a whole lot more with a whole lot less. The governments for each are completely different, but it hardly matters to the story as a whole. None of this does anything to alter the course of Clive or his party or how they handle any situation. No one they deal with has any level of political intrigue that interferes with the story, with the exception of Dion, but it only has to do with Dion and simply leads him to do something completely outlandish that ultimately makes this intrigue completely flaccid. One of the best aspects of this game is that it absolutely shocks you. It throws curveballs that you don’t see coming exactly when they need to. But these curveballs undermine the entire purpose of setting up the foundation of the governments and countries of this world. Even attacking the Mother Crystals, the thrust of this games story, are consistently caught with a lack of meaningful defense or even realistic concern for their wellbeing in a world that both relies on and reveres them. Again, only because the game begs us to take it so seriously do I find this to be such an egregious issue. They set up so many things, only to have Clive basically mow down the world around him without ever considering any other way than knocking down the front door. I hate that the various countries amount to nothing, especially when they could have had something to say about our world or even their own. They are simply Legos for Clivezilla to knock over while we play superheroes vs monsters. It’s simply a shame.

The presentation of the game is meant to be in a state of constant forward motion, but the popularization of chapter based gameplay as of late really makes the world feel less like a place you might role play and more like a classic platformer. By that I mean that the game is a series of stages instead wherein you hold right, interchangeably fighting monsters and listening to dialog, until you reach the end of the stage. While this might work in favor of books and film, this really changes the entire frame of an RPG as we classically know them. This design is taken further once you unlock the Arete Stone. This allows you to repeat any of the main stages of the game, from start to finish, collecting points to try and get a high score. It furthers that the main design of the game was around completing scenarios in tight packages, which could have been fine all on its own, but by calling attention to it, I can’t help but feel taken out of the moment. The landscape never feels like a continuous world because we have to be told to stop and recognize a “new” stage or moment is beginning. I like to escape into the world of Final Fantasy and this format ultimately pulls me out of “the world” and back into “the game” instead of the seamless merging of the two in the classic format. And it would have been one thing if it mentioned chapters at big moments, but it does it at every turn. To put it mildly, it puts a damper on the experience as a whole.

While the framing of the game was not exactly to my liking, the gameplay was a fresh change for the series. A fresh change, but not entirely welcome. It felt like this game deserved a subtitle instead of the mainline marquee of the 16th entry. If they had called this Final Fantasy Valisthea, or Final Fantasy Action in the same way Final Fantasy Tactics was to the point, I think it would have matched the fans tastes a little better. No one wants to order pizza, take a bite, and taste fruit punch. This is a hill I would rather not die on, and while I feel this way, it ultimately would not have changed my feelings on the game as whole, but instead is more of a judgment of the decision makers at SquareEnix. On one hand, it’s great for marketing and ensures a certain number of sales and general interest. On the other hand, you are basically walking into the room and asking for fans’ forgiveness. “Everyone, I know this isn’t exactly what you expected, but we promise it will be worth your time. Please give it a chance.” I want to point out that the issue isn’t that the game is completely action focused, but rather that the game is comprised of 40 to 80 hours with an entire cast of characters, and you only get to play a single one. Other RPG’s have taken the action route, but most of them have the sense to offer you access to some of the cast. It would be one thing if they didn’t have any good examples of this, but their own Final Fantasy VII Remake gives you access to play, equip, and customize the entire team, all while giving you a complete action based game. And while Final Fantasy XVI gameplay is fun and has some strengths, it has many competitors that did a better job in the current generation (like God Of War) and several that did it better in generations past.

Where the game really shines, truly surprises, and earns some forgiveness is in the moments where Clive is pitted against the various Dominants of Valisthea. The game is largely broken into three portions. Clive’s quest for dialog. Clive’s battle through monsters. And Clive’s transformation into the kaiju-like god-beast Ifrit, a being they called an Eikon (which I have to point out begrudgingly is pronounced like icon). This final play style creates bombastic scenes of epic proportions. It feels like 3 separate teams were all given completely different instructions on the tone of the game and that no one at any point during the final construction batted an eye when putting it all together. The Eikon battles are so jarringly different from the rest of the game that, like the chapter style, it completely removes you from your immersion in the world. You are shaken from the dark and dour world one team created and into the Godzilla/Tokusatsu, B-Movie of your dreams. It is both entirely welcome and completely incongruent with the rest of the game. At one point in the game, you could swear they forgot that it wasn’t 2008 or that they weren’t making a Sonic the Hedgehog game. And in another moment, you think they were going for Gundam meets Transformers or that Freeza was about to roll onto the scene. This is just another place where the game further deserved a subtitle instead of the titular 16. And while the actual functionality of the battles as an Eikon are simply mirrors of playing as Clive, replacing his sword with claws and firebreath, knowing that these moments are fleeting is a little disappointing. Unlike your battles in the rest of the story, these are clearly numbered. But it is another feature that kept pushing me through the game and a very powerful Phoenix feather in its cap.

As for playing as Clive outside his Eikon form, from the moment you start training as a young upstart knight, it shows promise. It’s simple with the promise of depth. Playing as Clive and zipping around the battlefield feels right. The game grows to give him a myriad of skills that, when used right, allow you to become the god he truly is. I found early on that it is best to cycle through the various control schemes and decide which one fits you best, as it enhances the game as a whole. Growing your skills is limited by the story, unlocking new abilities as you encounter other human-god hybrids called Dominants and taking their power. You begin to look forward to what kind of abilities you will get next. Looking back, it was the most motivating thing,  after the story, that motivated me to continue pushing Clive to the end of the game. And while none of them are entirely disappointing, you will be hard pressed to use many abilities beyond the first two trees unlocked. It’s not that the later skills are useless or even hard to use, there are just too many advantages to the first set to bother experimenting with the others. On the bright side, they allow you to completely change out any skills at any time outside of battle by letting you refund the skillpoint necessary to unlock the skills. This gives you complete freedom to try out any combination of skills as long as you have the necessary ability points.

Still, in the moment to moment play of the game, what you come to realize is that it suffers death by a thousand cuts. On the next stop on our autopsy, we get to dissect beyond the good points because every single choice they made beyond those detracts from any enjoyment the game offers. A series of very common, modern tools and shortcuts are completely absent. The first thing is that there is no mini-map. I can understand that this may have been removed in favor of immersion, but because each area ultimately feels like a stage with a very obvious beginning and end, you end up checking your map just to make sure you explored everything. It’s very easy to keep going the “right way” at all times and miss places to explore, treasure chests, or even battles. You essentially can’t get “lost”, which when well balanced, can make RPG’s very fun to explore. At some points the game offers several paths to get to the same endpoint, but you would have no idea if you weren’t checking the map. I must have hit the map button a million times to make very simple checks that the mini-map could have easily solved and kept me playing instead of pausing. 

 Another immersion choice I imagine was not letting Clive traverse the game at any other speed than a slow, agonizing crawl. You have no ability to choose your run speed, and only get to “run” outside of towns after having held down forward for 7 or so seconds. And if you stop, get ready to wait for the sprint again. You eventually get a Chocobo, but it doesn’t move any faster than Clive’s run. It simply gives you the ability to use a run button. Inside towns, you can only move at a light jog and you can’t at any point use any of your teleportation battle techniques to traverse any faster or just have fun being weird in the town. And yet, this game has giant monster battles and yells fuck at every awkward moment. You do get fast travel, but another weird point of the game is that it recognizes the points (large stones similar to the Arete Stones) are activated because of Clive’s presence, but then the rest of the game acts like what we are doing is not “teleporting”. This means that everyone walks or rides everywhere in Valisthea, including your own party, even though the game recognizes these points. Another very weird choice, as it would have been better to simply ignore it if the game wanted to be “serious” over being “fantasy”. You even have a boatman at one point that I never spoke with unless I was prompted, found in an entire section of your hideout completely unused after you first meet him. It’s a burden to get to know the people living in the hideout because of how large it is and how slow Clive moves, making you want to skip any conversation I would normally have enjoyed having. The dialog is actually a good point of the game for the most part, not exactly in the content of what is said but rather how it is said. 

For the most part, the extra conversations feel natural, if not a little too slow. They have weird pauses in their speech, but that isn’t really an issue of the content as much as the delivery. The real sin is that they frame most conversations in this one on one, switch screen between Clive and the target that feels so shamelessly lazy and boring, you are thankful that at least the words themselves aren’t boring. In these moments they pass each other invisible items that make the same sound no matter what it is. And while every item has some small art and very detailed descriptions that mix lore and colloquialisms, it’s a real shame that almost every item has no in-world design. The most obvious place you can feel this is absent is in your gear. The only visible gear is Clive’s sword. He can equip a belt and a bracelet, but these are never visible. There is no menu to view your sword as the 3 dimensional object it is without setting Clive up in the perfect position in the Photo Mode. So many RPG’s at this point allow you to view the in-game model in a special menu so that you can really appreciate it. This became a major point that made the game feel so much cheaper than it was meant to. It almost feels like they went out of their way to remove this feature instead of adding it. It would have been minor if there weren’t so many other issues, particularly these kinds of features that are in other games I always felt were minor, but when they are all absent at once, it’s very noticeable.

While the pacing of the story is pretty brisk, the disbursement of sidequests is outlandish. Sidequests are a staple of the genre and have increasingly become part of all sorts of games. You would think that a company full of people steeped in the RPG genre would do better in this arena, but this game may rate as one of the worst in both meaningful content and pacing. Most of the quests are not available until the very end of the game, and the ones you play along the way dole out minimal amounts of character content. You do meet and learn more about the characters in the game and the world at large, but none of it feels worthwhile. There are moments where you feel as though you have accomplished something significant, but it makes no difference to the storyline at large. There is no interaction between the quests and main plot, which for a game that is supposed to live in a world of political intrigue, it feels like a completely missed opportunity to deepen the lore. The other facet of the sidequest system are the Hunts. The hunts are largely the standard enemies with extra movesets, hit points, and color changes. They are actually pretty fun for the most part and a fun change on the basic enemy formula. However, the slightly deeper lore and expanded enemies is the only highlight of this whole portion of the game, largely because thats all you really get for doing any of this. 

The spoils for quests and hunts are often crafting materials, which already have a limited use. The only person you can equip is Clive, and he can only equip 3 craftable items at a time, and you can’t build accessories. This means that you are constantly getting completely useless materials, that while you can sell, the only thing you can buy are healing items, accessories, or waste on beer and music (which sounds pretty great if this were real life or if it had any effect on Clive and company). The accessories are also largely useless in the grand scheme of the game, as most of them only shorten the rest period of your special moves by minor amount of seconds. You are rarely in need of any special move at any given interval, and simply waiting an extra few seconds for the skill to return is not difficult by any means, especially outside of boss battles. The accessories that increase your stats are also completely invisible. Because of the speed of battle and the general design of the HUD, you can’t really tell how much any stat increases are working in your favor. The HP bar has no numbers visibly attached to it, so when you get hit, you have no real idea how much 50 defense points is really helping, and ultimately it doesn’t really matter anyway. Another staple of RPG’s missing is that Status Effects are almost completely absent in the game, both positive and negative. You can basically up your defense or your attack, but that’s about it. Even if they do exist, they must have happened so infrequently, that I hardly found any use for them or was ever hindered by them.

In battle, your only real ally is Torgal, your faithful pup. His abilities are pretty limited and his basic function is to help you continue or finish combos. He also has a heal ability, but it can only heal your most recent set of damage, and by such a small percentage at a time, his heal is largely useless. But not as useless as the rest of the characters feel. You can’t control or request assistance from any other character that works with you throughout the entire game. You don’t have any traditional party aspects. While Jill might be able to freeze enemies, because you can’t control who she is doing it to or when, it’s mere coincidence if it works in your favor. Still, the game shines when you blow away your opponents with your entire arsenal. And maybe in an effort to balance Clive’s overpowered abilities, many of them obstruct the field of battle so completely, that the stronger enemies can still make strikes even though you can’t see them. At times, because of this, the camera is your worst enemy, always focused on Clive’s “sexy little waist” (a line from a completely different review that I can never unread). While your moves continue to destroy the battlefield, the best you can do is dodge around and counter blindly. Clumsy fun is what you might call Final Fantasy XVI’s battle system. It can be easily broken in your favor but that never stops it from being fun.

The backdrop of Valisthea is often a visual treat, but in spurts. Large swaths of the game are simply rock backgrounds or bland terrain. But when you run into ruins or waterfalls, it is quite a sight to behold. Just before XVI came out, I got obsessed with a feature of video games I never thought I would use; Photo Mode. And while Ghostwire: Tokyo was its own special kind of gaming hell, its photo mode was exhaustive. It was like using a real camera and photoshop in a game. I can recall games as recent as Red Dead Redemption 2 have photo modes and graphics so good, they tricked local television stations into thinking they were real photos of their own towns. And this is yet another place that XVI comes in last, with an overly basic photo mode with very minimal options. Hilariously, the camera is not free to move around anything other than Clive, so you have to work really hard to take shots of other people or things. And if you want to remove Torgal or Jill from a shot, tough shit, you can only toggle Clive in and out of pictures, so get ready to maneuver a bit. A quick aside, on the most disappointing aspects to the game is actually one of the most beautiful; the ruins. Throughout the game, ancient societies’ powerful ruins and ships have been hollowed out and used as city centers or bridges or highways. They, at best, get a few lines of dialog explaining them, but never come to fruition beyond that. They are simply pyramids, spectacles hinting at an ancient world, but go nowhere. This might be a little too realistic. The beauty of Final Fantasy and RPG’s is that in most cases, this kind of scenery ends up becoming something other than background information. Another shame because it was not just beautiful, but it looked and sounded interesting. Below you will find an album of every picture I took throughout my time. Seeing it all lined up like that felt like I hadn’t spent 2 months leading Clive through his journey.

Final Fantasy 16

As much as I wanted this to be a review, it really turned into a list of grievances. Because the save file doesn’t have an hours played clock, my best guys is what the PS5 recorded as my playtime. I put 88 hours into Final Fantasy XVI, and another 5 or so if you count writing up this article. As I have made clear, Final Fantasy games are an event for me. I look forward to them even if they don’t have a story, setting, or characters that appeal to me. It’s a bit of stockholm syndrome, held hostage by nostalgia. Since the release of Final Fantasy X, I have felt the franchise walk further and further away from me. It made the battles slower and more methodic, added a turn gage, and put a stop to general feeling of exploration. The XIth entry moved online and bloated the experience into a slog with lengthy hours spent leveling up and somewhat trivializing the personal nature of the stories that used to be relegated to a collective cast of characters. In XII, the world of Ivalice brought a broader, impersonal nature to the adventure, giving you deep characters and a wide world, but very little glue keeping all the pieces together. With XIII, we were on rails where there was little strategy  in battle, but a bombastic scenery and convoluted story encompassed the cast. The legend of XIV’s epic failure is only encompassed by its meteoric rise from the ashes as one of the best online games still played today, and while it is loved for its story and cast, everyone essentially being the main character in their own right never passed for me. The road trip dramedy of XV and its splintered sales tactics of Anime, Film, and DLC just to keep up with the bland and incoherent story was still blessed with some heartfelt moments between its lead boys. And of all of these games, XVI is the one I have had the hardest time with. There are so many missed opportunities to be a great game, simply by absence of features alone. This game is marked by its absence of not just things that are sacred to Final Fantasy and RPG’s, but by basic gameplay features that would have otherwise elevated and erased this deeply held sentiment expressed before you. This game only treads water on good graces of the old fans and the surprise of new ones. It holds its breath on the talent of its voice cast and how well they express what little they are given. And most of all, makes land on the backs of its grand beast battles which, while tone deaf to the rest of the game, break through the malaise that otherwise would have compromised the game as a whole. Final Fantasy XVI makes land, but only barely. There really is nothing left to say except for, “I forgive you, and I look forward to XVII. Godspeed and Thank You.”