A long time, but a mostly good one! (Final Fantasy XVI in review)

     Final Fantasy XVI is a very well made game. The gameplay is very different from almost any other game in the long series and plays more like a Bayonetta or Devil May Cry with some of the intensity or tight timing constraints involved in dodging, though the writing is definitely still that of an RPG title. With those two elements working hand in hand, this game could be really something special, but I'll dive into that a bit today. Did they take things too far into the serious side of RPGs, or did they lean too far into the wacky and wild world of action games? Let's talk about it!

An Ambitious Task!

    A long time ago, maybe even starting with Final Fantasy XII on the PS2, Final Fantasy began the move to an Action RPG instead of the Turn-Based model that they had relied on since its inception, I never played any of the XIII games (of which there are three, titled Final Fantasy XIII, XIII-2, and XIII-3 Lightning Returns, respectively), but XV was definitely a full on action RPG, still trying to work out how to play the Summon Abilities in a way where they would work well with the new systems put into place. In XVI, the whole magic system is built around the summon that you have equipped, and the summons themselves are saved for massive Kaiiju battles (Think of Godzilla fighting another giant monster, that's what it is). Unfortunately, in these battles, you're only really able to play as Ifrit or Phoenix, which isn't too much of a bummer, but I would have loved to get a wider variety. It should be stated right away that the combat in this game is a lot of fun, something that I really enjoyed for the vast majority of the game, and even when the game started feeling like it was dragging on, it was the one thing that pulled me through. I feel like the combat was a bit too easy for the first playthrough, to be honest. I chose the harder of the two options that I was given upon turning on the game (something about Action-Oriented as opposed to Story-Oriented), but I only ended up dying a handful of times. It felt good to take out most of the game's major bosses without too much trouble (with only the last few giving me a serious challenge), and the fast paced nature of those bosses worked really well. Some of the mini-bosses, however, felt a bit less exciting or even tedious at times. I know that once I beat the game, it unlocked the "Final Fantasy mode" which increases the difficulty significantly along with giving a "New Game+" option which will carry your items over to the next save file, but for a game like this which took me at least 60 hours to beat, I don't think I'm really pondering whether I should do a second playthrough at this time. There's nothing wrong with that, there are just a lot of games out right now, and I'm not trying to replay things that I've already just completed. I'll come back to it later maybe, but I'm fine with moving on for right now.

Style over substance

    The combat was fun, but I have to say that sadly, the story just didn't grip me at all in the way that the team wanted it to. The biggest problem I think came from the characters themselves. Let's talk about Final Fantasy VII for a second, and illustrate this problem with some better known characters. In that game, we have Cloud Strife, a character who begins the story by being a super brooding and edgy ex-soldier guy, then he meets Barrett and Tifa along with the group from Avalanche, all of whom have pretty big personalities. Aerith comes in, bringing a completely different spirit and sense of motivation from everyone else that we've met so far. Yuffie is a Ninja who wants to steal all of the materia, Red XIII is a lion dog guy who wants to save the planet after years of horrible experimentation done on him. All of these characters get Cloud to loosen up and understand the importance of the mission by the end of the game, and give us a really emotionally resonant conclusion. In Final Fantasy XVI, our protagonist, Clive, is like Cloud Strife from the beginning. He's very serious and brooding, but then the entirety of the game, Clive encounters people exactly like him. There were only two or three people in this entire game that felt like they stood out in any meaningful way, and because of this, the game's story just never was able to get me that invested. The plot itself didn't make much sense either, especially considering the main plot point for a lot of this game is that the main characters need to destroy all of the "mother crystals" and destroy magic in the world. I just felt like there was never an adequate explanation for why they wanted to do that, but maybe I missed something. The biggest fights always took place around these massive crystals, so I was excited to go to them for that reason, but the plot reason being "The threat of evil coming from magic is too great" just seemed like a stupid plot point, other than to just get points from the more edgy group. When I say that, I just mean that most Final Fantasy games have to do with crystals in some shape or form, so this time they decided to flip the script and destroy the crystals. It was a choice, but one that I felt didn't pay off that well in the end.

    I do like that this game focuses on Summons so much, making it so you unlock the powers of the different Final Fantasy "Eikons" as you go through the game. It really adds to the feeling of getting more and more powerful as you go along, in addition to just leveling up abilities all through the game. On top of just having the summons here, they make wildly compelling characters along with the dominants that embody them. This also potentially causes part of the issue with dragging the game along, since each encounter feels like it can't possibly get any bigger, but then they just keep topping themselves. That's not a real complaint, since I was just happy to have another battle like that, but each Eikon fight felt like it was getting close to the end of the game. This is an infinitely better system than what Final Fantasy XV had going on in terms of the Summons, so I hope they keep this or something like this or Final Fantasy VII Remake along with the fast paced action for whenever they make Final Fantasy XVII.

    I need to talk about the downtime in this game. I already said that I love the crazy action sequences, but for every one crazy over the top action sequence, it seemed like there were at least 3 hours of walking around and talking to boring villagers with sidequests that felt like "Can you go to the drug store and get my prescription" or "my table is broken, go kill 14 of this enemy so I can fix it." Those are exaggerations, but these sidequests were extremely dull and led to very little additional content to the story. There are exceptions, of course, but for the vast majority, I felt like the side quests (which I think I did all of) didn't add much. I will say that by the end of the game, there were a few characters that I liked at least. I really liked the relationship between Joshua and Clive, I don't remember a time where brothers have been some of the main characters, and I felt like they were handled pretty well. I liked the relationship between Clive and Jill, even though it was an example of the classic trope of "Childhood friends falling in love," and I love Torgal, just in general. Torgal is just a big dog who is with you for the whole game pretty much, and he's a good boy. The winner of the award for the only person with an actual interesting personality goes to Mid, who doesn't become a very important character until about halfway through the game at least, but she at least made me smile when she would come in. Ironically, she was also the character that everyone else in the game thought was annoying and just a lot to deal with. Other than those characters, there were just a lot of people who had a lot of quests to try to get you interested in them, but I just never cared at all about Otto or Gav or Blackthorne, or Goetz, or most of the village leaders even. 

Time flies when you're having fun!

    This game took a long time to beat. Maybe I should have just played through the main story and potentially enjoyed it more that way, but with beating all of the sidequests and everything, I'm not sure how much time is on my actual save file, but I had the game open for 66 hours, according to the PS5 system clock. That's not the longest JRPG out there, for sure, but it felt much longer than that. The popular old saying is that time flies when you're having fun, which I think means that the opposite is also true. There were times where I just felt like I was barely slogging through the game, making no real progress while I asked everyone in town what it meant to make a good knife for a local blacksmithing apprentice (an actual sidequest that I did). There were definitely times that made up for these with the insane over the top craziness that tried to rival a crazy game like Bayonetta, though even the boss fights here weren't quite able to capture the same level of wackiness as you'll see there. There were definitely a few boss fights that were really big for the Final Fantasy Lore, such as when one of the bosses used Zettaflare, meaning that we finally have another Final Fantasy character with similar magical abilities as Donald Duck from the Kingdom Hearts franchise. Also the final boss, on top of attempting to rewrite reality for whatever reason, was able to use Holy and Meteor, which are two spells that should have some major significance for anyone who has played Final Fantasy VII.

    Final Fantasy XVI looks really good, it plays very well as far as the combat is concerned, and I really appreciate how well it marks the side objectives on the map, which makes it easier than ever to get around in a breeze. The music is incredible, and I want to  A huge positive is the load times, which are actually pretty insane as a whole. Unfortunately, by the time the game was over, I had already consistently felt like it was never going to end. It way overstayed its welcome, and by the time the credits rolled, I was happy to see it go. Also as a slight spoiler, the ending kept a popular trend in the Final Fantasy series that I thought just didn't make any sense, and it was a major bummer to see right at the finish line. While I ended up not being an incredibly huge fan of this game overall, I do like the direction that the series is taking, and I felt like it wasted my time much less than Final Fantasy XV. To answer my question from the beginning of this post, I think they did take this game in a more serious direction than was required, but they constantly pushed the envelope  I hope that the next game will continue moving in the direction of this game, and continue taking this series in wild and new directions.

    Thanks so much for reading this review, friends. I know that this review comes across as much more negative than a lot of my writings, but I really did enjoy it a pretty good amount. I just wish that they could have done more with the story, especially given the wild beginning that it had. If I could make one recommendation for someone playing through the game right now, I would say don't bother with a lot of the side quests. Do the ones that are marked with a "Plus" sign, because those are the ones that get you really good stuff, but for the most part, I think these quests are fairly skippable. Are you excited for anything coming out soon? I'd love to hear about it somewhere online. Personally I'm really excited for Princess Peach: Showtime, which will already be out by the time that you read this! Expect a review of that sometime in the near future! Thanks so much for your support as always, and I hope you'll have a great week! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed crystal destroyer, and I'll talk to you again soon!