Final Fantasy XVI Review

[I’m not sure which of the two disclaimers to start with so I’m just go with this one: nothing in this review says you have to dislike something you like. No disagreement about the quality of something encourages or invites you to get mad, you can just shake your head and move on.]

[This review contains spoilers for Final Fantasy XVI and I’d suggest you either finish the game completely or decide you don’t care about finishing the game before moving on.]

I went through all of Game of Thrones in about one month.

When I say all of Game of Thrones, I mean all of it. The first new episode I watched as it broadcast live was the final one, a misguided attempt to grip the zeitgeist firmly with both hands before it fully escaped into the realm of Starbucks cups and memes. While this all made sense at the time, trying to cram seasons of that show into a smaller package did not create something tighter and denser, it forced you to see precisely where it goes off the rails with stunning clarity.

It was hard not to think about that when playing Final Fantasy XVI. The title wears its Game of Thrones influence on its sleeve, but that’s not why it’s good or bad. The title’s misunderstanding of what made Game of Thrones work, while simultaneously following it into an equally baffling denouement, is worth examining, but the game’s failures are because it doesn’t understand what makes a story work. It stumbles into an accidental theme of flailing wildly against deeper, abstract ambitions and then falls back on to easy tropes to avoid actually saying anything.

Final Fantasy XVI is a beautiful disaster in many ways.

If You Have Act Three Problems, You Have Act One Problems

To get to how badly FFXVI disappointed me, I have to start with why it started off so good.

When writing the TV show Lost, showrunner Damon Linelof had plans for how some of those early mysteries were going to be solved. However, as it became clear that the show was going to outlive those mysteries, he started planting seeds for further questions to hopefully sprout answers deeper into the show’s inevitable hospice years without a concrete plan. This obviously did not work out as eventually the audience realized they were passengers in a car with no clear direction but forward, but that initial thrill of enigma is something that seemingly stuck with people over time.

Final Fantasy XVI has this same problem/virtue. The opening act leaves you with such an exciting premise you do not really notice the shaky edifice it’s building to support the rest of the game. An early chapter transports Clive back to his teen years where he remembers being betrayed by his mother, turning into the Eikon of fire, seeing a hooded man, and killing the Phoenix — his brother, Joshua. It’s compelling and creates a clear structure for the game to follow through on. You’re entirely too dazzled to ponder whether this chapter was unnecessarily long or really needed a pointless jaunt through the swamp before anything imperative actually happened.

But all these things happen and you’re waiting with bated breath for the game to catch up to these mysteries. How did Clive not realize that he was the Eikon of Fire and was actively killing the Phoenix? What were his mother Annabelle’s deeper motivations? Why did the antagonist Ultima appear to Clive as a hooded man, an appearance Joshua also adopts after the timeskip? What secrets did the Phoenix Gate hold?

And you’re gripping the edge of your seat patiently bit-by-bit for these things to resolve with solutions that satisfy not only what you can imagine but what you could not imagine. You sit there, pushing through boring subquests and linear levels, anticipating pulling back in the trawling net and seeing what you captured, only to realize by the end of the second act that the game has no real interest in subverting or even meeting your expectations.

How did Clive not realize he was the Eikon of Fire and was actively killing the Phoenix but was somehow watching it happen as a third party? Dunno, denial I guess. What were Annabelle’s deeper motivations? She didn’t really have any, she’s just kind of evil. Why did the antagonist dress as a hooded man, despite having the ability to look like anyone or anything and appear solely to specific people? So they could confuse the player into thinking it was Joshua. What secrets did the Phoenix Gate hold? Eh, the same stuff that’s in like ten other places in Valisthea.

These are reductive answers, but the fuller scope of them — Annabelle really believes in the divine right of nobility — are not really any more interesting than the abridged ones so much as they are convenient excuses from the writers.

Final Fantasy XVI charts a middle ground between not feeling confident in its own storytelling and also exhibiting mounds of unearned confidence when it comes to presenting it. It wants to just show you things, like a dog running back and forth to pick up toys to present to you but isn’t sure what to do once you see them.

A Liberal View of Slavery

There’s no better example of this than the bearer-slavery world building, which states that people born with magic powers are treated as subhuman workers and are forced to work until they turn the stone. The game frontloads the inhumanity of this with tales of cruelty — a father and son that watch bearers get fed to a pet monster for sport, a little girl that forces her bearers to use up all their magic and then throws them away, a mother that cheerily gives away her cursed newborn, etc. But eventually the story loses interest in this framework as anything other than a dismissive wave to the oppressed that Clive must save by saving the world.

The moral compass of the game never seems sure whether it should convince you slavery is wrong (an opinion players come into the game with anyway) or that it’s standard in the world and we should view it within that context or that taking it away will cause a rocky period for society. I could buy all these options as possible lenses with which to explore any terrible thing and give it layers, but also like...you visit a town with four windmills. Clearly they’re not luddites to the point where society would collapse if you ended the institution, thus ensuring the wobbly point the game is making will feel fake.

Moreover, Final Fantasy XVI will occasionally introduce equivocation as attempts at shades of gray without realizing how deeply it undermines its central point. At the end of one side quest, slaves that Clive had been trying to rescue for several quests already were put on another boat heading to a country that ostensibly treats its slaves better, eliciting little more than an “All’s well that ends well” from the firebrand revolutionary Clive.

In another jaunt, as part of a much-longer series of quests about your hideout’s blacksmith, Clive returns the blacksmith to his former village and sees that they’re using fire bearers to make hotter flames until they themselves burn out. The ethical conundrum then isn’t whether to stop them or whether that’s wrong, it’s whether to provide them with Cid’s intellectual property for fire-burning engines. Of course, Clive simply does, and then it’s never made clear what happens to the slaves there. Maybe they’re treated as well as slaves in the other country, thus making it morally okay.

The game tries to have it multiple ways on the slavery subplot and then more or less drops the zoomed-in story to zoom out to an uncaring God and a traditional “fight against your fate” theme. The writers really want you to care about something, even if they often confuse cruelty with debate, and then do not care about it themselves by the end.

I do not wish to endlessly harp on the slavery aspect as I never really expected them to handle it deftly, more because it is a AAA video game than anything else, but it’s emblematic of how Final Fantasy XVI just loses interest in itself over and over and leaves the player holding the bag. I badly wanted the game to nail the strike it was perfectly positioned to hit. Instead, it sets up bowling pins and, while the ball slowly rolls down the lane, calls your attention to the vending machine so you don’t notice the ball slowly veer into the gutter midway through.

Lights, Camera, Action

I want to be clear that my distaste for Final Fantasy XVI has nothing to do with it being enough of a RPG or not. While obviously it’s trying to reach for a new audience that Square does not think cottons to turn-based battle anymore, I have no issue with it trying to pursue a character action mold to shape a new gameplay system around. And by and large, the game mostly hits the notes it’s trying to hit. The battle system in the game is perfectly serviceable, it just does not aspire to anything more than that, and that lack of ambition is disappointing.

A lot of Final Fantasy XVI’s marketing wanted to compare it to contemporaries like Devil May Cry 5 and Bayonetta and that comparison absolutely does Final Fantasy a disservice. As action games, those games are just better. They’re not better in all aspects, but game development is also not a zero-sum game and better production values does not necessarily mean you had to pull away from, say, combo variety.

Final Fantasy XVI gives Clive multiple abilities in the shape of absorbed Eikon powers — taking Garuda, for example, gives Clive four optional abilities that focus on Garuda’s claws and wind powers. With the exception of Odin, none of these really affect Clive’s bread & butter combos, but they offer more customization than none. The problem is that the game does nothing to encourage you to vary it up after you find what works. It does not stop you from doing it, sure, but the loadout you use to handle one enemy will work exactly as well for any other enemy in the game.

This ends up exasperating, or maybe is actually a symptom of, the game’s encounter design problem. Every non-Eikon fight in the game is either with a small group of enemies, a small group of enemies with one big enemy with a stamina bar, or a single larger enemy with a big HP bar. If you have fought one of these types of encounters, you have fought them all, and no aesthetic design variation on the thirteenth style of Big Guy With Large Weapon is going to make him feel any different to fight than the 300 before him.

It is not terrible, it’s enough to keep you going for 60 hours to see what’s next, but it feels like the bare minimum is done to just keep the treadmill moving. The battle system’s biggest moments, the hunts, are undermined by the enemy variety making it so you’re never fighting anything unique and they are dealt with in the exact same way as the previous times you have fought this enemy. They are poor emulations of Final Fantasy XII’s execution of the same concept, which forces you to rethink your gambits and strategies for each kind of enemy.

I speculate that some parts of the battle system shipped in a diminished capacity, as there’s allusions in the game’s ability tree to elemental changes between Eikon types. There’s no evidence of elemental weaknesses at all within the game and if that system exists, it’s diminutive at best. I wonder if there’s a version of this game that was more complicated before it had to comply with the mission statement of broadening its appeal. Maybe that extra layer of complication would not have made it any better, maybe it would have made it worse, who knows.

I, Ifrit

The most lauded part of Final Fantasy XVI is its gigantic boss fights, where Clive transforms into the Eikon Ifrit and does battle with other enemy Eikons. These battles show influence from fighting games and action games with massive cinematic QTEs to birth an explosion of particle effects. It also takes heavily from games like Asura’s Wrath including adherence to beat-by-beat setpieces that follow roughly the same but with the names changed.

I think, for a first-time playthrough, these fights are visually interesting and cool. I also think they’re mostly non-interactive, not at all challenging, and entirely too long. Both these things are true. I genuinely enjoyed my time playing through these boss fights, but I dread ever doing them again.

The QTEs should have been varied up, as they only come in two varieties: press R1 to dodge, mash Square to hit. At some point I would have rather they just sit back and let me watch the movie instead of trying to pretend that I was a part of the fight. The QTE attacks also should have taken off significantly more health from the bosses than they did because battles where I dash in for the 20th time to use my two Eikonic abilities and then just wail on the enemy until I get pushed away again wore thin.

I do not expect most boss fights to age well through repeated playthroughs — though I might argue that doing so is a hallmark of better character action games, but that clearly wasn’t the aim here — so I don’t hold the decaying of FFXVI’s boss fights against it. They are, however, entirely too long.

Timeskip

So, according to Google docs, it’s been roughly three months since I started working on this review in fits and starts. Most likely I was never going to finish it, but as I have been playing all these incredible games that have been coming out this season, I can’t help but let my mind drift back to Final Fantasy XVI and whether it holds up to what the rest of the gaming industry brought forward this year. In that framing, it’s impossible for me to feel that FFXVI has done anything but disappoint.

Recently, I saw a friend tweet “Press R3 + L3 To Accept The Truth,” referencing a pivotal moment in the game where Clive accepts that he killed his little brother and that he is Ifrit. It’s a poignant moment in the game that I can see affecting people, but it was lost on me because by that point the player already knows it’s not the truth. They undermined the moment before it ever happened and Clive is wrestling with a dramatic irony that the gets cut off at the knees again and again throughout the story. When this truth he accepts gets fully proven wrong in front of his own eyes, a timeskip happens where you never see the fallout. Instead, he casually mentions it seven years later — the same physical features, the same clothes, the same attitude — as a mere curiosity that he would love to see the conclusion of one day.

In essence, while writing this review, I have taken that same kind of timeskip. But unlike Clive, those nagging threads keep bothering me. I cannot bring myself to love Final Fantasy XVI because it gets so close to nailing something and then will back off because of a lack of courage or ambition or something to see it through. It crosses a threshold for being too good to ignore all the things wrong with it.

When Clive accepts the truth about himself, it involves defeating a dark version of himself lying within his psyche. Thematically, the game wants to insist that accepting the truth means overcoming your darkness, which sort of makes sense though does not apply holistically throughout the game. This review is me accepting the truth about FFXVI. It’s a game that should be a homerun, but instead stalls out on third base. It builds toward something and then suddenly forgets what it is building toward.

There are games out there that I like significantly less than Final Fantasy XVI that I think were more willing to finish their thought than this game does and unfortunately that is going to be the game’s legacy for me.

6/10