Final Fantasy 16
Writing some mini-reviews to keep track of the games I’m playing, no idea if this will be a regular thing o.o
tl;dr
This was a slog D: I rolled credits out of a sense of obligation, and uninstalled rather than bother with the DLC.
If “a game is a series of interesting choices”, FF16 barely counts as a game – “choices” are few and far between, and I don’t recall any of them being “interesting”.
Setting
The entire world is generic medieval fantasy ruins; sometimes with pallette swaps, but it’s still a big empty desert with some ruined buildings, a big empty grassland with some ruined buildings, a big empty swamp with some ruined buildings - it all feels the same, and the feeling is “depression”. (Compare eg FF7 - even within the first area of the game - the slums, the city, wall market, the sewers, shinra HQ, all have their own vibes; you never need a map to tell you what part of the world you’re in).
The music is very similar – the “home base / hub area” music was depressing, so I went to the jukebox and scrolled through. Admittedly I hadn’t unlocked all of the tracks, but I’d unlocked most of them, and they were all depressing (except for the boss fight music, which was more high-energy… but not in a happy or relaxing kind of way, which is what I want from my home base soundtrack).
Plot
The game starts out as noun soup, with tens of characters and tens of factions, none of whom I know anything about, nor have any reason to care about. Even by the end of the game I couldn’t tell you the name of any of the countries or factions, and I don’t recall them mattering at any point. Half way through it is revealed that the real baddie was God all along, and everything else was a distraction.
World Building
I think it says something when the game has not one, not two, but three lore assistants built-in
- During cutscenes you can pause and read the background info about characters and locations on screen
- There is a library of random information
- Most interesting of all there is a map of how all the characters are connected to each other, and you can scroll the timeline to see how these connections change. You can even listen to each character’s perspective and see their thoughts regarding each other character. On a technical level this is actually really impressive and I wish more games had something like this.
Unfortunately, none of the lore was interesting, or mattered to the game in any way.
Characters
Mostly dull; the couple who were interesting were interesting in an unpleasant way. I didn’t enjoy spending time with any of them. If the game let you choose who is in your party (it doesn’t), then I wouldn’t have had any favourites who I tried to keep with me.
I did briefly have fun at the start when I was coming up with a headcanon about some NPC’s homoerotic activities (there’s a lot of “strapping young lads” and “dominants” and topless men with 6-packs), but those characters exited the plot fairly quickly.
Non-combat gameplay
The main quest is a walk from A to B to C; the side quests are “go kill a thing and come back”, “go collect a thing and come back”, occasionally “go talk to a person and come back” - as far as I can recall there was not a single decision at any point in any of them. (There is one side quest where you go to read a plaque and then tell somebody what the plaque says, and the game presents you with three choices, but all three choices railroad you onto the same path)
There are no mini-games.
The most interesting decision which engaged my brain outside of combat was “should I call a chocobo (3 second cutscene, then fast movement), or should I just walk (no overhead, slower movement)?”
Combat gameplay
Equipment has zero variety - weapons only have a single stat, with each weapon being stronger than the last; there are never any interesting decisions to make about what’s best in any given situation.
Elemental magic is there visually, but not mechanically - fire and ice both do the exact same damage in the exact same way, enemies don’t have strengths or weaknesses, there are no decisions to be made.
Other magic is not there - no status conditions, no buffs or debuffs, no defense.
Parrying and dodging exist, but neither seemed to work reliably enough to be useful (for comparison, I love the parrying and dodging in Dark Souls and Metal Gear Rising)
There is some variety in abilities (most of them you press the button and it happens, but one you hold the button to charge up, one you build up power with weak attacks then release in a strong attack), but in practice I just used whichever ability was currently off-cooldown.
The only part of combat I found slightly interesting was running around enemies to get a bunch of them in a small area before using an AOE attack - making a little game for myself where I saw how many trash mobs I could hit at once, then trying to break that record.
Party members don’t really do anything beyond dance around in the background. They are comically incapable of finishing a fight – if you get an enemy down to 1hp, you can stand and watch them hit it for 0 damage for as long as you like, the game will always wait for the player to make the final blow. There is zero sense that you’re part of a team (compare to most earlier FF’s where you build a team with healer, fighter, mage, etc - each with unique roles, where different team compositions play differently)
The “limit break” is, as far as I can tell, exactly the same as normal combat but with a 25% damage boost. (Compare eg FF8, where each character had their own unique mini-game for a limit break attack)
The “cinematic fights” are 30-minute cutscenes with the occasional “press X to continue”; there are no decisions to be made. They’re visually pretty, but that wears off after one or two minutes. I ended up putting a movie on my laptop to keep myself entertained during the final boss.
Airship
No airship.
Conclusion
This game made me sad - not because of the plot, but because of the experience of playing it.
The things I love about most Final Fantasy games are the worlds, the sense of adventure, the characters, the decisions to be made in gameplay, the variety in mini-games, the interesting side-quests - this has none of those. Rather than a Final Fantasy, it feels like a generic medieval-fantasy character-action game with tedious combat, separated by even-more-tedious cutscenes.
On the plus side, it made me appreciate all the other games in the series – for example, FF7 has more interesting decisions to make in weapon selection than FF16 does in the entire game (Do you go with high attack? High magic? Large number of materia slots for varied options in combat? Fewer slots, but linked, to do more advanced spells? Weaker weapon, but with a materia growth multiplier to trade strength now for strength later? And then which materia do you put in it? A variety of elements for every enemy type? Tailor the elements to the biome you’re in? Extra unique moves like “steal”? Stat buffs?)
2024-01-21 00:00:00 -0600