I haven't finished the game yet - I suspect that I'm past the halfway point, as there's a clear indicator of plot progression visible on the world map, and it seems very likely that I have only one more "thing to do" on it.
Being vague to avoid spoilers.
But I wanted to reflect on the game and how I feel about it.
Final Fantasy games have been moving away from traditional turn-based battles since XII (or XI, though that was an MMO, so I don't think anyone expected it to work the same way). I'll confess I'm a bit of an old crank, then, who wishes that instead of abandoning this format, they had found ways to make it modern and more dynamic.
XVI takes this to its logical endpoint by becoming a full-on action game. There are "RPG elements" in the sense that you can level your character up, and indeed if you are diligent about doing side quests and not avoiding fights with monsters, the game gets easier because you'll be higher-level.
But the gameplay reminds me, if anything, far more of the recent God of War games. Like in those games, you'll be able to focus on certain special abilities and invest points you gain while leveling up to make them more powerful.
The magical, Eikon-based abilities you learn all work the following way - each is affiliated with one of the Eikons whose power you have received (you begin with only that of the Phoenix, but as you encounter and often defeat the Dominants of other Eikons, you absorb some of that power. You can then "equip" up to three Eikons at a time, changing what your special ability (linked with the circle button) does, and also the elemental damage type of your triangle-based ranged magic attack (which does pitiful damage unless charged up). Each of the Eikons has three abilities associated with it that you can invest ability points into and assign to R2+Triangle or R2+Square.
These abilities, I only found out well into the game, can actually be assigned to other Eikon "stances," so really you just have up to three sets of two abilities to swap around mid-combat.
Anyway, like the special attacks that Kratos has for each of his weapons in God of War 4/Ragnarok, these do a big effect and then have a cooldown. But once you have three Eikons, you can generally swap between them and by the time you use all of the abilities, the first pair are likely to have recharged (unless you get the extra-powerful ones for each Eikon, which tend to have longer cooldowns).
The result, then, is that there's not a ton of tactical choice to make. You basically want to use these abilities as often as you can. Sometimes, you can save them for when you stagger a foe, but they also make it easier to get foes to that point.
Clive has a lot of attacks and moves he can make in combat - I often do jumping attacks after charging at monsters.
The thing is, if there's a "right" way to time these attacks, I don't really see it. Most non-boss enemies are trivially easy and will usually die before they can hit me, so I'm not paying a price for any tactical sloppiness.
And, well... that's a little disappointing.
Final Fantasy combat has never been extraordinarily complex - you have buff spells to toss up on your party members and sometimes discover a foe has a weakness to certain damage types - but XVI feels far less tactical than previous games. For one thing, you're only playing as the one character, with perhaps some light management of your pet wolf, though his effect on foes tends to feel pretty minor.
What's a bit frustrating about this approach is that I know SquareEnix can do more.
Final Fantasy VII Remake transitioned the classic game to a much more modern gameplay system - yes, it ditched turn-based combat for something based more on action. But they kept a lot of the menu-based tactical options as part of it. Now, however, you basically do the action part of it in the parts of the turn-based system when you'd normally just be waiting for the ATB system to get you to your character's next turn. Buffs, heals, and elemental spells, along with abilities that didn't cost a resource other than filled-up ATB meters managed to bridge the tactical thinking of the old games with the fast-paced action of the new.
Not to mention, you'd often swap between characters, which usually helped fill their ATB meters faster, but also gave you other things to focus on.
Clive is rarely alone in Final Fantasy XVI. You often fight alongside the wolf Torgal, and usually with your childhood friend Jill, and sometimes with the altruistic outlaw Cid. But other than a few commands for Torgal, you only interact with Jill, Cid, and other sometime party members passively, letting them do their thing while you do your thing.
Furthermore, your big, flashy abilities all work on the same cooldown-based system. You do have limited resources in your Potions, Hi-Potions, and other things, but the big blow-out stuff is all limited only by the amount of time you wait for it to come back.
And, as such, there's no price to using those abilities. It's not really a decision to use them.
Now, the combat can feel thrilling thanks to the speed and flashiness with which Clive fights. And there's a particularly satisfying moment in fights when you perfectly time a dodge and come back at a foe with a counterattack (I have a necklace that gives me a few seconds of pseudo-Limit Break when I do this,) which is the closest the game comes to FromSoft-level satisfying combat.
All this said, what the game perhaps falls short on in terms of fundamentals, it might make up for in spectacle.
The Eikon fights are scattered throughout the game. Like in FFVIIR, you can't just summon Ifrit in every fight. But the story revolves around Dominants - people who serve as living hosts to the godlike Eikons, and who can transform into these massive creatures to do epic battle. While technically a spoiler, I think anyone with any modicum of literary comprehension will be unsurprised that the player character Clive is the Dominant of Ifrit, which in this world is the previously-unknown Eikon of Fire, in contrast with the Phoenix (the Dominant of which is Clive's younger brother Joshua).
And when Clive turns into the towering fire-demon, that's when the game hits its most epic set-pieces. Each one more or less evokes in the player a sense of "how could this possibly go more over-the-top?" only for the subsequent fight to somehow top it. (One element is how Ifrit is like ten stories tall and is smaller than most of the other Eikons you fight.)
Now, that being said, the Eikon fights actually use pretty much the same combat system as the main game - the numbers are about three or four orders of magnitude higher, and the setting and sense of enormity tends to be much grander. But just as I often default to jump attacks on Clive if I'm not burning through all my special abilities, I basically do the same as the Kaiju Ifrit.
There is challenge to the combat here - but I think a lot of it is about dodging attacks, which is more about twitch reflexes than careful tactical considerations.
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