I got Final Fantasy XVI I think the day it came out, and played through most of the game in that initial burst. However, after getting just one main questline quest from the end (actually two, but the first of them was a "talk with a bunch of NPCs in your home base") I set it aside.
Part of what reignited the game for me was looking up some builds online. Even being, I think, a bit overleveled (I think you're meant to be at or a little above level 40 when you beat the game, and I was 48 - though I did no grinding, only side quests, and honestly avoided a lot of fights out in the wilderness,) it's hard to actually get enough skill points to unlock all the cool abilities. But you can refund spent points easily, so I just went for a singular build and stuck to it. Basically, I had four abilities that built up Stagger very quickly and then a couple of high-damage abilities, and that made most fights fairly easy to beat.
While focusing on a stagger-and-punish build gave my actions a layer of strategy, it's still certainly not as deep as your typical (or perhaps I should say older) Final Fantasy games, where a mix of buffs, elemental damage types, and healing spells, spread across multiple party members, is what you need to understand to deal with the deadly monsters.
It seems a little reductive and also certainly a little late in the game to make this a "review" of the game, but I do think it might be good to talk about it in various categories:
Story:
FFXVI has a complex narrative of warring factions, where the villains aren't all playing on the same side. The complexity of the game's political landscape was for sure inspired by Game of Thrones, as was its mostly straight-up medieval aesthetic.
XVI's world is one of the most brutal seen in this series, where the exploitation of "Bearers" (those gifted by magical power) has created an underclass, the persecution of which seems to be the main unifying aspect of culture across the many kingdoms, empires, and such. Ironically, magic is also granted to Dominants, who possess the ability to transform into the mighty Eikons, Kaiju-sized versions of our familiar Final Fantasy summons. In these cases, most of these figures are exalted in their societies, serving as princes, kings, and other positions of leadership.
The strongest elements of XVI's story, though, are the personal ones. The game has a single player character (with a few very rare scenes in which you control another, though never in combat, if I remember correctly,) and Clive Rosefield is a compelling protagonist who undergoes a lengthy hero's journey. I will say, as well, the tendency to skew Final Fantasy characters extremely young is avoided here - while Clive's story begins in his mid teens, by the end of the game, he's in his 30s, which these games often treat as old age (as someone with only a year and a week left in his 30s, I've started seeing 30-year-olds as young whippersnappers).
And the epic timeframe of this story lends it an epic scale. The true villain of the story is profoundly mysterious for a fairly large chunk of it. It's a little on the messy side, but I think the default mode for Japanese video games is to shoot for big and complex rather than tight and clean, and I'm ok with that.
One of the elements of the story I wish was stronger was Jill, the primary love interest and Dominant of Shiva. While she does accompany you and fight alongside you sometimes, she still feels like she's playing the part of the passive love interest back home. Granted, it's hard for any of the characters to feel non-passive when you can't control them, and maybe I'm being unfair here, but I wish she were a little more active.
Gameplay:
I think I sort of covered this, but XVI disappointed me in truly ditching RPG mechanics (apart from, like, stats and levels) in favor of becoming fully an action game. But I think playing it has also given me an appreciation for action games that employ a stamina meter. Attacks with Clive's sword feel light and weak, because you can make so many strikes so quickly. While a stamina meter is a limiter, it allows the game to balance things so that a single weapon strike lands with greater force, and I'd have liked that. After getting the game's best (I assume) weapon, Gotterdamerung, I still felt like my regular attacks were pretty pitiful. The Eikonic skills, which do have cooldowns, felt much more impactful (and were).
When Clive transforms into Ifrit for the game's climactic kaiju battles, it feels very exciting, but (wisely,) the mechanics are very similar to how Clive controls. And while Ifrit is, like, 40 feet tall, usually the things he's fighting are just as large or larger. Unfortunately, this means that the scale of the fight is sometimes lost. A few such fights take place in the air (or space) and in these cases especially, scale totally disappears.
There are also a number of "Cinematic Clash" and "Cinematic Evasions" where a cutscene begins mid-battle, and you have a kind of Quicktime Event (hey, remember Quicktime?) that, I've got to honest, doesn't feel as cool as if they just let the thing happen in the cutscene without my interaction.
I'd have liked a bit more depth to the combat and to the way that you build up your stats. Weapons just have a single damage stat, and so there's never any real choice to be made between weapons. Armor might have higher physical or higher magical defense, but in most cases they're the same value, making upgrades obvious.
I've also complained before about the design of sidequests. The stories of the sidequests are often good, even if I think the dialogue with the NPCs often goes on about twice or four times as long as it needs to (and for some godforsaken reason, every time they cut to a new scene, and sometimes even in the middle of a scene, there's like a three-second establishing shot where the camera tilts down to look at Clive talking to someone, and it just makes these dialogue scenes that much more tedious) the story of the sidequests is often compelling. But there are other problems: one is that there are too many of them, and two is that they have like, Vanilla-WoW-level quest design, often sending you to some location to pick up "three of this one thing" off the ground. It feels like padding on a game that really doesn't need it.
Music:
Holy crap, though, the music is freaking amazing. My favorite is Find the Flame, and it's fun to see a kind of reprise in All as One, which plays in the last phase of the final boss. While I haven't played the DLC with it, Cascade, the Leviathan theme (which also plays in the game's early trailer) is great.
This is a game that really tries to hit you on an emotional level, and I tend to find music is the most surefire way to do so. This one nails it. (I mean, that's kind of a Final Fantasy tradition. Even if I think Nobuo Uematsu has stepped away from the series for the past... couple decades, they're still putting out some bangers.
Art Design:
I know that a lot of people were excited to see Final Fantasy "return" to a classic medieval fantasy look. Personally, I found it a little bit limiting. Character design is very strong, though, and for what it is, they do a good job. I might have liked a little more environmental variety. While we get a desert area in Dalmekia, the other regions are largely kind of standard Northern European-style climates.
Looking Forward:
Ok, there are some spoilers ahead:
The rumor is that there's a direct sequel to FFXVI. Having finished the game, I'm... curious to see how they do that.
Clive certainly seems like he's dead by the end of the game (though given that he's petrifying rather than succumbing to wounds like Joshua does, maybe this is something that could be reversed) but furthermore, magic (magick?) itself is leaving the world. What does that mean for... you know, a fantasy plot?
It's the same reason I doubt they could make a direct sequel to XVI's ten-entry-ago predecessor. VI ends with the Espers vanishing, magicite gone from the world, and Terra, the only human/esper hybrid, seeming to become fully human.
Both settings are going to have to recover from apocalyptic events - while Valisthea (from XVI - not sure if VI had a specific name for its world) is probably in better shape, and most of the direct threats are probably gone (I assume with the disappearance of magic, the aetherfloods have stopped and the Akashic are gone,) but also basically every society has crumbled (actually, I think the Dalmekian Republic might still be around? But for sure the Holy Empire of Sanbreque, the Kingdom of Waloed, and the Crystalline Dominon are freaking toast. That said, we also spend a lot of our sidequests building something that could serve as the foundation for new societies within those realms. (Well, not so much Waloed. The continent of Ash is kind of fucked.)
I'd actually be really curious to see if they did bring back Clive, and if the world he emerges into is one that's very different from the one that he left. I could imagine some far future in which he's de-petrified and has to reckon with a world transformed by technological developments. But... you know, who knows.
My best friend has been playing through older FF games, and after beating X, he briefly tried out X-2, but after about ten minutes of it gave up on it. I watched some of this, and it was a jarring shift from the pretty polished (for 2001) FFX.
However, it occurred to me that X-2 might have truly been the last turn-based Final Fantasy game, which is weird. He's started XII, which I got a decent chunk into but was ultimately turned off by its combat system. He pointed out that in a weird way, XII's system is kind of like an early precursor to the VII Remake/Rebirth combat system, which we both like. So maybe I should give it another try.
Still, especially after getting delightful surprise (and shattering heartbreak) of Expedition 33, I'd really hope that the folks at Square Enix consider a return to more traditional Final Fantasy mechanics. Frankly, I probably would have enjoyed this game a lot more if it had been a little more strategic/tactical.
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