Over the last few years, I have went through a lot of the Final Fantasy series. I have recently beat 5, 9, 10, 13, 13-2, Remake and Rebirth (which I reviewed here), and I also played a lot of almost every other non-MMO mainline entry in the series (in the distant past I have also beaten final fantasies 1, 4, 6, and 7), plus direct sequels. Between that and the fact that I’m a game designer, and one who is also working on my own RPG, I feel like I’m in a pretty good position to give some thoughts on this latest entry in a way that might be helpful to other Final Fantasy fans.
In my opinion, Final Fantasy 16 is really bad. Just a good old-fashioned bad videogame.
This review won’t contain spoilers.
It’s hard to know where to start with this game. I think it does almost everything wrong. At its core, it is a character action game similar to Devil May Cry, but while those are typically shorter, (DMC 5 is ~11 hours) this one is streeeeetched to 40 hours.
To be fair, I’m not a huge fan of character action or even just real time action games to begin with. However, over the past few years I’ve come across a number of such games: Ys 8, Tales of Berseria, Scarlet Nexus – all of which I’ve liked a lot more than Final Fantasy XVI. In fact, over the last 5 years, I have played probably 100 or more RPGs that I hadn’t played before, some of which were real time, some of which were turn based. And FF16 might be the worst of all of them.
So I do think that while, yes, it started out in a way that was going to be a challenge for me to enjoy from the get go, that’s not even close to the whole story. Everything in this game, from the music, to the narrative, to the character setup stuff, to the lore, almost everything I can think of, strikes me as boring, bland, safe, and uninteresting.
I have had a hell of a time putting time into this game. I got it on the day it was released back in June of 2023. I actually bought a PS5, just to play it. I was excited to get in on the ground floor with a new Final Fantasy game, when it came out – something I had not done… well, maybe ever, actually (perhaps with Final Fantasy 1 or 4). Every other FF game, I played 1 to 20 years after it came out. (I just played 9 for the first time through in 2022, and it is incredible.)
But yeah, my hope had been to have the game beaten by the time the PC version came out. Well… today, the PC version came out, and I’m still just 75% or so through the plot. So, I do want to say that I haven’t yet beaten the game, and it’s possible that upon beating it, I will suddenly improve my opinion of the game, although, I seriously doubt it.
Vibes and story
Let’s put gameplay aside for a minute and talk about the overall vibe. This is a story about a bunch of gruff white men kind of grunting at each other a lot. I joked on my Discord that if they had just named this game “Men of Valor” – a much more suitable name for what the game is – instead of “Final Fantasy”, I think it would have went over a lot better. The cast is largely a bunch of Tough Dudes with very similarly humorless dispositions. There are almost no jokes in the game, or cuteness, or god forbid, any sort of silliness. There is one Moogle in the game that looks completely out of place with everything else. It is the most likeable entity in the entire videogame but it does not belong there.
There is a woman, technically, in the main cast, named Jill, but as her name and grey attire might suggest, she is extremely bland and boring. She gets very few speaking lines, and when she does, it almost never has any agency except for one part in the plot where they’re very explicitly (and suddenly) like OK WE’RE DOING A JILL THING NOW. Then they go back to just pretending Jill doesn’t exist. They attempt to do some kind of “love story” between her and the main character, Clive, but there is nothing remotely like a spark between them, this due in part to the fact that there are no sparks ANYWHERE in the game. Again, there’s no joy, no humor, no fun. It’s all just people being miserable at each other.
The world is sort of a generic “Fantasy World”, like what a teenager imagines the middle ages to be like, plus some magic. There are some specifics, and it tries to have a “theme”, which is a really boring, safe message of “the world should judge you for who you are, not what you are”. Which is like, fine, as a message. But it is sure NOT to engage with that idea too deeply or bring out any political nuance or details that might interact with what people seriously care about in 2024. I mean, it’s a corporate game that has no intention of rocking any boats. No big surprise there. For me a world is all about the people. I just did not really get a sense that there are people in this world, as I did in games like Trails in the Sky FC and Final Fantasy 9. Instead, it feels like a 2D caricature of what a teenager thinks the middle ages were like.
My sense is, now having finally watched a little bit of Game of Thrones, that Final Fantasy XVI is what happens when a gamer tries really hard to copy Game of Thrones. It’s like a hollow impression of Game of Thrones, which, to be fair, I already wasn’t a fan of to begin with.
There are many, many sequences which make no sense. But not “makes no sense” in the I guess “Nomura” sort of way, where he’s clearly just lying to the audience to cheaply create intrigue (as I talked about in my Rebirth review). In this game, things make no sense in a lazy, boring sort of way. Just gameplay/plot contrivance stuff, or sort of newbie storytelling mistakes of losing the plot. The plot is meandering, and aimless, feeling like it’s “starting over” multiple times throughout with a new approach to what this story is going to be about.
I was never compelled to play more by anything in this plot. The main character is yet another gruff man who is boring and not fun to watch. The game overall strikes me as being made by people who like movie trailers more than movies. It has a lot of the trappings of drama, there are “dramatic looking” scenes, but there’s not much underneath the surface.
Gameplay
I guess in theory the actual combat is… okay? I’m told that if you actually do go through the whole 40 hours, you can play through again on a new unlocked setting where the knobs are tuned in such a way that the combat system starts to make a lot more sense. To gate that behind a 40 hour game is ridiculous, though, and really does make it feel like they just stretched out a DMC game without thinking through the consequences.
There are CAG fans who can tell you a lot more about the nuances of this gameplay system and how it compares to DMC or other games in that genre. I’m not one of those. For me, the gameplay felt best described as “absolutely normal 2023 Videogame Combat”, which is to say, it’s 3rd person, left stick moves your guy, right stick moves the camera, there’s a lock on, a dodge roll, a few spells. And basically EVERY SINGLE FIGHT is: dodge roll their moves, then counter attack with all your stuff. That’s it.
In what might be a Final Fantasy first, at least since the first few entries in the series, I never encountered a boss or a fight that forced me to “change up my approach”. This is because there is almost no party building / customization options whatsoever. You only have 1 character in your party (there are sometimes NPCs that walk around with you but you can’t configure them at all), and the item system is one of the most barebones in Final Fantasy history, you can’t do anything with it, at all. There’s a skill tree – actually, it’s not a tree, it’s just, a bunch of skills laid out, that you can learn in any order. But it really doesn’t matter much what skills you take, it changes almost nothing, because there just isn’t much mechanical terrain in this game. It’s basically just, do you want to do slightly more damage or deal slightly more stagger? That’s about it! The reality is, you have to do both, so it really really doesn’t matter or change the way it feels to play. Ultimately, you’re just gonna dodge roll > use all your abilities > loop. The health bars are way too big, so you’re just sitting there mashing and mashing away on guys for minutes at a time. My fingers actually hurt after playing this game for an hour. I think on some level, they knew that their combat wasn’t all that interesting which is why they are constantly blasting the screen with an unprecedented amount of particle effects. This amount of particle effects makes me think they were insecure about the system itself.
It’s just really repetitive. There are no points in the game where the combat “changes significantly”. It’s just the same thing from hour 1 as it is in hour 30. And there’s no minigames, either! (I hate forced minigames but I think minigames are a great way to break up a longer game, especially when they’re great like Queens Blood or Tetra Master.)
I can’t stress enough how much it sucks to lose that “getting new characters in your party” thing. 15 also failed to have this, where you also got four light skinned men right out of the gate and that’s all you’ll ever have in your party. I really think these games are losing more than they’re gaining by not letting us do the classic D&D fantasy thing of coming into a new town and, wow, I met a really cool wizard and he wants to join my party!
Overall, maybe if you’re a CAG-head *AND* you beat the game *AND* want to continue with the New Game Plus mode, under those conditions, the gameplay could be “good”. But for most of us, it’s just a boring, generic, mashy videogame. People have said that this game has more in common with God of War than it does an RPG, and I think that’s really valid.
Music
Okay, music is something that I’m formally trained in, and I care the most about in videogames, and ARGH. The music in this game is seriously such a disappointment. What the hell – how did this happen!? How did we go from the incredible town songs in FF6 and FF7 to this? It’s like a generic “High Fantasy Town.mid” song.
To be fair, the absolute best song on the soundtrack is the battle song, which, if you’re going to get one song right, that’s the one to do it with. But even this doesn’t come close to the battle songs in most Final Fantasy games.
Square is really feeling the loss of Nobuo Uematsu here. They still have Naoshi Mizuta, but had him work on the soundtrack of Stranger of Paradise instead of a mainline game, which was a huge mistake. Rebirth also seemed to have hogged all the good composers, because that soundtrack has like 800 songs on it and almost all of them are good or at least kind of cool.
Final Fantasy 16’s music is composed by a man named Soken, who, when you look at his history as a game composer, it is actually kind of baffling that he got put in charge of such a huge flagship mainline final fantasy game. He simply was not up to the task and it’s incredibly apparent throughout the whole soundtrack. There are so many pieces where the orchestration is poorly voice lead, generic, lacking identity. It’s at best “trailer music” slop, and at worst really uninspired and amateurish.
Music means a lot to me, so it’s hard to say how much my overall feelings would have changed if this game had good music, like most Final Fantasy games do.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I’m just so disappointed with Final Fantasy 16. I haven’t been this disappointed in a videogame in a long time, actually. There is one thing that this game did right, in my view, which is that it is, at least in principle, a main-character driven story (at least, for parts of it). That’s something that I wish more RPGs would be.
There are some nice art pieces in here, particularly the monster designs are pretty cool. But overall, this game is just not worth the time it takes to play. It’s way too long, it’s boring, it’s uninspired and it’s just not fun. I tried really hard for well over a year to beat it and… I just don’t want to!
I do think that the Mergers & Acquisitions behemoth that Square became after ~2000 or so really made it a lot harder for good art to get made by their creatives. That said, I really hope that Square takes a dramatically different approach with the next Final Fantasy game – I still have hope. To be clear, I do not want them to “go back to” the FF1-10 style of games. We already have those games. Many of them are great, play 6, 7, 9, and 10 if you haven’t already, but the answer is not to re-produce what has already been done. I want them to do something new. But not this. No more of this, please.
Thanks for reading.
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