‘Final Fantasy XVI’ Has An Identity Crisis
Final Fantasy XVI has an identity crisis, a design indecision that splinters the game right down the center, causing it to feel as brittle as the game’s Mothercrystals. After nearly 60 hours slogging through the main campaign, popping around the world map like a completionist to see what few diamonds in the dunghill of sidequests remained, I am stultified by what Final Fantasy XVI chooses to offer its players.
One of the first games that truly feels like it could only be possible via the ‘next generation’ of consoles, Final Fantasy XVI contains some astonishing graphical achievements through unforgettably impressive setpieces – specifically, boss battles with Eikons. These scenes not only left my jaw on the floor while playing, literally cackling with laughter at how cool they were, but the fact that these technically groundbreaking moments are interactive elevated them to feeling like peaks within the ongoing history of cinematic gaming.
At the same time, however, these peaks are punctuated with deep, unrelenting valleys of impossibly mundane tasks. The hours between Eikon battles are stuffed with activities and story beats so bland that they evoke parody. Whether pursuing a main map objective or an optional side quest, to describe these in-between moments as ‘phoned in’ feels charitable; it’s like entirely different teams cobbled together Final Fantasy XVI, and that feeling followed me through around four-fifths of my playthrough.
A Strong Introduction – The Merits of FF16’s Demo
Final Fantasy XVI starts incredibly strong and with brisk pace. I was initially sitting on the fence about whether I would day-one Final Fantasy XVI, but learning that the free demo for the game carried your progress into the main story was encouraging enough for me to try it out. I enjoyed Final Fantasy XVI’s demo so much that I didn’t even finish it before deciding to impulse purchase the full game. The excellent pacing, the polished visuals and voice acting, the culminating Eikon battle involving what the game later reveals to be Joshua and Clive in the form of the Phoenix and Ifrit respectively – it all coheres in a way that promises scale, emotion, and intensity.
The rest of Final Fantasy XVI is something like a sine wave thereafter, with the only oscillating ascension taking place around these, dare I say, iconic Eikon scenes. These Eikon battles are so critical to the genuine successes of Final Fantasy XVI because they are some of the first moments that I’ve owned a PS5 where I thought to myself, “Oh wow, this could never happen on last gen hardware.” These battles are audiovisual masterpieces with cameras that constantly follow explosive action, alternating between the usual combat system of rapid-fire combos and stylish animation. Uniquely to these fights, however, Eikon sequences intersperse quick-time event button presses, dialogue sequences that reveal the inner tensions of the embattled characters, and once-in-a-game attacks that wordlessly communicate the god-like powers that Dominants – characters who channel the powers of Eikons – possess.
The Peaks of Combat: Understanding Eikons
Each Eikon is introduced to the player either through a battle sequence or an inescapably Game of Thrones-tinged cutscene that provides the player necessary context that foreshadows how a character is more powerful and important than they may initially seem. Dominants are, as a rule, the most critical players on the chessboard of Final Fantasy XVI’s story; this is especially contrasted in the intermittent scenes devoid of Eikonic setpieces. The motivations of Dominants are not always made transparent to the player or to Clive, the protagonist, but the power teeming inside each of them is fully obvious from the moment you learn about a new Eikon.
Beyond the initial Eikon battle between Clive’s Ifrit and Joshua’s Phoenix, which ends in a pseudo-nuclear explosion that razes the family’s stone castle and seemingly kills those present, the game gradually spools out other Eikons, all of which possess a unique elemental spin to utilize in combat. Shiva, the anthropomorphic ice queen that has been present in every Final Fantasy game I’ve finished, is controlled by Jill, childhood friend and eventual lover of Clive. Ramuh, Eikon of thunder, is controlled by Cid (would it be a real Final Fantasy game without a Cid character?), who leads a ragtag guerilla group of sorts. Each such Eikon is passed on to Clive, either in a gesture of heroic good will or in a tragic act of sacrifice, and the player can then choose which Eikon powers they wish to most actively alternate between during normal combat. Clive’s Ifrit, however, is a constant throughout the entire game.
The Troughs of Combat: Losing Direction
While the addition of Eikon powers add an interesting dynamism to combat, introducing visual flares and a mix-and-match approach to elemental focuses, the moment-to-moment functionality of these powers aren’t different enough to keep the combat feeling fluid, fresh, and fun. Rather, as the now-trite Devil May Cry comparison elicits, the combat in Final Fantasy XVI never escapes the pitfall of feeling button-mashy and repetitive. In fact, Final Fantasy XVI is one of an increasing number of games where I’ve needed to wear compression gloves while playing, so as not to exacerbate the repetitive stress injuries (RSI) in my hands. Combo damage doesn’t stack up or pay off in a way that incentivized me to focus on that element of attacks, but rather devolves into a sort of waiting game as you let the two special moves in each equipped Eikon recharge. The result is that I commonly felt passive and withdrawn during the one element of game design that Final Fantasy XVI felt like it initially nailed: combat.
As combat grows stale, so too does the actual story – a concerning reality that worsens over time, like rotting wooden beams that creak before snapping. The developers of Final Fantasy XVI went all out in the aforementioned Eikon sequences and occasional intermittent cutscenes between chapters, but most of the remaining story beats have no life of their own. You can tell that the developers knew that these interspersed story segments and quests were lifeless due to the design decision to allow dialogue to be skipped. Since you quickly discern that asking shopkeepers questions doesn’t open any doors, that only full cutscenes contain the usual production value contained in the demo, and that the vast majority of tasks you complete are glorified fetch quests, the engagement evaporates. Especially towards the game’s end, I found myself wondering what I, or the characters, were motivated by.
Cross Examining FF14 and FF16
The structural formula established in the demo quickly abandons the initial opportunities you’re given to explore; the game also stops innovating and iterating on itself. Contrasted with the unforgettable Eikon encounters, the design of Final Fantasy XVI becomes bland: visit the main hub and pop in for any updated icons above the shopkeeper and blacksmith, fast travel to the side quest you initiate, fetch the items or fight the creature you’ve been sent to slay, the quests change, repeat. This uninspiring cycle is emphasized by the gaping lack of Eikon battles, causing what might otherwise be forgivably flawed game design to become the entire focus of the player for hours at a time. When entire play sessions could best be summarized as fetch quests, despite clearing my entire world map and main hub of optional icons, there has been a severe failure.
Part of the flaws so integrally embedded into Final Fantasy XVI’s design have been explained to me by die-hards of the critically acclaimed MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV (please don’t make me commit to the entire copypasta). Though I have never played Final Fantasy XIV myself, enough of my friends and Epilogue community members have exposed me to the game such that I understand how the disconnect between main story beats and core gameplay makes a lot more sense. While the combat action has virtually nothing in common with Final Fantasy XIV, the actual quests do seem to share a lot of the DNA between titles.
Final Fantasy XIV is a game that is designed to feel endless, to keep you hooked on their monthly subscription and logging back in for more; it seems to be the case that Final Fantasy XVI makes the fatal misstep of thinking that what quests it offers can feel the same way and still be successful. But because the player goals are so entirely different, this design does not readily translate. Final Fantasy XVI needs to keep its players engaged and feeling rewarded for more than its cutscenes.
Perhaps I’m spoiled by my favorite series, Yakuza (also known as Like A Dragon, moving forward), which offers the most memorable side quests in gaming. No one has made it through Yakuza 0, for instance, without encountering the Burusera Ring side quest, nor should they. While certainly not as cinematically strong as the main story cutscenes, the Yakuza games put care into their side quests, the writing of these quests is as lovingly crafted as those more polished story sequences, and thus I genuinely love engaging with substories in those games. At the very least, even if it ends in a street brawl, I have a story to tell. In Final Fantasy XVI, the single side quest I can remember is where you rekindle Clive’s relationship to a certain childhood pet. Credit where credit is due: this one was worth it – but why spoil the only quest that I thought was worth my time?
Final Fantasy XVI falls into the uncanny region where what’s good is fantastic and what’s not is abysmal. Thus, speaking cohesively about the experience feels like I’m constantly at risk of driving off into disrespectful or unfair territory as far as my criticisms are concerned. I found Final Fantasy XVI to be incredibly tough to finish, mostly because I knew that each play session would reward me with high engagement only once at best. What began as an impulse purchase became an absolute chore to complete. Thus, even to a Final Fantasy fan like myself, this is a hard sell; you might as well just watch the cutscene movie.
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