I have, admittedly, been a little checked-out on Mainline Final Fantasy games for… awhile. I squoze all possible enjoyment out of FF9, then did the same with FFX despite its weirdness. Skipped X-2. Skipped 11. Tried to play 12, but bounced off hard because it felt more like an automation simulator engine than a game. Tried to play 13 but… I honestly can’t remember why I got sick of it. Skipped 13-2 (but attempted to watch Wife play it). Skipped 14. Skipped 15 (but watched Wife play it). I came back to 16 because it looked different. I played the hell out of FF7R, and it was different, but still good. FF16 appeared to be a different kind of different, and it was!… but still sorta good? I think?

FF16 is the answer to the question “What if FF7’s incredibly long and unskippable summon cutscenes were playable?” Is it excessive? Absolutely. Does it work? Somehow, against all odds. But is it a good game? Ehhhhh…

The Story, Characters, Art, and Summon Eikon battles are all outstanding, spectacular even. Those are all some of the best Square has put out in ages. The Eikon battles in particular are real achievement, they said they wanted each one to be a cinematic bespoke kaiju wrestling experience, and they absolutely pulled that off.

But… what about the rest of the game? There’s a lot of game outside of Eikon battles, and the best thing I can say about it is that it is Just Sorta There. There’s gear, but you only have one character to outfit, and the gear just sorta gives itself to you? There’s only really two shops that matter, and they’re at your base, and most of the time you can just ignore the retailer and go straight to the smith. Crafting exists, but again, it’s just sorta there. I used it extensively, but I don’t feel like I really engaged with it, because for anything I needed to craft I either already had on-hand, or I was blocked by an obvious Unique Quest Item that I hadn’t encountered yet.

Normal combat is sorta mind-numbing. It plays like a Character Action Game (DMC, Bayonetta, Hi-Fi Rush, etc), but a super shallow one. You have a four hit primary attack combo, you can extend it to an 8 hit combo by interspersing magic attacks. You can charge your Physical or Magic attack, and you’ve got some basic inconsequential moves like thrust and head-bounce.

Magic adds some variety, with each summon’s magic bringing with it 3 normal attacks (on short cooldowns), one “big” attack (on a long cooldown) and one “utility” move. You can pick three magic schools at a time, and can do some per-skill mix & match if you dump a crazy number of points.

So that sounds like variety, but it’s sort of an illusion. Choice of magic boils down choosing which 3 utility skills you want, and I felt the first three you got were the best. With Phoenix you get dash, which is crazy good. With Garuda you get the ability to pull down and extend a stagger against big single targets. With Ramuh you get the ability to quickly apply a DoT and debuff to up to 9 enemies right out the gate. And they have a great balanced mix of normal and big attack skills, some of the highest burst damage and highest stagger capability. . . so there’s barely any reason to switch off these first three.

I feel like I might be doing this wrong, but every time I unlock a new class of magic I give it a good shake, I swap off Garuda and invest some serious points in there and it just doesn’t end up great. My “build” (if you can call it that?) lets me go into combat, immediately apply mass debuffs, immediately nuke the field with a high-damage spell, then focus down whatever beefy dude is on the field. For single-target encounters I can get that debuff on, apply heavy stagger, pull to extend the stagger, and once it’s staggered I just pile on my 3 massive high-damage attacks, one of which also heals me. By mid-to-late game enemies either have to be an S-Tier hunt boss or a chapter boss to survive more than one stagger cycle.

An Aside About Nontent

During my play-through, various content recommendation algorithms realized I was playing FF16 and surfaced a lot of really horrible “articles”, likely algorithmically generated themselves, and I want to complain about just how worthless they were. I don’t know if I’m coining this, but I’m classifying this stuff as nontent because it is decidedly Not Content. It is the opposite of Content.

Example headline: “How to change ur outfit in FF16!!!!!!” Body of the article: 1000 words of filler to get your auto-playing video ads and big honkin banners out, followed by “u don’t, lol. you change outfits like two times in the game based on the story”

Another one: “I WISH I KNEW THIS BEFORE STARTING: LEARN HOW TO RUN IN FF16” Body of the article: 1500 words about how running is important, chock full of ads, followed by “u just hold a direction and he just does it”

This is apparently just How Things Are now, and I hate it.

Level, Mission, and Quest design is also pretty uninspiring. The game isn’t open-world but also isn’t quite as restrictive as the zones in FF13. The world is made up of four “big” outdoor zones, with two or three decently sized towns per zone, and a couple fast-travel points. You won’t really “explore” these zones, because everything is heavily waypoint driven, but that doesn’t really matter because they aren’t all that enormous anyway. It’s rare you’ll see a waypoint further than 400y away.

Side-quest design is turbo-boring. There’s only a couple types of things they’ll ask you to do in a side quest: go to place, find and talk to two (2) NPCs (it’s seriously always two), kill mobs. A side quest will be like three or four of those strung together. So like, go to place, find two NPCs, kill wave of mobs, kill second wave of mobs, go to place. Done.

Rewards are outright bizarre. Fights, Missions, Quests, and Hunts reward five types of things: items (almost 100% crafting mats), Gil, XP, skill points, and renown. Gil rewards are basically meaningless, all game I have had more Gil than I knew what to do with, save for buying music tracks for 20-40k each. Crafting mats don’t have a big enough sink to match up with how much they give you, because you only ever need to craft the best weapon/belt/wrist. And I promise I never spent any time farming mats, I simply never needed to.

I also want to take issue with “junk” items, which only exist to be sold for gil. I legitimately do not understand why these exist, when they could just give you more than 20 gil for a mission. There’s no alternative thing you can do with them, and you can’t not pick them up most of the time because they’re rewards. Just do away with it. (Wife suggests these exist to force players to interact with shops, but if that’s the best they could come up with it’s super weak.)

XP and levels in general are real weird because sure you level up and numbers go up, but with only one character what do the numbers even mean? I have no direction or influence so it’s not like I can say “I want to be better at casting spells, but at the cost of lower defense”. And since you only have one character, it’s not like you can focus and say “ok lets make Bob better at magic, but make Jane better at raw melee DPS”.

If there’s no way to influence the stats, and nothing to compare them to, why bother showing the numbers go up? Why bother showing the numbers at all? Franchises like Diablo and The Division and Destiny moved away from a lot of explicit stat stuff, or if the stats are still there, they abstract a lot of them away to a basic single number “gear score”. FF16 seems really close to doing that, but they just didn’t push over the edge, so there’s all this vestigial stuff still hanging around and not contributing to the game at all.

Now for a completely unnecessary gripe about weapon realism. Basically the only thing that changes about getting a Cool New Sword in FF16 is how it looks on your back. Fine, whatever, I’ve already complained about stats. But what really bothers me is that his weapon strap is high on his right shoulder-blade like Cloud or Kratos, and his swords are like 1.5m long. There is no way for him to physically unsheathe them, it just simply will not work unless the strap has like some sort of clasp mechanism, but there’s nothing cool about clasp mechanisms so he just voops it through. If you’re going to do this, either go full goofy magic with it like in Nier, or make it something that could actually work like Kratos’ omega-hook. Don’t try and put a realistic leather holster with buckles and straps, because when you do all I can do is stare at it and seethe.

Should you pay $70 for Final Fantasy XVI, a Premium Square Enix Game, produced exclusively for the Sony PlayStation 5? Ehh. Maybe. It was fine. Eikon fights were neat and really well executed, the rest of the game sorta wasn’t. The story was pretty typical Final Fantasy faire, but at least it wasn’t cringe and/or incomprehensible. It wasn’t bad, but it also isn’t something I can highly recommend to everybody.

Recommended. (Kinda.)