There will be some mild spoilers in this review-ish.
Perhaps more than any other mainline Final Fantasy game that I have played, FFXVI is a land of contrasts. It has incredibly high highs and abysmally low lows. The lows feel even lower than they actually are because they actively sap your time and energy when you want to plough forward to the highs.
This is the Darker and Grittier Final Fantasy, and I appreciated the tone shift for the most part (though the profanity gets to be a bit much, it’s almost comical as protagonist Clive spews endless swears over getting punched). I appreciated far less the game’s rare shift into overtly anime-inspired kaiju slugfests – more on this below. The gameplay has also shifted, this time to character-action like Devil May Cry (and indeed, Ryota Suzuki serves as combat director here, with many techniques in Clive’s arsenal lovingly lifted from Dante’s).
The narrative inspiration is very clearly the Game of Thrones television program, and the opening two or three hours is ripped directly from there. Nations swirl with backstabbing politics, and keeping all the factions straight might be a struggle at first. Some characters are so nakedly borrowed from Thrones counterparts that you may wonder whether it was this game, and not Elden Ring, to which George R.R. Martin was referring when he said he did some work for a Japanese video game company. Betrayal? Check! Death? Check! Nudity? Sure! Incest? Bingo! Red Wedding? Close enough! Following all that, Clive is subsequently tossed into enslavement, and the game becomes about power and who deserves to have it. It is very weird that this is a game with almost no people of color (and maybe one of them is plot relevant) but is largely about slavery. There are other pieces that cover the racial and gender politics of this game with deeper consideration, but things here are not perfect.
Derivative as it all might be, I did enjoy the characters, the worldbuilding and most of the writing a good bit. The relationships Clive develops with his friends felt genuine and earned, and there were good quiet character moments that recalled the best writing found in Final Fantasy XV. Conversely, I thought the villain and his motivation were notably poor – he copiously lifts from the Xeno franchise, where this sort of thing was done better. That said, his grand reveal happens so late in the game that it didn’t really ruin the rest of the narrative work, which I liked quite a bit. I think the game would have been better if it didn’t fall into the classic JRPG arc wherein you must attack and destroy God at the end, but that is what I signed up for when I booted a game called Final Fantasy.
Unfortunately, the combat and the plot both suffer from serious pacing issues. The plot repeatedly builds up steam only to throw the brakes on and toss a half-dozen mostly-mindless sidequests at you. Sidequests are optional, but you want to do them to unlock additional game features, such as riding a chocobo or expanding your item pouch. I did every sidequest because I am a masochist. Some of them had interesting stories or writing. Most of them did not. All of them were either fetch quests or killing some enemies.
The aforementioned kaiju fights were also a bummer. They felt tonally and visually dissonant, clashing with the visual style of the rest of the game and the people-grubbing-in-the-muck tone of the writing. Sometimes disharmony can act as a bit of spice and improve the overall dish, but here not so. It feels very much like the developers wanted these bombastic sequences to get by on Rule of Cool, and I am certain that for a lot of people they represent the high point of the game. However, watching Ned Stark get into a Dragon Ball-style fists-faster-than-you-can-see punch fest wasn’t doing it for me. These sequences feel ripped from a different, worse game, one that wishes it were Asura’s Wrath but can’t quite swing it. Bahamut’s fight, where you punch him so hard that he gets knocked into space and he unleashes ten thousand lasers, is the worst offender. Luckily these sequences are rare. The rest of the time, things are played straight and serious.
Combat likewise drags, especially in the middle of the game, largely because enemy health inflation is a serious issue, with some mid-game bosses taking well over half an hour to clear. That’s one thing in a turn-based fight, but 30 minutes of continual button mashing is a lot. The eikon battles (Titan and Bahamut in particular) really take the cake here, which speaks to a primary issue with the combat: there are really only two fights in the game mechanically. There are ones where you hit an AOE as soon as the fight starts and that’s a win, or fights where you just spam the dodge button until your attacks are off cooldown and then use every ability. It feels like the folks designing the combat mechanics wanted to make fighting feel really quick and responsive, but they didn’t have encounter designers that understood how to differentiate fights. This is exacerbated by basic combat abilities like “block” not coming until more than halfway through the game, severely limiting the player’s toolkit in combat.
The slow-rolling of mechanics is not inherently a problem in and of itself, but it becomes a problem because the moment-to-moment action of combat is weirdly facile. There are a lot of things you can do during a fight, but only a few of them actually are worth doing. Resultantly, the combat system is quite broad, but frustratingly shallow. If the encounters were capable of more variation in what they demanded the player do, having long fights would make sense, because you could have enemies go through phases, requiring the player to change their behavior or strategy in response to shifting boss tactics. Yes, I know bosses DO have phases, but you don’t actually need to do anything different unless the literal mode of play changes, such as when Clive transforms into a kaiju. The outcome is that the fights are much more spectacle than substance, and spectacle wears out much more quickly. The first few minutes of a fight rule, because you’re seeing new stuff. The last fifteen rule significantly less.
A consolation is that by the end of the game your toolbox will be big enough that fights will feel reasonable in length again because you can delete most enemies in seconds with the right ability rotation, but this also means every fight is really the same fight. If the enemy isn’t elite, you one-shot them with Zanketsuken. If they are an elite foe, you do the fight. For me the fight was Diamond Dust -> Zanketsuken Lv.5 -> Lightning Rod -> Dancing Steel -> Zanketsuken Lv. 5 -> Gigaflare -> Flames of Rebirth -> Impulse. Every time! Final Fantasy is of course historically a JRPG franchise, and JRPGs ask you to grind through hundreds of challengeless mindless fodder encounters, but this is a character action game, and that philosophy is fundamentally at odds with a genre that demands that encounters be tight and bespoke in their design. I don’t think anybody would be thrilled if Bayonetta had five hundred identical fights in it – and in that game, you’re playing for score, with additional challenge criteria in play (you don’t want to get hit, you want to clear the fight as fast as you can, you want to use a wide variety of techniques, and so forth). You actually can replay stages in a score attack mode here, but it’s hidden away in a side menu somewhere.
This may all sound like the game is bad, but it’s not! As I said at the beginning, it’s a game of very high highs and very low lows. None of the lows are so bad that I wanted to quit, but I did groan. I think I honestly would have appreciated this game more as a prestige television show than as a video game.
Verdict: This is a very easy B/B+ video game. It’s cool to see the franchise continuing to try something new. This isn’t a slam dunk, but it is different. Come for the characters and world, tolerate the combat. It is worth trying the free demo (probably the best-paced sequences in the game) to see if things click, and if they do go for it – you’ll have a blast.
Justin Bortnick 