Final Fantasy XVI

Overall I hate Cid too for reasons but those reasons still fall into the category of writer doesn't know wtf. Like one time he's about to explain something concretely important rather than some old man wisdom he gets cut off and never says it because the writers didn't want to tip their hand for a few more hours. When he should be explaining why he just said he knows something QUITE IMPORTANT he instead hands out philosophical platitudes to show his own development because that's good drama to this writing team.

I am overwhelmed by the number of writing issues of this or similar nature. It's like I'm reading a child's problematic fanfic except adults that absolutely know better all agreed this was the way to go.

I don't understand this game at all. What is Final Fantasy XVI supposed to be? Is it an action game, an RPG, a blockbuster spectacle, a recontextualization of its series lineage, a melange of various other media influences, a "prestige" tentpole media event... or all of these at once? I think it's relevant to observe something so scattershot and aspirant toward many different goals simultaneously in a similarly compartmentalized way, so let's try to divide the discussion by subject.

Final Fantasy XVI as an RPG
Might as well start with what's ostensibly the great unifier with this particular series. To nip the semantics in the bud: there is no one way to design and conceptualize an RPG, and this commentary is not about litigating the "validity" of one approach over another; FFXVI is an RPG as much as any other game that carries the series nomenclature, and all I'm interested in whether it's any good at what it sets out to do. What it chooses to focus on is the deliberate streamlining or elimination to the point of non-existence the kind of stat-based menu interactions the genre typically involves; Clive has maybe three core stats, as many equipment slots, and the development of each are handled by systems and progression that render literally any other game in the series the height of complexity and diversity in developing a character through numbers. There is nothing here because they don't want anything to be here; your Clive is anyone else's Clive, and any differences in the moment are immediately swappable and reversible, with picking out Eikons and a derived skill loadout being the only meaningful choices in player expression the game has, and the frustration inherent in this dynamic is that the game still pretends like it has to operate in the guise of what's expected of an "RPG" where its meager offerings do nothing but act against itself for how pointless and even intrusive they are.

The dearth of statistical development would be permissible if other aspects of the game were emphasized instead, but they are as out of focus as the rest. The structure of XVI has you locked into Uncharted-esque forward-momentum strings of battle arenas separated by "cinematic" connecting tissue like slowly opening doors or squeezing through narrow cracks in the environment, and in these spaces there isn't even the pretense of exploration or the occasional dead-end. When that pretense is presented, in one of the game's four "open" overworld areas, you almost wish it had never been, because there is nothing to find or do in them. This is a game of jogging through an empty world, where its sense as a connected, holistic land is rendered a sham by edges of areas not even allowing you to travel to an adjoining one--you're immediately whisked to the map screen level select instead, because the game isn't interested in painting its setting as anything more than a glorified blockbuster sequence of stages. The itemization and the game's internal economy are total nonstarters, where you'll regularly be picking up single-digit amounts of gil, to be used in a game that has nothing interesting to buy, or crafting materials, in a game where crafting is barely a concern you have to think about since all meaningful materials are given as rewards from mandatory storyline boss encounters, or optional hunts if you want to optimize. The "exploration" carrot that would push one to chart their boundaries--in a world that lacks for interesting topography or memorable landmarks--is nowhere to be seen, and you wonder why the developers bothered at all.

Final Fantasy XVI as an action game

It is clear to me that on a mechanical level, this was the intent everything else about the game was beholden to: whether you think of the niche as stylish action, combo action, or character action, FFXVI positions itself as part of that pedigree... only it crashes entirely against irreconcilable structural concerns that it cannot maneuver around in the form it adopts. Clive's fundamentals are heavily based on Devil May Cry's Nero, but even in context of a character whose critics call him overly simplified and streamlined, Clive is ever more so: he has literally one attack string on the ground and in the air each, one melee weapon that never changes or gains alternatives, and all his transformative attack skills operate on cooldowns that restrict the frequency of their applications. It's a horrible baseline for a character in this genre to exist in--boring at baseline, too strong and untouchable in those moments when his meaningful skills are being used, and rote in all the ways he can approach battles. This is an "easy" game (though the execution barrier will have people less used to its play concepts struggle with its demands) because there's no incentive to improvise or experiment with anything the arsenal provides, and it exists in an unsatisfying flux between its fight contexts: "mob" enemies that come in crowds are absolutely immaterial in that they are barely aggressive at all and die too quickly to serve as combo puppets to try things on, while any enemy at mid-boss or higher status has a stagger gauge that forms the combat's guiding rhythm, in ways that have been overused ever since FFXIII introduced the concept. This whole game is just monotonous reading of enemy tells for just-evades or perfect blocks, chipping away at their stagger, and unleashing all cooldown damage skills in that window when they cannot defend themselves, and this is repeated two to four times per encounter, unerringly.

The MMO pedigree of the development team gives some of the fights an appreciated syncretic character, with area denial spacing management being a constant and familiar design element, but it's not enough to carry the rest. The standard play's issues are only exacerbated during the Eikon clashes, which are more than half comprised of passive watching of cinematics, where the only level of interaction is the game pulling up a QTE like it's taking notes from fifteen-year-old design trends. It's baffling how hard the game bets on this as a recurring design element and dramatic tool, because it only serves to highlight how unwilling the game is in allowing the player to actually play the segments most of the work seems to have been poured into. When you do get direct control of Clive in his Ifrit form, the mechanics are merely an even more limited variation on his baseline play, to a point of almost impossible consolidation. I cannot emphasize enough how much I dislike the game's focus and level of importance it places on the Eikon battles: they are host to its worst excesses in hollow violence, badly-reading and overdesigned visual choreography, and the dearth of any meaningful or interesting interaction with the game as a video game.

Beyond all the issues raised by the game's mechanics on initial play, it's perhaps most damning in its promise and premise of carrying on the play structures of the action games it's patterned after. A game like Devil May Cry can do what it does because it's designed to be replayed; the total duration of the story is modest, and the compartmentalization of narrative makes them ideal for just going through the levels again, uninterrupted by anything but play mechanics. Final Fantasy XVI is a 50+-hour epic that contains copious slow-walk atmospheric narrative sections, busywork chains of errands between NPCs during the primary path, and a design sensibility that's completely at odds with labbing satisfying combos and putting them into practice against demanding opponents. It already became evident during the first playthrough, but replaying the early game on the New Game+ "Final Fantasy" hard mode made it evident just how badly any of the bosses function as returning experiences. They're full of scripted sequences where you might entirely outpace their health bars, wasting cooldown skills and other combat resources on their staggered forms that simply no longer register damage because the next cinematic transition hasn't triggered yet; even outside of this kind of awful-feeling consideration the fights are full of these kinds of scripted phase transitions and QTE intermissions that add nothing and subtract much on repeat visits. From my observation of "Final Fantasy" mode's hard mode offerings, the differences amount to inflated enemy levels and adjustment of minor enemy formations so late-game enemies appear sooner, but in the moments where you want the most differences to manifest--the Dominants, Eikons and other major bosses--I could determine no differences at all in movesets or anything else, beyond inflated health pools, which only serve to make the most monotonous aspects of play even more laborious. Final Fantasy XVI as an action game is flashy, simplistic, and ultimately incredibly dull.

Final Fantasy XVI as a piece of written media
I'm honestly at something of a loss for words with this aspect of the game--not because I don't know what to say, but because I have already said it in other contexts, in an attempt to expunge what this narrative is and does from my reckoning. It is a complete flub, a waste of the talent put to the task of realizing it through acting performances, and the worst story the series has ever told. It wields smug, didactic sermons on topics that are entirely outside of its grasp and that it's not qualified to comment upon, acting preachy about its moralizing while reducing its cast to the ultimate good guys and ultimate bad guys, with virtue and vice never overlapping at all in its posturing sham of a morality tale world. It reads like the work of someone who realized through textbooks that humans have enslaved one another throughout our existence and thought themselves the first person in existence to be cognizant of the fact, and with equal deftness to depict its fictionalized, fantastical and cowardly allegorical representations. It walks hand in hand with the thematic fuck-up of espousing humanistic equality and emancipation for all and making that story's actors entirely beautiful European white people; who wants this kind of message from these kinds of messengers? All the "exploration" of the slavery aspect of the story is alternatingly sensationalized or not treated with the gravity it demands, such as certain sidequests resolving with abrupt sentimentalism simply because Clive or someone else shames a mob into rethinking their values, which are never treated as something ingrained through centuries of systemic societal conditioning but momentary and individual ills that a virtuous man can sway through the sheer impression of their will.

Those are the failures of the game's larger thematic crux, but I don't know how to unpack how it feels about women. Can anything this vile be accidental or the manifestations of unconscious biases? At what point do we hold someone's fictional expressions accountable as deliberate statements instead of the vague confluences of an author's intent and an audience's interpretation of them? If Kazutoyo Maehiro and the team around him were trying to say anything with this game in this respect, I can only respond by saying that I never expected to view the many precedents and sources of inspiration the game utilizes--all varying degrees of sexist and misogynistic in their own right, sometimes substantially so--positively in relative terms; he has uplifted other works through providing a cautionary tale of failing as a writer in every way possible. I could, and have, lay out the individual characters subject to the text's violence, disregard and diminishment of women--Jill, Anabella and Benedikta the most major of them, and all wretchedly treated--but it's a litany that would never end if scrutinized. There is almost nothing good this game does in the way it portrays women; the only thing it can aspire to is a kind of neutral state of nonsignificance where the plotting and characterization doesn't have the time to entirely run roughshod over a featured character, and so in the supporting cast you might find those pity offerings who are spared the insult through their marginalization. Even so, the game is extremely apt in conjuring meaningless women out of nothing just to prop a male character's development--no other context exists for women here--up to the very end of the game; it is its trick and trade that it knows well and swears by consistently. It is a game that features the worst sexual or romantic scene in the series's history, between sister and brother, acted out through the euphemistic terminology of bequeathing one's magical power to another, reflected in genre material that's either literal porn or evoking it all the same; a scene where the dynamic of Eikon absorption being severely painful for Clive is reversed and ignored, and instead it's Jill, whose textual and symbolic shred of relevance to the plotting Clive absorbs, writhes in his arms gasping and moaning as if working up to an orgasm, because she functionally is. Staying on any one scene like this even for a moment to consider what's being portrayed and why unpacks just so much hostile and harmful thinking about women that it is an exhausting game to think of as a holistic work. Final Fantasy has never hated women more than with XVI, so congratulations for that.

Should this game be accredited narratively and performatively for anything, it is likely Ben Starr's depiction of Clive, in which he draws much resonance and sincerity from a role that's designed to be suffocating in its narrative utility and theming. Clive already matters more in relative terms than other series protagonists, because he is the only playable character present; it is thus imperative for the developers to stress that embodying Clive is interesting and enjoyable, and they have overcompensated in this regard. Clive is manufactured to be always heroic and just from the moment you meet him, even when he has no reason to be--a hackneyed "isn't he nice to his household slaves" scene sets the tenor for the character's treatment, where the foisted-upon violence and edge that makes him promotionally and aesthetically valuable doesn't incur upon his fundamental goodness at any point; Clive is always a paragon and increasingly so as he sheds his shell of cynicism over the game's length, and the depiction of him as a perfect dude is so stifling to what characterization could be explored that it interacts severely poorly with the game's copious sidequests, of which the vast majority are errands done for nobodies in which Clive and his personality are the only vector through which the writing could find expression... and Clive happens to be a void of a person, because the game cannot conceptualize him as anything but the embodiment of human goodness and exceptionalism. The latter point becomes an especially pertinent point of framing this game as obsessively solipsistic, even beyond FFXV's narrative theming of royalty worship and the divine mandate of kings, where you are only Clive in play, where Clive runs the entire organization that comprises the hero faction, where Clive absorbs and kills every other Dominant powerset from the game's cast, and where it's ultimately revealed that the villain created all of humanity for the sole purpose of someday birthing Clive. It's extremely overwrought and worshipful of its central character, and if said character doesn't connect with oneself--I can't claim to like his ultramasc presentation and garish Tales of Berseria ripoff costuming even a little bit--then all the narrative maneuvering invested in him and by extension, the entire game, cannot function.

Final Fantasy XVI as an aesthetic work and a Final Fantasy

Evaluating whether a game like this looks graphically "good" doesn't really say much outside of laying out one's own personal expectations and context for modern game production, so I would rather just sidestep that in favour of discussing its aesthetic choices. I really have to go back to Clive again because he is what defines so much of the game's visual appearance, and his character design is one of the least enjoyable I've seen in the series. It seems desperate to me in aligning him as an Acceptably Masculine lead, all v-shaped in the upper body and hugely muscled as he is, and outside the emotional high and low points in Starr's performance, that is where his baseline VA direction takes him too, to a sort of hushed rasp that reads as "mature" to the sort of people who assign relative merit on humans's vocal registers and how they're utilized in media. The clothes he wears are all dark and aggressive colours, and the cut of them full of fantastical stylizations that stick to the eye more than basically any character design Tetsuya Nomura has provided to the series, since those gel with the surrounding aesthetic in ways Clive does not; his fashion excesses thus set him apart even more from his peers, on a level somewhere beyond their either totally mundane or reserved fantasy attire. It's a microcosm for this game in that it has pretenses of being a "grounded", in-the-piss work of medieval fictionalization, but it navigates that baseline unsatisfyingly through general environmental malaise--the game likely peaks as far as visual attraction in its very first dungeon, the Greatwood--which is then broken up by jarring bits of more colourful and fantasy-oriented residue, and neither complements the other well. The game's approach to lighting is especially odd, with much of the game consumed by a a dim shroud in what is lit and what is not, and at about the 70% mark a plot contrivance occurs where a spell cast by Ultima covers the world in... overcast weather, and a reddish hue from the skies. This weirdly minor change in atmosphere regardless has an enormous effect on the presentation of the world, since it is global in nature... making trekking through it for hunts and other odds and ends at end-game even more visually monotonous than before.

To echo the disclaimer from earlier, I also am not interested to litigate whether this is sufficiently "Final Fantasy" or not--there is no answer to that kind of question and it wouldn't be an interesting one if one existed to begin with. What I will do, however, is comment on how this game utilizes its own legacy in conjuction with other inspirative residue. My impression as only a dabbler in FFXIV is that Creative Business Unit III (or their preceding division) is that the creators are huge fans of Final Fantasy and seek to incorporate series staples, motifs and iconography on a consistent basis into their own work. That kind of adulatory creative spirit has its place if it serves the creation of new things inspired by the old, but as often you tend to see references made for the sake of it, and past concepts and designs brought back as "fan service" or simply because a developer likes the subject; Masayoshi Soken's music for the game does not thrill me by its own orchestral chanting focus, but it legitimately tires me through how many series leitmotifs and melodies reoccur throughout. Despite all the above--and many more things besides--about FFXVI, good or bad, that might be its defining aspect: it does not come off as the series doing or saying anything new, but it feels like a reverberation and composite of itself, its own legacy, infused with the external influences of other media--something Final Fantasy has never been a stranger to, but in my view that dynamic is out of balance in what is done with this particular game, the me-too imitation having overtaken the internal epiphanies. It comes off as a straggler and follower of other "successful" media and stories, borrowing liberally from them and aspiring to the same kinds of pedigree if only it just stuffs itself full of every possible point of interest that pop media contains. It is insecure about its "Final Fantasy"-ness not being enough anymore, and so it takes from Game of Thrones, takes from boys' fighting manga, takes from the superficially interpreted stylings of Yasumi Matsuno, takes from kaiju and sentai media, and takes from "hype culture" tentpoles like the works of studios Gainax and Trigger. The nominal ingredients for whatever Final Fantasy means to any one individual are all present, but they don't find a voice to result in a work that later creations can base anything on. In chasing a mature reputation and esteem, Final Fantasy XVI in a series targeted at teenagers is a rated-18 work that reads to me as the most juvenile of all.

As you confront Hugo Kupka who wants you dead in retaliation for Benedikta's death, Clive is written to either forget or ignore the reasons he quite unintentionally ends up fighting Garuda, which are that Clive hears the voice in his head calling for him, and he and Cid spot their target, a vague hooded man, causing Clive to chase him into the maelstrom. The fight results in him losing control and killing Benedikta in basically an unconscious rage the same way he eventually accepts that he killed his brother. He is written to ignore what actually happened then in order to imply to Hugo, who is portrayed as having deeply cared for Benedikta, that Cid was a weakling for not being willing to kill Benedikta himself after "failing to save her from herself", so Clive stepped up to kill her for him. It is such a needlessly, actively malicious violent lie rooted in the author's intense misogyny that the entire scene turns itself into a farce closing with what I described as a line so stupid it could only have been made to cut into a promotional trailer. Even the core of the why this plot is possible in this setting, Clive being a good guy, is tossed aside in favor of not only the worst, but the most senseless provocation I've ever seen a protagonist make in any media, much less in Final Fantasy. So to my mind they succeed at making Clive the good guy in the same way Game of Thrones season 8 succeeded. I can't even hope the other writers in the room were as aware of what horseshit this was as the Game of Thrones cast was about the quality of the final season of show the game desperately wants to pretend to be.

Benedikta... I'm not a guy with a lot of useful or observant opinions on how to write women but this game is real bad at it.