Final Fantasy XVI

[Peklo]

There are many games that I choose to play "suboptimally" or in ways that are blatantly inefficient in context of the options provided, but which are the most interesting and enjoyable to me because they either prolong interaction with the surrounding fundamentals or provide some niche twist on them that I want to pursue. XVI has options to make some mutually exclusive choices between, in the moment... but the surrounding design of an encounter or the specifics about those options never justified themselves as a point of attraction, because all it ever desired of me was rote efficiency, so that's how I reciprocated. The fundamentals of play are too limited to stretch one's wings for their own sake.

 

[Bongo]

The game doesn't push you to diversify your approach to its combat, so it's up to the player to provide that desire by themselves;

Ah, so it is Final Fantasy after all.

 

[Peklo]

It's a Final Fantasy with design pedigree and intent toward a genre it typically doesn't occupy so comparisons for those aspects are made in context of that lineage rather than its titular own. I don't have any interest in rhetorical gotcha attempts--especially when the series is large and diverse enough to encompass plenty of games that do provide the experience that I'm not seeing XVI pull off.

 

[jpfriction]

I think there is a small chance that Bongo was making a good natured joke about a series he likes and not trying to “get you”.

 

[fanboymaster]

Spoilers for 8ish hours in I think?

Spoiler

L3+R3 to accept the truth has some real f to pay respects energy. Also everything about the allegorical choices for slavery here feels misguided at the most charitable.

I'm going to keep pressing on but for me this feels like a big misfire on all levels thus far.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Not going to get deep into narrative things yet since I'm only halfway through, but while I'm not finding this the best FF story by far, the main issue I have with it overall (as opposed to individual moments or elements that have grated) is the pacing. Five-year time skip in which no one ages and their abilities don't change, characters introduced in cutscenes who don't reappear for many hours, that kind of thing. I see why they created the Active Time Lore thing for this.

The RPG stuff that remains is barely even vestigial. I don't find I need to buy much outside of potion restocks, and it seems like upgrades are few, at least to this point. Not much to spend money on. Not much to spend ability points on apart from upgrading abilities and getting the "what the summon is known for" move. Complete lack of party mechanics aside from them being automatic combat helpers is... not what I want out of an FF game. But the action is fun to me; not too many combos and moves to remember, just a lot of things you can chain together into ad hoc combos however you like.

God of War: Ragnarok felt more like an action-RPG to me, with all its equipment upgrades and significantly larger ability trees. This is leaning heavier toward the action part, and the action itself leans heavily on the (frankly kinda brilliant) cinematic camera angles and swoops and such. Mechanically the combat isn't anything new or novel, but the presentation of it is top-notch. The score does a lot of work too.

 

[Oathbreaker]

Come to think of it, the biggest reason it feels so bare bones is exactly because the Eikon skills have such a massive limitation in what you can use at a given time. Every other character action game has them all available at any given time just by switching to the appropriate weapon.

Saw a very late game spoilers sort of place that REALLY exemplifies the problem with this game's lighting choices. It's dark but honestly would have been more visually clear than say, Rosaria after it becomes permanently cloudy if not for the game's insistence on giving you one of those fireballs to light up the surrounding 5 feet, making it a strain on your eyes to see anything outside of that radius. Truly galaxy brain design choice, that.

 

[Peklo]

I see why they created the Active Time Lore thing for this.

I think it's one of the game's inadvertently funnier design aspects (beyond just the name) because it highlights many things about the narrative and storytelling style at once simply for existing. Despite the gestures at Matsuno and whatever else densely political narratives in the genre and outside of it, this is an exceedingly straightforward story, particularly for its singular focus on Clive and his point of view. There's really no explicit need for an internal codex to exist because the machinations and players on the board are both very few and easily internalized... but the game doesn't seem to think so, particularly as it goes on. Despite the narrative condensing further and further into a standard world-saving yarn, it introduces a character that solely exists to do visual presentations of the supposed geopolitics in play in the latter half, and these are made into mandatory intermissions for the main story. There is that, the independent lore notes, as well as two painstakingly notated, point by chronological point character relation and "the journey so far" charts, also framed through this character. The end result is the game through all these aspects spending very long talking about itself, with the pretense that it needs to because its components are complex enough to warrant it... but I never came close to feeling like it earned that indulgence. If anything, the bulk of the game's writing through its side-quests (some of which are mandatory, if that makes sense--you'll pick them out in practice) is repetitive, long-winded and so lacking in character that to call it "world-building" feels like generous misdirection. It's just there to fill space, like many other aspects about the game.

The Active Time Lore is ultimately pretty much exactly what FFXIII was accused of in its day--leaving out context from the "actual game" and injecting it into the growing appendixes only--but the way that game handled its chapter summaries worked out better for what they were, since they read almost like a parallel novelization of the game that you were playing, so a dry recap wasn't their sole domain; there were actual supplemental angles on the characters in there. In XVI I often felt like I was told the same things several times over, through different menus to serve as that information's vehicles, with no new insights gained.

 

[Bongo]

The "who is this person again?" button was a standout feature in Triangle Strategy (and, oddly enough, in Amazon Prime Video), but I feel that it has not yet attained its full power.

 

[Bongo]

The "who is this person again?" button was a standout feature in Triangle Strategy (and, oddly enough, in Amazon Prime Video), but I feel that it has not yet attained its full power.

Come to think of it, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, of all games, had a good version of this, too.

 

[Lakupo]

Active Time Lore, the character relationship chart and the timeline map are all really great features that would be nice to see in other games but are kind of over the top for the story this game is telling.

 

[4-So]

I wonder if it's something the team will inject into FF14, which would be a good way to dig through that game's lore now that I think about it.

 

[Purple]

They did put in that in-game encyclopedia recently. As you get through post-Endwalker content, it fills in characters the first time you come up. Characters who have been in like literally every major cutscene in the past decade. Which is... nice but kinda weird to be locked until the 9th roll of the credits and all.

 

[Oathbreaker]

The Active Lore thing in 16 specifically would probably just have been better off as the FFIX ATE's. Show us some other perspectives, people going about their own days, build the setting a little bit. Not that I'd trust the writers to make that anything but more suffering, but still. Totally agree that the political landscape thing is completely empty. The game does not live up to its first cutscene.

 

[estragon]

Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity games and Tyranny (by a different team, but where the system first debuted... it was retroactively added to PoE 1 in patches) have an excellent system to click on a proper noun to get more information, and it has a complicated enough cosmology and interesting/smart enough politics and worldbuilding to warrant it.

(Also, PoE 1 and 2 taken as one continuous narrative since you can import your save from 1-->2 is definitely in the running for best CRPG and possibly just video game RPG more generally of all time.)

 

[Peklo]

This received a not-insignificant playability patch, adding:

• "Player Follow (Movement)" and "Player Follow (Attack)" camera options, allowing you to disable the camera auto-adjusting to Clive's back, which was previously the only setting.
• a motion blur setting from a range of 0 (off) to 5 (the previous setting). Many thought this setting was too intense, so options are welcome.
• three additional control presets, in addition to the default three. They mostly swap the placements of evade (default R1) and Eikonic Feat (default circle) inputs. It's still not free controller customization which this genre really demands, but it's something.

My big ask on this front as of now is rethinking how lock-on works entirely. L1 toggles it, and R3 changes targets, but since it's a button press, there's only an arbitrary cycle between targets, which is useless and entirely at odds with the game's group-fighting design touches, where it places casters and buffers behind enemy lines and emphasizes that those should be your priority targets. Freeing up right analog directions from camera control whilst locked-on would do a lot, since the very nature of being locked-on usually means you don't need to micro-manage your view anyway. Flicking the stick toward the direction of your desired target is standard design for a reason, and I don't get how this game fumbles such fundamentals when it does.

 

[4-So]

Finished this the other night and I've had some time to digest it. I don't want to re-litigate some of the more contentious plot elements that have already been discussed in this thread - some of those points I agree with and some I don't - but I will say that I felt the ending was a bit limp. While I think it makes a kind of logical sense, a cohesiveness if I'm considering what was on display the prior 50-ish hours, it didn't actually feel correct. Which is to say, Clive's death, although not shown on-screen, is strongly suggested and it felt strangely out of tune. For that matter, I think the entire ending sequence - ending scenes, credits, post-credits scene -is strangely out of tune.

Having said that, I haven't had this much fun with a Final Fantasy from start to finish since probably FF10. Characters, story, combat, systems, etc. all landed for me. And the music especially, which is probably the most important factor in determining a game's relative value to me. If there's a bangin' soundtrack, I will forgive a lot (not that I feel much needs to be forgiven here). I do think that the overall narrative starts to fray somewhere around the 75% mark but this is hardly unique for a FF game, and certainly not enough to lessen my opinion of it.

I'm not ready to jump into Final Fantasy mode just yet but I do find myself wanting to play more of it, which is no faint praise since it is exceedingly rare for me to feel the urge to continue playing a game once credits have rolled.

 

[Peklo]

For me, replaying a game of this genre immediately after an initial playthrough on a higher difficulty is par for the course, and that Final Fantasy mode has not made a significant argument toward making that process feel worthwhile is yet another indication of what really festers at the heart of this game and my inability to engage with it even on a purely mechanical level. Just a pervasive sense of an identity crisis throughout the whole production, wanting to be everything for all people and coming off diluted from all directions.

 

[Oathbreaker]

Friend also just beat it so I'm gonna do my thing.

Spoiler: They really went there, holy shit

So for the ending they decide that slavery is defeated by erasing the difference instead of like... the thing the story was building up to before they half forget they're trying to free slaves. I am astonished they actually decided to crown the head of all the awful shit in this narrative like that.

So my friend offered to just give me his copy of the game now that he's done with it. Not sure I even want to pop it in.

 

[Adrenaline]

I've been playing this, I think I'm a bit over halfway through. The only other FF I played extensively was XX. I think the combat is pretty fun and the graphics are great. There are a lot of things you can fault about the story, but I'm still interested in seeing if it goes anywhere. I think if you were going to make a Berserk game this is pretty much how it should be done. Clive is fine, I wish they did more to make Jill interesting than give her a tragic backstory.

 

[Kirin]

The only other FF I played extensively was XX.

Welcome back from the future! What genre did they angle towards with that one?

 

[Adrenaline]

It was a tower defense. Not my favorite

 

[jpfriction]

I’ve been playing this recently after picking it up for relatively cheap. It’s fine, keeping my attention. Combat is fun but a bit too simple, I prefer something like God of War where you feel more in control over what is happening.

Wouldn’t mind a bit more side shit to do. So far it is just “walk from point A to point B and sometimes there is a dude with a green bubble two steps out of your way who asks you to kill a crab”. Let me race a damn chocobo, it’s a final fantasy.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Combat gets a little less simple over time as you gather more Eikons and start being able to mix and match powers to suit your playstyle. I can't help but think that whatever element system they removed (there are vestiges of it in tutorial language) could have punched it up a good bit.

There's a lot of side shit in aggregate but not much of it is very involved, unfortunately. It really shows "designed by a lot of people from an MMO team" tendencies.