"Final Fantasy XVI" Review - Cooldown Simulator 2023

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Creative Business Unit III

Available for: Playstation 5

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

Final Fantasy XVI sucks. It sucks bigtime. It sucks in nearly every way you can imagine. And no...it's not because Square Enix fully committed to the switch from turn-based combat to realtime. It's also not because it's "woke" because there's a gay character halfway through. It's also not because the game's slavery themes don't "say enough." I mean, really, of all the things to complain about in Final Fantasy XVI, please just choose one of the things that actually sucks about it...and yet, despite that damning intro, I actually made it (I think) fairly far into the game and enjoyed it for a not insignificant amount of time. There are things to enjoy here, but the second the negatives start to get to you, you're not long for this fantasy world. So...let's get into it. 

In Final Fantasy XVI, you play as Clive Rosfield, first-born son of the Duke of fantasy nation variety 1: the somewhat democratic good guy nation that treats the slave class somewhat better than the other nations do. In this fantasy land of Valisthea, you have a smorgasbord of generic fantasy lands: the superstitious barbarian nation, the squeaky clean prim and proper holy kingdom, the imperialistic bloodline-obsessed empire, the desert nation in which the warriors use scimitars, the gang's all here. That in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but it becomes a little irritating because the writers take their story and setting so seriously. See, Final Fantasy XVI tries very hard to be Game of Thrones. There's vulgarity with reckless abandon, sex scenes, court intrigue, betrayals, and above all else, the horrors of war and the cruelty of mankind. In this universe, magic-users, called "bearers" are oppressed, enslaved, killed, tortured, maimed, just about everything bad you can imagine. The most powerful top .00001% of bearers have the ability to use Eikons. This means they can take on the form and the powers of one of Final Fantasy's traditional epic summons (such as Ifrit, the giant fire demon). The Eikon Bearers are regarded as even lesser than their normal Bearer counterparts and are forced to be tools of war for their respective enslaving nations. Like, seriously, you don't have any idea how much people hate the bearers. In one early-game example of how these folks are treated, a woman and her son are sitting in a tavern talking to another family. The woman says something implying that the infant she just recently gave birth to showed signs of being a bearer, so she immediately surrendered the "thing" to the authorities to have it taken care of. The son then happily asks her "will I get my real little brother soon?" to which the mom reassures him that he will absolutely get an actual human for a little brother soon.

Do you see how much hatred there is in this world for bearers? Do you see how these people are ripped limb from limb, murdered as infants, and treated like animals? Do you get it?

Ok, well, our main cast of characters are bearers with Eikonic powers, so they're the most hated of the hated.

So, naturally, there comes a cutscene where the heroes are making their way through a crowded street on a rainy day wearing hoods so as not to be recognized. Then there's an ominous church bell in the distance to set the ominous scene further. Then, a city guard, who will likely be ripping the characters fingernails out with flaming hot tongs if he catches them, rides in on a Chocobo that squawks as it enters the frame. 

DO YOU SEE WHY THIS DOESN'T WORK?! It's ridiculous that I find myself agreeing with the porn-obsessed petulant incel who calls himself "Synthetic Man" on Youtube, but he's correct when he says that Japanese game developers have a problem with this kind of thing. It's just a fact. You CAN. NOT. MIX. Game of Thrones-style darkness with Kingdom Hearts-style power of friendship anime nonsense. It Does. Not. Work. So, this game had a major problem right from the get-go. And that's before you get to how ridiculous this whole system is. 

Magic-users being oppressed isn't a new idea. The Witcher does it, Dragon Age does it, hell, even Eragon does it towards the end of the series right before Christopher Paolini plagiarizes Lord of the Rings right down to the swan boats. You know what all of those examples have in common? Reasoning. In The Witcher, oppression of mages comes from general paranoia that makes its way towards nonhumans after the hype around mages dies down, and the vast majority of people had turned away from magic as a concept after a diplomatic disaster in The Witcher 2. In Dragon Age there's deeply held religious dogma surrounding magic so strong that an entire force of soldiers with the ability to nullify magic exists, so the oppression of mages has a reason for existing and a justification for how it happened in the first place. And as for the Eragon series, the author simply ran out of Star Wars films to steal his plots from and had to look elsewhere. But in Final Fantasy XVI, the citizenry relies on mages for everything, and the nations rely almost exclusively on their Eikon bearers to fight their wars for them. There are magic-cancelling handcuffs, but that's literally the only thing normal people have to protect themselves against magic. Now, in a land of just normal people and mages, maaaybe you could make a case for normal people being a vast majority and oppressing the mages that way...but in a world where mages seem to be everywhere and some of the most powerful mages can turn into giant dragon gods who shoot missiles from outer space? Get out. It wouldn't happen. There is no universe in which a race of people who can turn into dragon gods, lightning gods, lightning gods on horses the size of mountains, rock-based homunculi as big as a planet, etc. are an oppressed people. It's a ridiculous attempt to cash in on some of the more popular fantasy themes of recent years without a single second of work put in to make any of it make any sense.

And you know what? I'm not done yet. It's not just the incel Synthetic Man (who complained that the new Zelda was woke because there were brown people in it) I find myself agreeing with in regards to this game. I also agree with Jim Stephanie Sterling, who sits on the exact opposite side of the spectrum from him...which obviously isn't a great comparison given that the former is a bad person, but the point here is the ocean of difference in worldview. Steph makes the accurate point that while the villains are all despicable and really good at being despicable, the effect is kind of lost when the most lowly peasant is exactly as evil as the villain taking center-stage. It seems like literally everybody is correct about this game's story if they disliked it. It's just amazing to me that the writing team put so much effort into making this as much of a grimdark story as they possibly could while simultaneously putting so little effort into anything other than the grimdarkness. But you know what? Not even that is the end of my complaints. Even with nothing about this story as I've described it thus far changed, it might be acceptable simply because it's a different approach than Final Fantasy has done before. That fact does carry weight in spite of everything I've said...sadly, while the game's story commits to the departure in tone, it doesn't commit to the departure from the Final Fantasy status quo. Yep. Amidst all the politics and slavery and all of that, there's also an ancient evil with a stupid name and stupid motivations involving liberating the world from a human concept picked via dart throw (in this case: "consciousness"). There's also some time travel nonsense, and I'm sure it just gets worse the closer you get to the ending. But I didn't make it to the ending. We'll get to the reasoning after a quick discussion around gameplay.

Unfortunately, that doesn't hold up much better than the story. The dev team tried to make this into a Devil May Cry style hack and slash affair, but they unfortunately kept one too many wrong ingredients from the traditional JRPG formula. First, let's discuss things from a ground level. At the most bare bones level of combat, you have a sword attack and a basic magic attack (mapped to square and triangle respectively). You also have two magic powers and a damage-negation measure specific to the type of magic you currently have equipped. You start with one variety of magic and gain more as the story progresses, and each magic variety comes with its own suite of possible powers to choose from alongside the aforementioned damage negation measure. For instance, in the default magic variety (fire) you can use powers like a firey uppercut and a fire tornado, and you avoid damage with a burning dodge. In the wind variety, you can use powers like rapid wind claws, and you can interrupt enemies with a wind lasso. For one last example, with the earth variety you negate damage with an earthen shield. You can have up to three varieties of magic equipped at a time, so your loadout of powers and avenues of damage avoidance are up to you. So, in the moment-to-moment combat, you combine melee/magic attacks with magic powers, using dodges or shields as needed. Enemies have a health bar and a stagger bar. Every attack you land chips away at both bars, with the stagger bar taking more damage than the health. Once the stagger bar reaches 0, the enemy becomes staggered and you can hit them for significantly more damage than you otherwise would. When you're fighting regular enemies, this system works perfectly well, and in fact, it's actually a lot of fun! There's a lot of options for crowd control within those magic powers I mentioned, so certain combat encounters can become Warriors-esque affairs where you're juggling 10 soldiers in a tornado then throwing in a lightning storm and creating a fissure in the earth. Make no mistake, with this gameplay system, there are times where you're likely to have fun! However, a wrench gets thrown in the works the second even a mini-mini-mini boss appears. For any enemy above the grunt level, you do so little damage no matter what you do that it's going to take several minutes to defeat them....which is to say nothing of actual bosses. By around the halfway point, mini-bosses will have as many as 200 health points with story bosses having twice that much plus 2nd and 3rd forms. Would you like to know how much damage your basic magic attack does? 5-6. You read that right. 5-6 damage with no way to upgrade that amount. Your weapon attacks do more damage than that, but the damage scales alongside the boss hp, so the damage percentage never increases. As this implies, you do paltry damage no matter what you do...so when I say you whittle the health and stagger bars down, I mean it. With this in mind, you're going to do all of your damage with those aforementioned magic powers. And that, dear reader, is where the subtitle for this review comes from. Each of the powers is on a not-insignificant cooldown, and what this means for the moment-to-moment gameplay when there's a mini-boss or during boss fights is that the majority of your time will be spent dealing minimal damage and waiting for the cooldowns to end. You'll end up rapidly switching between the three magic types you have equipped, spamming the powers, then reverting back to the minimal damage until your next opportunity to use the powers. And you know what? For a while, that's fine. For a while, that experience is a powerful feeling where you unleash absolute elemental chaos on a boss. But before too long, you'll see behind the smoke and mirrors that the excellent visual effects put up and see this gameplay system for what I've already called it: a cooldown simulator. So, in a way the team succeeded in creating a button-masher, but because they keep the kinds of damage sponge bosses you'd expect from a traditional JRPG, it's a boring one.

The gameplay is also plagued by another traditional RPG aspect that isn't normally a problem in these types of games: the need to get new weapons. Like, duh, in an RPG (no matter where it's from), you need to get better weapons as the game progresses, so what's the problem? The problem is that you automatically get the materials you need to craft the best weapon for the next chapter at the end of the boss fight for the current chapter. So...there's literally no way to not get the next best weapon unless you just forget. Same goes for armor bits. So...what exactly is the purpose for having a gear system anyway? You don't have different weapon types, it's just one sword per chapter...and the stats don't actually change anything, because as I've already said, enemy hp scales alongside the increase in sword damage. So in the end, you waste time every chapter going to the blacksmith and manually upgrading your gear when doing away with stats altogether would literally change nothing. 

But with all of the problems there are with gameplay, the worst part is the pacing. Each chapter runs pretty much the same way. You'll start off in your hub area chatting with some folks about the mission ahead, you'll deploy to the mission area, you'll make your way to a specific place within the area (fighting enemies that pop up along the way), and you'll end the chapter with one of the most impressive boss fights in recent memory. And like with a lot of things I've brought up, at first this structure isn't an issue. Those boss fights are one thing that the game gets 100% objectively right, so early on, they serve as an excellent thing to look forward to. Plus, before you start seeing through the moment-to-moment gameplay (and before the game starts re-using levels), the lead-up to the boss fights is also pretty good. But like with all things in Final Fantasy XVI, eventually you'll start to see the cracks show. The breaking point for me came maybe around the halfway point. At this point in the story, a character brings out a brand new kind of ship they want to build, so you're tasked with going across the hub area to ask the blacksmith to do task x. Then you have to go across the hub in the opposite area to talk to the character again. Then you have to go across the hub to talk to a material procurer to get them to do task y. Then you have to go all the way back across the hub to talk to the character again. Then you have to go on a fetch quest to a place you've already been before and maybe fight some enemies. Then you have to go back to the hub to rinse and repeat everything I've already specified. It's that bad. This segment came off the back of a particularly good boss fight, so I found myself getting progressively angrier and angrier at the poor pacing and boring objectives. From this point on, I couldn't not see the cracks, and I'd find myself losing interest at perhaps the fastest rate I've ever lost interest at. My opinion of Final Fantasy XVI dropped exponentially practically overnight, because as I've already said, once the negatives start to show, they're impossible to ignore. 

I guess if there's one last thing to talk about in regards to gameplay, it's those boss fights I've been going on about. They're largely interactive movies, but credit where it's due: these are without question the most 100% jaw-droppingly impressive interactive movies in gaming history. There's simply no comparison and no question that all the budget went into these battles. I mean, come on, if memory serves, the last boss I left off on was a dragon god in outer space shooting lasers. So in spite of my many gripes with gameplay, the boss fights are objectively excellent. 

Thankfully, the words of praise don't stop with the discussion of the boss fights. As a technical package, Final Fantasy XVI is mostly strong. But let's get the negatives out of the way so we can end this section on a positive note, yeah? In the more densely-populated areas the framerate has a tendency to drop, and while the soundtrack is excellent, the same track gets used for just about every boss...and in addition to that, a portion of that soundtrack piece feels relaxing in a really out of place way. That doesn't make the boss fights any less epic, but it is a gripe I had. Finally, there's the stilted, lifeless conversational cutscenes. Normally that's not the type of thing I'd go out of my way to point out because it isn't necessarily a big problem. But in a game where 80% of every level is going around and talking to people, it can be. I say can be because certain Bioware games have this as an aspect, but they're at least backed up by great characters and good writing. But in a game like this where the characters are so useless and boring, and in which the writing is so terrible, it's a damning problem.

I know I started to sound pretty negative there despite the fact that I said the technical package was mostly strong, but I do stand by my statement about the overall state of things. Firstly, the soundtrack is excellent if a little unvaried, as I've already stated. Secondly, nearly everything about the graphical quality is second to none. The environments, the character models (outside of the stunted dialogue scenes), the particle effects, the sense of scope when up against the bosses, all of it is fantastic. What's more, there were no animation or sound glitches, no crashes, no low textures or sudden texture pop-in, etc. For anything that hasn't been called out as a negative, it's a positive.

Folks, despite the fact that there are some positives to be found in Final Fantasy XVI, it's easily the worst game that has come out this year as far as I'm concerned. The developers tried to take both the gameplay and the story in different directions than usual, and both attempts fell flat in far too many ways. I mean, I didn't even end up talking about everything I hated (such as the boring side quests), that's how much is wrong here. If you can stick it out through some truly horrid pacing if the promise of an excellent boss fight at the end is there, then this may very well be GOTY for you. But for me, it's anything but.

Let us review:

Nonsense grimdark - 1.0

Poor characters - 1.0

Generic world - 0.5

Constant pacing problems - 1.0

Boring gameplay loop - 1.0

Time-wasting RPG elements - 1.0

Technical problems - 0.5

The final score for Final Fantasy XVI is...

4.0/10 - Below Average

For shame, Creative Business Unit III, for shame!