A Rose By Any Other Name: A Final Fantasy XVI Review
A Fantasy That's Final, But Not Quite Final Fantasy
[WARNING: minor spoilers are discussed]
Childhood is a blur, and we were poor. So, while the first Final Fantasy game for the Nintendo Entertainment System came out in 1990 in the U.S. (1987 in Japan), I know there’s *no way* I played it for at least a couple of years. Still, I know I played it before Final Fantasy III came out in October of 1994.
So, let’s split the dates down the middle. Let’s say I played Final Fantasy 1 in 1992 on my trusty 13” color TV, which I also used to play all my used NES games. That means I’ve spent 32 years playing Final Fantasy games, or 72.7% of my lifetime. And not just playing Final Fantasy, but obsessing over FF. If you’re new to my writing, you should know I’m autistic. And I literally can’t remember my life before FF, so it genuinely feels like FF has been a special interest my whole life.
This isn’t some gatekeeping credential establishment but rather necessary info to paint a picture of where my review for Final Fantasy XVI is coming from. It’s coming from a lifelong fan who cares very much about the history, present, and future of the franchise.
The franchise as a whole has had some ups and downs — mostly ups, from my perspective. I tried counting the series total according to Wikipedia (going beyond the numbered mainline entries) and I stopped counting at sixty games, because I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to count every single Chocobo spin-off and mobile game. There is a LOT of Final Fantasy out there, folks.
All that said, back to the game I’ve been been playing the last few weeks, for a total of 58 hours: Final Fantasy XVI. I won’t bury the lede: this is a VERY GOOD video game. But is it a good Final Fantasy game?
The series, developed and published these days by SquareEnix, has long abandoned the turn-based combat that made it famous. Without getting into niggling, pedantic details about the Active Battle System the series has used for ages, let’s simplify the combat into two camps: turn-based, and action-based.
The last time a mainline FF game had turn-based combat was Final Fantasy X, back in 2001. Since then, two have been MMOs, and everything else — even the controversial Final Fantasy X-2 — have been action games. Final Fantasy has officially been an action game longer than it ever was a simply turn-based game.
The best action-based Final Fantasy was 2022’s Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins, which borrowed its sometimes sludgy and methodical weapon cues and playstyle from the Dark Souls series. On release, the internet memed the bejeesus out of SoP:FFO for its main character, Jack, and his singular focus: killing Chaos. But most folks who bothered to play the sometimes-charmingly goofy game came to appreciate that the action, co-developed by Koei-Tecmo developer Team Ninja, was legit.
The action in FFXVI plays a lot closer to a hack-and-slash, and the gameplay is…fine. It’s very flashy (this is easily the best-looking FF, and on the PS5 Pro, this is one of the better looking games I’ve ever played), customizable, and action-packed. Unfortunately, almost every enemy, and certainly every boss, is a damage sponge. The primary action button is Square, and in some battles, I must have pressed the Square button at least 500 times. There were times when it felt like I was playing a clicker game like This is Mayo or Clicker Heroes.
The worse indictment on the action is its lack of strategy. As you progress the main story in the game, you come across 8 Eikons, all of which have different elemental or quasi-elemental powers. We’ve called them Summons in past games, Espers, Guardian Forces, etc. Now, for a very long time (iirc since Final Fantasy II), elemental strategy existed: for example, if you used a fire attack on an ice creature, the attack would do extra damage (often double), and vice versa. In some entries, there was an added layer: if you used a fire attack on a fire creature, they might absorb the attack and gain hit points instead of lose them. This all added a delicious layer of strategy for making your way through the game, allowing you to fight not just with your fists, but also your mind.
XVI eschews all that. You’re just going to be pressing Square a LOT for your main attacks while your special Eikon-ability attacks cool down. You can upgrade these abilities, but the only strategy that I could find was “Number Go Up”. Figure out which attacks did the most damage, then spam those abilities as soon as they cool down. One possible reason behind this is that the game’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, comes with an MMO pedigree, so the action is 100% MMO-like, and nothing as strategic as I would expect for a FF game.
This made for some incredibly boring fights, particularly those against bosses, particularly when those boss fights became Eikon fights, when you’d not only have to wait for your good attacks to cool down, you’d also have to pay attention to Quick-Time Event-style single button attacks, dodges, and - you guessed it - more spamming the Square button.
The irony of combat in Final Fantasy XVI is that the better the fight looked, the more boring it was to play. Some of these fights looked spectacular, pushing my PS5 Pro to the limit. Every time one of these battles came up, the fan on my console started screaming like a fighter jet. My wife, sitting next to me reading a book, would often look up and just start watching, during boss fights and cutscenes alike. But all of this took an uncomfortable amount of the play time out of my hands.
The story was outstanding, but lacking in flavor and pinache. I didn’t really care about what happened to this world, or most of its inhabitants. Kingdoms were crushed, Empires fell, nobles and plebs were massacred (earning the game its M Rating, the first in the numbered series, within the first 5 minutes). But aside from Clive Rosfield, his mentor Cid, his brother Joshua, and his love, Jill, I super didn’t care about anything that was happening, or anyone it was happening to.
This is WILDLY uncharacteristic for a FF game. In Final Fantasy VI, the main villain, Kefka, poisons a town, killing a party member’s wife and son. I never even much used Cyan in my main party, but just thinking about those dorky cutscenes with their chibi 16-bit sprites still gives me chills. In Final Fantasy VII (OG, PS1 version), there were all sorts of colorful blocky polygonial characters everywhere, particularly in Wall Market, including the famous person stuck in the bathroom with, er…indigestion. Or when Yuna performs a Sending for recently departed souls in Final Fantasy X. They were just nameless NPCs, but those previous entries found a way to make me care about them.
There’s another problem with the story in my opinion: this is basically one man’s story. I mostly don’t have a problem with that as a concept and in practice, but it’s very not-Final Fantasy and it also causes one super awkward scene where Clive takes Jill’s Eikon, and he uses it for the rest of the tale. She was one of the Dominant, and held Shiva’s icy power. But Clive asks to take her power. Call me 21st century, call me woke, whatever, but if my special lady had a superpower, I would support her and want to fight alongside her, not arbitrarily gank her superpowers. I have literally written an entire fictional book that is an argument against this scene.
Lastly, the music. I won’t complain about the music, it’s a very well composed game. There are even brief moments that play old classic FF motifs and main themes that really got the heart stirred. But not a lot of the newer stuff got stuck in my head, nor did I find myself humming along. With the exception of a tune called The Hideaway, which I thought of in my head as Cid’s Theme. That track absolutely slaps.
None of this is to suggest or say that Final Fantasy XVI isn’t a good game! I think it’s a very, very fine game, and I would recommend it to anyone curious to play it. But I simply don’t think it’s a good Final Fantasy game. This might be a “me” problem, but I’ve come to expect certain things from a Final Fantasy game over the last 32 years:
Colorful world
Colorful characters
Whimsy
Occasional bonkers scenes that play just for laughs
Elemental strategy
A party of people bonding with each other and not just a “chosen one”
So play it for the action, play it for the eye-meltingly gorgeous vistas and characters and cutscenes, play it for the epic story, but maybe don’t expect to play it simply because you loved Final Fantasy X or XIII or Rebirth. There’s a lot to like here, but none of it is typical Final Fantasy.