I’ve seen a lot of positive praise and sentiment for XVI even from longtime fans and I find that worrying. I finished the game and thought it was a solid 5/10 at best and was happy for it to be over. The game felt closer to Genshin Impact than it did Final Fantasy.
The music was generally quite good and the eikon battles were a fun and new take, but just about everything else I found lacking.
spoiler
- The main story retreads themes that have been told many times and offers nothing unique. It’s clear early on we are on a quest to collect the rings of power to fight the big bad who thinks the only solution to the problem is starting over.
- Most characters were flat and uninteresting
- Combat was very simple and unengaging. It was simply not fun. You can only use about a quarter of the abilities you collect (not that theres many more youd find useful enough to use anyways)
- Crafting/itemization was pointless
- MMO-tier side quests (ironic considering XIV has some interesting ones)
- Story format is lifted straight from XIV as all “engagement” quests (ones with the red crossed swords on the map) are the same as XIV dungeons (trash, minor boss, trash, minor boss, trash, major boss)
- Empty world with no incentive for exploration
- Minimal play style variety despite the different eikon flavors
- No class system (I would have expected something listed as a “role playing game” to have some sort of class system)
- No party system in any form
Overally, fairly worried about the franchise since so many people are over the moon as it implies we might be getting more of the above. It feels like XVI took heavy inspiration from XIV but did a worse job at the highlights of XIV (story, job/battle system) and straight up copied some of the bad parts of XIV.
Now that it’s been a few weeks, hopefully more people have finished the game. What are your thoughts?
SkillUp did and got a lot of shit for it, as he expected 😁 He generally disliked the direction the franchise is taking and wasn’t a fan of much besides presentation, which makes sense since he’s more of a gameplay oriented gamer from what I can tell.
(No spoilers)
I enjoyed it. This game for most people will land between a 7/10 to a 9/10. The music, story, and combat were all excellent for me but make no mistake. There are deep deep flaws in this game, especially on the “rpg” side of things.
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Using FFXVs open world as an excuse to make this game zone based makes no sense after playing it. The benefit of zones is that you get to add dense content to these hand crafted maps but the zones in this game are far more uninteresting and dead than XV since they basically did nothing interesting with them.
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The party system is just horrible. Yes Torgal is a good boy and all but the parts where you had two additional party members made the game feel so much more alive. Even from a gameplay perspective they took aggro away from you and contributed dps. Having large sections of the game where you’re alone with just Torgal is so bad and even thematically makes no sense.
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I don’t get why they couldn’t add even basic shit like elemental advantage/disadvantage. FF7R already shows you can do this. It’s just plain lazy and using the excuse of “it makes the game harder” is baffling.
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Locking the hard difficulty behind NG+ is such a poor way of padding out a game. It’s already statistically proven a vast majority of players don’t even bother NG+ and locking something thing like that behind a 40 hour grind is sad. I much would’ve preferred having a hard difficulty on my first play through.
Ultimately I’ve come to terms that most of the things I don’t like in this game are design decisions they brought in from FFXIV (zones, no elemental affinity, lack of party, most side quests, etc). 95% of the things I did enjoy were game mechanics not from XIV. It’s clear to me that their approach to game design from their time as MMO devs do not compliment this game. The more they stepped away from it, the better it got. But the parts that doubled down on it were very lackluster.
Criticisms aside, this game is still a 9/10 for me and sets up good ground work for their next game. And if it makes anyone feel better here, CBU3 are usually very aware of criticisms and I’m sure they’ll address it one way or another.
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I haven’t finished it yet; I think I’m about 80% through and I’m struggling to pick it back up. I agree with all your points. It is super repetitive - Same Big Story Mission vs Different Eikon -> 6 Side Missions -> 1 or 2 Hunts; repeat. I want to like it, but end of the day the cutscenes aren’t enough to carry it.
I got to about 80% and I really really had to force myself to finish it, I wouldn’t say it was worth it, but I’m also glad it’s over now and I can move on to something else.
I’m only part way through (a bit past bahamut) so I’m not fully qualified to comment on the game as a whole, and I’m avoiding reviews until I’m finished (also haven’t played 14 or 15). So far I’m really enjoying it because it just has that Final Fantasy charm that squeenix are so good at. I love the world, the story is good (if leaning a bit too heavily on game of thrones for my liking), and the characters are likeable enough. Combat got fun once it clicked. That said…
There are a LOT of really obvious things to criticize. Over tutorialized, incredibly boring fetch quests, and progression systems that are wierdly linear and restrictive. It’s frustrating because some small tweaks could make it so much better. Let me explore and discover quests for myself instead of witholding them until the game decides to make them available and then spamming me with notifications. Disable the on-screen quest markers or at least let me turn them off (the “animal instinct” feature is neat, don’t need more than that). Let me upgrade my weapons past +2 and specialise them with elemental synergies so there isn’t just one “correct” gear set to use at any given time. Give different merchants their own unique items to sell. Jill is an interesting character but is underused, that whole descent to the first crystal with Cid, and the cutscene that followed, she was barely given a single line. The titan fights are great ideas but not always fun to play, and too reliant on quicktime events which I thought we’d all agreed kinda sucked several years ago so idk why squeenix didn’t get the memo.
But anyway yeah it’s pretty and sometimes fun and I can pet the dog so it still gets a thumbs up from me I guess 乁( •_• )ㄏ
I get some of your criticisms for the game and agree with a lot of them. But I don’t see a narrow more action focused character and mechanics as a bad thing, FFXVI is basically a Japanese Witcher 3. Now you may dislike that in favor of more blank slate character development and that’s fine. What I do find a major problem in 16 is that the combat system is complete overkill for the standard difficulty as the enemy AI is extremely passive outside of the big fights. So the game doesn’t force you to really make hard choices in terms of loadout and moment to moment gameplay a la DMC5.
Also, the side quests really suck mechanically and slow down the narrative way too much.
I think comparing it to the Witcher is a bit too generous towards XVI. Witcher combat isn’t super diverse, but people play it because there’s interesting stories, characters, and occasionally meaningful choices. I don’t think XVI stacks up in narrative and clearly there’s no actual choices to be made in the game.
Completely agree 16 is not as strong narratively, merely saying the RPG style is similar, where you are role playing a very focused character with clearly defined personality and mechanics. As opposed to something like FallOut or an MMO where you can taylor your character’s specialization.
Really fell flat for me, riddled with bad animation, fetch quests, boring dialogue, pointless crafting etc.
I really did enjoy the first hour or so, but tbh even the combat - which people praise - wasn’t even as good as stranger of paradise in depth or complexity. You spent most of your time doing the same combo waiting for cool downs.
Hitting attack or dodge repeatedly isn’t satisfying depth, not to mention the dodge just automatically saves you as long as its timed right the direction means nothing.
Side quests were pretty unbearable, in my whole life I’ve never skipped cutscenes, I skipped them all on the last 12 side quests because the voice/animation were so boring and I knew I’d be rewarded with either gil of crafting materials, both of which I had in abundance and nothing to spend it on.
If you want to lock a “super hard” mode behind ng , then fine, but the “Action focused” mode was so easy that it’s insulting to lock the harder mode out, nobody wants to play a game twice to enjoy it and especially not one that’s 50 hours long.
Overall, very disappointed, after seeing people rave about yoshi I thought it could be good but it was just too close to an MMO in quest design.
Edit: Oh and having no elemental or status effects in a game in which every eikon has a theme and you fight marlboros which do bad breath is just so lazy. The system was oversimplified, not complex, everything the enemy did was just a pure subtraction, nothing else. I just can’t understand how they’ve released such a plain experience.
