Man I have been struggling to build the motivation to write about this. What a fuckin' thing.
I'll cut to the chase and say that I don't think Final Fantasy XVI is a good videogame. There's some great stuff in there but overall it's a really inconsistent experience and some of my issues with the game go from "this is boring" to "this is so actively offensive I'm surprised they haven't apologised".
Spoilers below the jump.
I had drafted a very long post detailing all of the things I hated about the story but anything I could say was said infinitely better by Jackson, Em, and Austin on their episode of Abnormal Mapping. I highly recommend listening to it, even if you like the game, because I think their dissection of the FF16's core themes is key to understanding why people are upset about it.
I struggle to really, like, pick apart why I didn't like Final Fantasy 16's political machinations because the truth is that I'm far enough removed from it that I just don't care. A core premise of the game's story is that magic users, called Bearers, are branded like cattle and treated like slaves. This stuff is handled so aggressively poorly it's basically cartoonish. I had to stop taking it seriously. The protagonist, Clive, is a Bearer, which makes their plight a core pillar of the game's story until Clive has his Bearer brand scarred away and removed from his face. At which point nobody ever talks about Bearers in the main story ever again because it is no longer a concern to them. (There are bigger things at stake, you see.) You have to dig into sidequests for it and at that point in the game, it's mostly to tell you that Bearers are simply too stupid to live without their masters.
Thankfully, the Bearers don't carry the brunt of this game's mishandling of shit because this game also features women, which by the end I was surprised to find it bothered to at all. I'm like, very aggressively not the type to say this shit because I like things that are sometimes horny or bad or both but like, Final Fantasy 16 fucking hates women. It is absurdly misogynistic.
Again, all of this is better told in the podcast I linked above. It boils my blood to think about. A core character of that game (Jill) has a whole story moment where she ceremoniously offers what little remaining agency she has in the story to your character. She then spends the rest of the game at your base camp doing nothing. Jill has a moment where she runs after you when you leave for the final boss, like a 1920's housewife chasing a train to the end of the platform as her husband rides away to war or whatever. It's fucking stupid. She's fucking Shiva incarnate and spends the entire back third of the game sidelined because a man you don't know about until 20 hours in replaces her role in the story and he's the one who rides off into the sunset to fight the big bad at the end. And that's not even touching how poorly handled other characters like Benedikta, Vivian, Tarja, and Anabella are.
A thing I was gonna write about originally and was not touched on much in the podcast is also how frustrating the game's UX is. It's crazy polished and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing in most cases but for Final Fantasy 16, it's done so aggressively that it makes the game feel rigid and dull. Menus take forever to navigate through because they all interruptibly animate. High-energy story moments are stopped dead in their tracks either to tutorialize you or tell you 'You Beat This Guy' in big text on screen. The tutorial stuff in particular drove me fucking crazy because it would happen like 35 hours into the game and a batshit story thing was happening and then POP. All control taken away from me so a question mark can do a fancy thing on screen and the game can tell me "if you move the L stick, the cursor on screen will move. you know, like it has in every other menu or instance that you've interacted with for the past dozen hours".
FF16 repeatedly halts whatever is going on to animate some shit in your face. By the end of the game, I hated every time I leveled up because whatever I was doing would have to stop for 30 seconds while I looked at a bunch of stats that never mattered roll in. Critical story bosses being vanquished with in the most impeccably animated cutscene paused so it can tell you that you got 3 crafting materials from that that you'll never use because the crafting system in that game is linear and you only ever have one weapon at a time.
Everything takes so fucking long in that game and that includes the base camp you unlock in the game's second act. Everything is super far apart and I'm sure it was to make it feel like a real place with real people but all it did was infuriate me because Clive is the slowest sprinter in existence so even running through the area took too long. I stopped talking to anyone in there because it was just too much lost time to get anywhere that wasn't story or restocking items.
There's a part of that game, the whole section of the game that culminates in you fighting Bahamut, that rules and it's unabashed shonen anime, Dragon Ball-tier shit. You're dragons and you're fighting in space and it's awesome. It's the best thing if you don't think about how Jill (again, SHE'S SHIVA) is just sitting on the ground doing ????. That whole part of the game, including the very linear dungeon, rocks hard. But that's, like, basically it. The other parts of the game that I liked were almost immediately dulled by some shit I couldn't stand.
People talk a lot about big-budget AAA influence on non-Western games and I think that's a little silly because Final Fantasy has been big-budget AAA since the PS1 era but this is really the first time where I've felt like they hated the games they used to make. I like the combat plenty, I like the more linear structure of it, I don't even mind not having party members. But the way its systems and design mesh together makes for an experience that feels so at odds with the things they're really best at. And I don't mean that from the perspective of "It should be like a traditional Final Fantasy game!" because that's stupid. That doesn't exist and if you think it does you're just old and grumpy I'm sorry.
A smarter person would have a better way of summing up what I think the core problems are here. I just don't like the game! The more time I put between it, the more resentful I feel towards the time it took for me to see it through, hoping it would have some kind of absolution for its trainwreck themes and poor play experience. It would be a better game if its story was less ambitious and its gameplay rougher around the edges.

