erica

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freelance illustrator, designer, and idk buncha stuff

@kuraine's wife

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ascari
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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.

which, no, i don't mean as a "bad games are better than good games" thing that's silly, stop that

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in reply to @erica's post:

The thing you mentioned about the UI really made me feel like this game was a huge parody. It's not possible that no one in the development team and QA raised the point that those fanfare-loot screens are incredibly mood and immersion killing. They seem to put them in the worst moments possible as well, right in the middle of an cool death blow animation rather than letting the battle, you know, actually finish.

I agree with all your other points as well (the treatment of women in this game is one of the worse ones in recent memory, and I watch -a lot- of bad anime), but all of them I can see as being their best intentions/bad taste. That fanfare screen tho, I really cannot swallow. Someone was forced to do it and put it in the worst moments on purpose out of spite

it took me days to get back into the game after Jill gets kidnaped for the fourth time. it was just unbelievable that a writer could do that and still call her a 'character'. i nearly lost it at the beach scene. and then the story about the field of flowers? how is that not a flashback cutscene? "oh, well maybe they didn't have the time or whatever to make yet another model for clive at another age", they did just for a like 15-second shot of him with Joshua as a baby!

This definitely resonates with me. The more time that goes on between now and when I watched my partner beat it, the more the "good parts" of it fade into fuzzy memory and just leaves the bad aftertaste.

The Jill stuff is absolutely unhinged how frustrating it is. Whoever is writing these games at this point just straight up does not want women in the them, it's grim.

Absolutely correct. After TOTK I wanted something more linear and flashy and kind of throwaway but I couldn't even appreciate it on those levels. The politics were so blatantly not fully thought out that they doubled back and became insulting

at the risk of sounding like an outsider looking in (considering I haven't played it and probably never will)...

a lot of the marketing & articles I saw of this game had a strange air of like... "look, final fantasy is a serious grown up game with serious grown up themes now! not like those silly old FF games!" that really evaporated a lot of my interest in it. I guess it doesn't shock me all that much to hear about how the story handles things.

That's what got me interested in this one! Like I think it's cool that they'd try to do that with Final Fantasy, whatever that means to them. The problem is that it's not a serious grown up game with grown up themes. It's a passionless game with completely mishandled themes.

I'd still love one that gets this stuff right, I just don't think Maehiro is the right person for it. Or really the right person for any kind of writing task.

I guess it's not so much the serious themes that made me disinterested. I guess I just kept getting "contempt for previous FF games" vibes that made me distrust that those themes were actually going to be handled all that well. IDK if that makes any sense >.>

I haven't had a chance to play yet, but it sounds like the gameplay is rough around the edges from what you've listed. IMO menus, pop ups, and walking around town are gameplay, and if they're detracting a lot and adding little, then I think it's fair to call that gameplay rough. Apologies for dwelling on the wording here.

it kills me that the in-battle gameplay is the best part of the package, and its hamstrung by the lack of need to really use the systems since the difficulty is effectively not there.

plus any of the plot intrigue went out the backdoor to be shot after the bahamut fight.

Glad to hear someone feeling the same as me for this game. I imagine I could ramble on for hours in the most unintelligible way with all the things that bothered me about FFXVI. By the end of the game I was frustrated and bored. Never thought they could make something appear to be so epic yet so boring and long winded, tinged with a special magic of frustration sprinkled between, for anything from the UX, dumb character/story moments, side quests, or the 'cinematic' combat. Bah. To think I finished it, in all my bullheadedness.

piggybacking this since you voiced almost every gripe i had.

edit: how did this get long

edit2: was reminded of cid's voice by a clip on twitter. actually, who can say whether ff16 is actually bad or not.

the game clearly wants to be about Hot Dudes Doing Shit and is deathly afraid of leaning into it whole-hog for reasons i can't well guess. jill is included only grudgingly, for a given definition of included. bearers, and the entire subplot around them, feels included only grudgingly. we have that game, don't we? it's called Strangers of Paradise and it rules, and ff16 really badly wants to be and does not want to be it. which ends up making it all the stranger itself.

we have all these cool abilities and room nukes, used for the express purpose of... killing exactly three dudes standing around Ubisofting at us, waiting to die; and we can't have the next three dudes until we've finished exactly the three dudes on our plate. never a bunch of assholes to group up and mow down. never a gauntlet of big assholes. always three dudes, only dudes, and only occasionally is there one that can survive more than a single skill use.

this isn't even just a difficulty complaint, though. enemies don't do anything, unless they jump in the air and telegraph "ooo i'm gonna land here ooo". i don't need the game to only throw boss enemies at me exclusively, but the enemy troops feel like they're designed to be Work, and not to be Flashy or Challenging. the whole game is slogging through these nothing enemies in hopes that soon, there will be an opponent where i get to use my cool skills without them evaporating, that soon, an opponent will actually attack me on their own and i'll get to use my cool counterattack i spent 5000 asshole points on three hours ago.

i remember exactly one moment where i stopped and realized i had just had fun, in ff16, on my own, outside of a pivotal story boss: the Lv50 S-rank hunt was actually really fun. i remember being engrossed and coming through by the skin of my teeth. my reward? my numbers went up, by a lot, and every other fight for a while became less interesting.

why does this game have experience. the more you play the better you get at dodging. every time you kill a kaiju you get 5 new cool powers to swap in and to upgrade. why does clive also need 50 more hp and 2 more core stats every time you complete a quest

anyway, to any devs reading, give your opponents more HP. inflate their stats. also, let me lower my level or other progression on purpose if i want. the world ends with you is the perfect videogame. thank you for enduring this impromptu manifesto

edit: all ff16 copies should be replaced with dragon's dogma dark arisen