jack✨

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.

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.

Yikes. I guess I should go back to my FF14 trail? Between your thoughts and Patrick Klepick's, this does make me question what the reviewers who raved on the game saw.

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

The only people who seem to be raving about it are the white cishet Edgy McEdgerton Gamer types. Also "Accessibility hurts Gamers" is a terrible take for a director to have.