i made an Angry Post about ffxvi’s writing earlier after playing the worst side quest i have ever seen in a video game. i deleted said post, because it was just kind of me yelling and i didn’t feel great about it and realised i would probably have a more thoughtful opinion later.
said thoughtful opinion though is that final fantasy sixteen’s writing is fucking bad. mostly.
i feel like i need like, a quality/time line graph to demonstrate this, where the quality just sinks and sinks as you go. i feel like the prologue/first act is mostly pretty good? largely off the back of how well realised cid is. after i beat the game i loaded up new game plus just for the fun of beating up tutorial bosses with end game powers and it confirmed for me that yeah, i do still like the early parts of this story.
🚨🚨BIG SPOILERS AHEAD🚨🚨
but then cid eats it and there’s a five year time skip. cid dying is a perfectly good narrative move; no beef with that. but the time skip is indefensible. it glosses over so much juicy character growth and drama which we just sort of infer happened off screen and gains nothing I’m trade. one of the worst storytelling choices i can name of the top of my head for sure.
after that shit just becomes aggressively disjointed. the things that happen aren’t bad per se, but it feels like they all happen in the wrong order; three distinct narrative arcs are interspersed together and the effect is to just make them all feel deeply unsatisfying. the big kaiju fights still broadly carry it, but the writing at this point in the game definitely earns the grade of bad.
then you fight bahamut and the story after that, in act iii, is ratshit awful. this is the stuff that makes me wonder if this is the worst written final fantasy. broadly, every new story beat undermines something cool from the earlier part of the game and the main antagonist, who is much more in focus from this point onward is truly, truly terrible. i feel like a final fantasy antagonist needs to be some combo of interesting, charismatic or sexy to be compelling and ultima is none of them. i could write a whole essay on this bit of the game sucking ass but honestly? i don’t wanna think about this shit anymore.
the caveat here is that i think the character writing is generally pretty strong throughout. talking with my partner i compared it to watching these beautiful elegant sail boats on a filthy, polluted lake with oil drums and shopping trolleys in it. i like clive and friends a bunch but it’s absolutely not worth sitting through a story that isn’t actually about anything (and consequently manages to be boring) for them.
also everybody feels under-explored? like a bunch of good character moments are left on the table because cutscenes cost a gajillion dollars.
ultimately, i don’t really think ffxvi is worth playing, even for the good combat. probably if you can find a pre-owned copy two years from now. I dunno that i’ve really said anything more substantial than ‘story bad, but with caveats’ here, but i needed to get it out of my system so i could think about something else.
i do love torgal thought