What makes a Final Fantasy? Given the frequent tone changes for the series – this one boasts an obvious Game of Thrones influence and a mature age rating – it’s an open question, but fans come back for more than just chocobos and moogles. For me, Final Fantasy is more of a mood. Other fans can rest easy – there is still much of the series’ DNA in Final Fantasy XVI, and that is ultimately what helps the game through its weaker moments.
The game radiates a sense of care, in its themes and in the way characters treat one another. Like Final Fantasy VII, it reminds us that we have one planet to live on and that we should treat one another with kindness. Sure there is swearing and violence, but they are genuine expressions of desperation and surprise, and they feel earned. Who wouldn’t swear at seeing a monster the size of a mountain raze everything in its path?
FFXVI is also full of gratifying little nods to the series’ history – the victory fanfare is back and it is glorious, seeing fan-favourite monsters become serious opponents is as exciting as it was in Final Fantasy VII Remake, and this game’s Cid is the best Cid since Final Fantasy VII, if not ever.
At 15, protagonist Clive Rosfield is a guard to his brother Joshua. Even though Clive is older, Joshua is set to inherit his family’s throne because he is a Dominant, a person who can control powerful monsters called Eikons, and even transform into one. As the Dominant of Fire, Joshua can use devastating magic; Clive, who can only throw a few puny fireballs, is worse than useless to his scheming mother. People like him, called Bearers, are usually enslaved from birth, all for the crime of being able to use magic without the aid of a crystal. But during a mission gone wrong, Joshua is killed by a mysterious second Dominant of Fire who by all accounts shouldn’t exist and their kingdom is taken over. Thirteen years later, Clive, now enslaved, is on a mission to avenge his brother.
Final Fantasy XVI is a story of nations clashing over territory and resources, a recurring theme for the series. The crystals and their magic lead to questions of ecological sustainability and free will, both of which have been at the heart of FF since its inception. However, the tone-change masks that FFXVI is the kind of story the series has told several times before – and gets told in similar ways in many western games besides. Realistic high fantasy may be new territory for Final Fantasy, but not necessarily for its players.
And it’s sad that in the pursuit of “realistic” fantasy, the FF team has erased people of colour from their own history of slavery – they are absent from the game. Worse, there is a desert region, complete with some stereotypical oriental music, occupied by lightly tanned characters with clearly western features. It feels as if the amount of care taken with other aspects of the game wasn’t extended to people of colour, and that stings.
Where it took FFXV a film, a game, several expansions and a few books to piece its world together, here characters constantly put events into context, share anecdotes or react to changes that you bring about. You have a historian, a strategist and something called Active Time Lore at your disposal – the last one is akin to Amazon Prime Video’s X-ray feature, and lets you look up information about characters, locations and concepts during cutscenes. It’s a dream for fans of in-game lore, but the amount of ground there is to cover also results in uneven pacing. Even short gameplay sequences are regularly bracketed by drawn out cutscenes in which characters pore over a map.
These scenes had me itching to pick the controller up again, and they spend a long time telling you how urgent the situation is, which feels ironic. But as a result, Clive, who may come across as taciturn at first, is probably the most well-rounded, loving and emotive character since FFX’s Tidus, with the difference that this time around players may actually like him. Final Fantasy thrives on likable protagonists and their relationships with each other, and Clive, who makes a lot of friends over the course of the game, is the perfect mix of cool and affable.
The combat feels like the final form of the free-roaming hack and slash battles Square Enix has experimented with ever since Final Fantasy XIII. You have a ranged magic attack, sword attacks, two special attacks that use the power of an Eikon and commands for your faithful hound, Torgal. Most attacks can be charged for more damage, and eventually Clive acquires a limit break that makes him even more powerful for a short period of time. It’s thanks to combat design veteran Ryota Suzuki, who worked on games such as Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon’s Dogma, that juggling all of these options feels smooth, and well-timed strings of combos turn smaller enemies into defenceless ragdolls.
However, unless you are the kind of player that enjoys experimenting with attacks and achieving flawless combos, the novelty inevitably wears off. Devil May Cry is great but it’s also not 40 hours long. While Clive learns some additional skills and attacks to make new combos with, you end up executing the same attacks and patterns a lot, especially since bosses have ridiculously capacious health bars. The stagger system from Final Fantasy VII Remake is vital to make it through – if you continuously attack enemies so that they can’t retaliate, they end up “staggered”, taking increased damage while completely unable to fight. Still, you spend a lot of time bashing nonsense numbers out of big monsters and battles feel overly long.
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This criticism could of course apply to any game above a certain length, but fights in Final Fantasy XVI can easily devolve into an onslaught of magical explosions and heavy, persistent motion blur that is unclear and unpleasant on the eye. Battles are frequently ridiculously bombastic, even for a Final Fantasy. If you don’t believe that there can be too much action, too big an enemy, too many phases to a battle, this game might change your mind. The dichotomy between this excess and the naturalistic Game of Thrones approach to the world and characters is jarring, and it might have benefited the game to rein things in a bit.
Level design is not Final Fantasy XVI’s strong point. Impressive-looking castles turn out to be linear tunnels while large, open swathes of field or marsh or desert extend between them. While towns are now higher in number and hold more people than in Final Fantasy XV, they are little more than hubs in which quest givers patiently wait for you to rescue them, and the outside world remains devoid of life. See a tower in the distance? The door is closed. Found treasure? It’s almost always an item for the barebones crafting system. Unlike in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, for instance, there are no secrets that you can organically uncover, and side quests are a simple matter of following an objective marker, taking out whatever monster awaits you at your destination, and then fast-travelling back.
As much as Square Enix clearly tried to get me invested in the side quests by offering little narrative arcs, most of these stories aren’t engaging, and where tedious quests meet minor rewards, disappointment is inevitable. Final Fantasy needed surprise encounters and real incentives for players to explore its wider world, but you’re back to swathes of empty land. Side quests that unlock something special, such as upgraded curatives, do exist, but they are marked with their own symbol, another item to tick off the list.
Final Fantasy XVI is the series at its most spectacular, for good and bad. However, Square Enix has taken a lot of the criticism aimed at previous games into account, and the battles offer more freedom, the characters are fleshed out, and thanks to detailed world-building, you finally get the sense again that there is a world out there that needs saving.