3.5/5 ★ – fez219's review of Final Fantasy XVI.

Final Fantasy 16 is one hell of a game. It's got some of the most intense boss fights I've ever played, set in a fantastic world with excellent lore and great characters. I found its story very compelling as well, and I was always excited to see what new enemies and abilities were around the next corner as I played with its great combat system. But the pacing. Good lord, is this game poorly paced. FF16 alternates some of the most hype stuff in a video game ever with hours of mind-numbingly dull dialogue and exploration in its abysmal open zones and sidequests. While the cutscenes are impressive, some just go on too long when you just want to play the damn game. Without its pacing issues, this game would easily be a 9 or maybe even a 10 with a few other slight shifts. But getting through certain sections was downright painful. This unfortunately greatly detracts from an otherwise excellent experience. It's lucky that the more focused sections of the game are so great, because this could otherwise drag the game down far worse than the 7 I'm giving it. Outside of pacing issues, the game is an overall great experience that I have no trouble recommending. The graphics and presentation are incredible, with amazing vistas and crazy battles looking equally great. While some NPCs look a bit wonky, Final Fantasy XVI for the most part is one of the best looking games ever made. I found the framerate to be largely consistent as well, even if the game does occasionally chug. The music is masterful and perfectly matches the crazy scale and variety of its fights. And the centerpiece of the game, its unabashed action combat, shines brightly. This Final Fantasy is far closer to a character action game like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta than its RPG roots, which was a controversial choice. But I think it really works. The presentation of the combat, the persistence of stats and leveling up, seeing move names appear onscreen, it all still feels like it's Final Fantasy despite the lack of any real roleplaying gameplay. You do have some choices to make in your combat build — primarily in your moveset and the gear you want to compliment it — but do not expect anything close to an actual RPG. There's a skill tree, but it mostly comes down to maxing out the basic moves and pumping whatever abilities you like. Most Eikonic (e.g. magic moves with a cooldown) moves just get slightly stronger and finally can be equipped on any eikon once mastered, so there isn't much strategy to pick besides which (up to six) Eikonic moves you want with which (up to three) main Eikonic abilities go with them. I did have fun trying to figure out the best combo of Eikonic moves to chain to maximize damage, but I wish the Eikon you picked influence your combat style more than just changing out your special moves. Different Eikons giving Clive different weapons or combat stances could have put the combat on a pedestal with the best action combat sytems ever, but the combat as it exists is still a great time. As for gear, swords and armor (belts and vambraces) offer nearly no build options besides more attack or defense, and you barely feel the change from even powerful equipment because the game levels up around you. It feels more like a requirement to keep up that you never feel unless you lapse, in which I'd imagine enemy health sponginess gets out of control. Accessories at least offer interesting perks, although they're mostly minor and come down to reducing cooldowns to compliment your moveset, rather than adding another strategic dimension. One area I think that deserves praise and may be under-discussed: accessibility and QoL features. The game grants early game equipment to make combat more-or-less automatic. I didn't use this gear, but I appreciate that it makes it easier for anyone to enjoy the combat's spectacle and still feel powerful. Respeccing moves is incredibly easy and user-friendly as well; at any point outside combat, Clive can completely refund his skill points in any given skill with no penalty. The combat itself is really great, though! I don't think it's quite as good as the perfection we've seen from games like DMC3 or Bayonetta, but to be fair that's an extremely high bar. At a basic level, managing cooldowns, staggers, and combos while dodging is still very satisfying here. The main Eikonic abilities (each tied to circle button) are all super-cool, and can add significant dimensions to your playstyle. It's apparent how fun they are from the beginning with Pheonix's ever-useful teleport. Still, I wish there was more variation to Clive's non-Eikonic moves; I feel that a few more combo options for basic non-cooldown moves or allowing a few more than 6 eikonic moves to be equipped at a time would have gone a long way. Still, the enemies and especially the bosses have a ton of variety, and the combat is still great. It's very snappy, with satisfying dodges and counters aplenty and tons of different enemies with unique attacks to learn (many of which get onscreen text announcing the attack, like FF16's turn-based predecessors). The Sekiro-ish stagger system makes for plenty of moment-to-moment strategizing as well: do you burn a few Eikonic moves to break a tough enemy's guard quick, or do you save up your Eikonic moves to do a crazy combo string after staggering them for mind-boggling damage numbers? The more spectacular bosses are especially incredible, with some truly insane set pieces — and that's without actually getting into the Eikon gameplay. It's some of the best combat I've seen in a while even if it's not at the tippy top. The Kaiju-like Eikon fights are truly something else. While somewhat simplistic in their gameplay, the level of spectacle hasn't been matched in a game since God of War 3, in my opinion. These fights are NUTS. That said, I wish there were just a few more Eikon fights. I think a few bosses that were already great could have been pushed to the next level with an Eikon phase (***spoilers from here on out***) — especially Odin (I get that it's meant to be a more personal fight, but damn it I still want to fight Odin as an Eikon)! The fights against Titan and Bahamut are some of the best bosses I've ever fought. The story takes quite a while to get going, but once it does, I found myself quite invested. At first, it seems as if FF16 is busy doing a Game of Thrones imitation, complete with sex and F-bombs. And I think it works! All the intrigue is fun, and the voice performances carry what otherwise could be some extremely cheesy dialogue. But as you get further into the game, you realize a much more Final Fantasy villain is pulling the strings, and it gets very silly. But I enjoyed that too! There's some silly bits as you go and inconsistencies as far as the villian and Clive's powers go, but it's still a great ride. Most of the main characters are extremely likable, but I will say Jill didn't land for me. She's just boring and isn't given enough to do. Still, her relationship with Clive still resounded despite her flatness. The other main heroes are all really fun to spend time with and highly entertaining. Clive is an excellent protagonist, and his relationships with the other main characters are all very compelling. Especially Torgal. Cid is a standout, with a phenomenal voice performance. Most of the human villains are great characters as well, particularly Benedikta, Hugo, and Dion. I think Barnabus is a bit of a miss, just because your losses to him in cutscenes are annoying and he's basically a cartoon villian who isn't relatable at all — although I suppose in his case, that's kind of the point. If anything, I wish Benedikta stuck around longer and potentially had a redemption arc. That said, that could be a double-edged sword and take some steam away from Hugo's visceral conflict with Clive — probably the most compelling conflict in the whole game. The game was smart to keep Hugo around as long as they did. He's imposing and terrifying (albeit silly), and any time you think you might fight him it's easy to get as pumped up as Clive. The true villain, Ultima, isn't the most compelling until the end, but the final fight and Ultima's unravelling are supremely satisfying. The world and its lore is one of the best parts about the game. The way magic is treated in FF16 is very unique both within Final Fantasy and within fantasy in general, with many subversions down to the end of the game. The various countries and their landmarks have tons of writing put into their background and I loved learning as much as I could. The game's active time lore system really helps the player either keep up or dig into as much as they wish. I would love to see more games use this system. FF16 is a truly impressive and beautiful game, yet it fumbles the bag in a major way — its abysmal pacing. It's very clear what the good parts of the game are, and they are very very good. When you're in linear levels, fighting bosses, and watching the big budget cutscenes, you're gonna have a great time — even if some of the early moments really take their time and could go a bit faster. But there's so much more game beyond that, and it is SLOW. Way too much of the game is spent travelling around open zones with far cheaper scenes of dialogue that I found myself blasting through with the x button. The locations you explore are very pretty, but the rewards for exploration are meager and don't make for compelling gameplay. Most of what you find are crafting components for an extremely undercooked crafting system; it feels like the crafting system was to be much more expansive, but was nerfed into an extremely simplified version of recent God of War game's crafting system. The stories you experience in these open zones feel very sidequest-y despite often being parts of the main quest, and really drag down the experience. They're just boring, with fetch quest objectives and basic RPG trope characters that never come close to the quality of the main characters or the linear levels. These sections of the game drag with ridiculous amounts of exposition about the world, ignoring storytelling's big mantra of show, don't tell. I do appreciate that much of it is meant to build out the world more — which it certainly does! But so much of the game is dedicated to these chores and it's just too much. It's especially frustrating when you know the game is building towards a big moment, but to get there you have to cross through hours of open zone content. More meaningful rewards for exploration could have gone a long way towards making these zones be more tolerable, but even then there's just so much content in these zones that it pads out the game too much. It simply should have been shorter. The sidequests likewise feel very tacked on. They are given in huge blasts and it's just exhausting to suddenly have ten+ sidequests in the late game right before a big thing you're looking forward to. This even happens right before the final boss. It feels almost like the devs are messing with you. Again, I appreciate that the sidequests give some fun character background and lore — but they're just too low quality in both their objectives and the dialogue to not be a drag. Sometimes, they have compelling content. But for the most part, they're just boring and there's too damn many of them. I think offering far less sidequests and trimming down the main quests in these zones would have made for a much tighter overall experience. I would have been fine with ten times less the amount of these quests and sidequests if they involved more fleshed out characters and dialogue, and gameplay that rivalled the main quest's fantastic adventure. The open zone content and sidequests very much feel like MMO type content and it just doesn't fit the bombastic other half of the game, nor is it satisfying in terms of gameplay rewards. Overall, this is a fantastic game at its core in just about every respect, but one that's bogged down way too much with bloated open zone and sidequest content. If the latter aspect of the game harmonized better with the first aspect, this could be a masterpiece. But as it is, it's still a great game with some of the coolest stuff I've ever seen a game do. I highly recommend it, even if I wouldn't recommend spending much time on its sidequests and open zone stuff.