Final Fantasy XVI

- The side quests do a lot to add to the lore, but they don’t add much for the gameplay. They’re mostly simple fetch quests. I almost feel like they could have folded the hunts into the side quests somehow, since I want some action in them as well. Still, they are just charming enough that I am doing all of them.
- The gameplay rules. You can tell it’s the FFXIV team who worked on this because they used a lot of the same design philosophies in an action game. The two that stick out to me are the enemy telegraphs (sometimes literally a giant AOE marker on the floor) and the rotational gameplay that keeps things feeling smooth. It’s really satisfying to hit a groove with your three eikons, switching back and forth as needed and filling time with combos and Torgal commands. They break that smoothness occasionally, and most disappointingly with Ramuh, but it’s overall a solid loop.
- The scale of the world is off, somehow. The entire world seems like I could walk it in a day or two, but there’s all these different cultures and stuff. It’s not a bad thing per se, but it breaks immersion a little bit.
- The story is mostly just “good,” and the stuff about freeing bearers is a little platitude-y. But the philosophical questions with Ultima are actually really interesting. Ultima is a god who made mankind just to see some greater vision fulfilled; free will was an irritating accident. That clash of wills between man and god is actually fairly interesting, where they both want opposing outcomes for the world. It’s an interesting thing to think about, and I wonder a bit if it’s meant to critique a particular religion or if it’s simply a philosophical question. You don’t often see fantasy stories where the god is mostly irritated about the whole free will thing.
- The combat has gotten a little stale at the end of the game. I think this is mostly because the last few eikons don’t synergize particularly well with the others. Odin, for example, is reasonably strong if you stay in his abilities, but loses impact if you switch to another eikon. Bahamut is super strong, but casting megaflare by sitting and dodging isn’t so fun. Even Shiva, who I like the most of the last three, has weird spacing in her attacks. This is compounded by the lack of enemy variability at this point in the game; there’s nothing that I haven’t really seen before except behemoths.