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Final Fantasy 16 review: if it were half as big it’d be twice as goodClive service game
Clive service game
Image credit:Square Enix
Image credit:Square Enix
I’m reasonably sureFinal Fantasy 16isn’t the longestFinal FantasyI’ve ever played, but it feels that way, for a multitude of reasons. The major one is that a lot of its quests exist to create distance between places and plot beats. They are overwritten errands such as bringing people lunch or fetching herbs or carrying letters - dessicated, MMO-ish fare, thrust into a moderately enjoyable action-RPGfor the sake of incremental worldbuilding and scale.
Even the more exciting varieties follow a formula you soon internalise: a colourful but basically unnecessary chinwag; a hike through a scenic but not very intriguing stretch of map you’ve probably already seen in part; a fight with a few monsters you’ve almost certainly beaten up a dozen times before. There are some decent sidequests towards the end - tangents dedicated to core companions, before you mount your final run on the Big Bad. The majority of quests are also optional, if you don’t mind skipping the level-up rewards. But you have no way of knowing which are worth skipping, and to be wholly unromantic, you have no way of skipping out on an appropriate percentage of the asking price. Perhaps most damningly of all, there is no minigame - no life-devouring cardgame, snowboard section or weirdo excursion into animal husbandry - to console you when all the busyworking gets too much.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix
The focus on Clive isn’t purely born of a wish to tell a more straightforward hero story than the party-based shenanigans of old. Perhaps Final Fantasy 16’s cleverest flourish is that it’s a steady deconstruction of Clive’s centrality. Before we get into that, I guess I should talk setting. FF16 unfolds in Valisthea, a high fantasy world of kingdoms who are fighting tooth and nail for control of various supernatural entities or resources. There are the Mothercrystals, glittering mana mountains whose fragments are the source of most of Valisthea’s magic. There are the Bearers, a despised subclass of enslaved humans who can wield magic without using crystals. And there are the Eikons, godlike creatures based on Final Fantasy’s summons, together with the much-coveted human Dominants who can channel their powers.
FINAL FANTASY XVI “DELIVERANCE” - PC TrailerWatch on YouTube
FINAL FANTASY XVI “DELIVERANCE” - PC Trailer
Clive’s defining capacity as both a playable character and a work of narrative is that he can absorb the powers of the Dominants he befriends or defeats; once toppled or persuaded, they endow him with suites of unlockable attacks, evasive moves and super abilities. It might feel like a slap in the face for Final Fantasy’s traditional party-based format: all of FF16’s grandest supporting characters ultimately exist as upgrade fuel for sulky himbo Clive, so that he can conjure up darkswords and do aerial juggles. Small wonder they feel so superficial. And this is sort of the point.
Clive’s ability to dominate the Dominants and concentrate Valisthea’s overall agency within himself isn’t just the usual boss-upgrade treadmill, but a subplot with a sinister dimension. Learning what this entails is a lot of fun. But it also requires a gigantic preamble, and even as a Squaresoft4ever diehard who is well accustomed to Final Foreshadowing, I don’t think it’s quite worth the legwork.
Nor, I would argue is the combat, even though the combat is good. FF16 is sort ofDevil May Crywith a million times the cutscenes. Fights take place in the same world as exploration, and see you performing combos and special moves with a cooldown to both damage and, eventually, stagger an enemy, which (as in FF13) opens a window in which your attacks hit harder and they don’t fight back.
The unlockable Eikon suites slowly layer up this foundation. You can equip and switch between three at once in real-time, and they fit certain playstyles: Garuda is about speed and juggles, for example, while Bahumut’s signature trick is a charging AOE lightning bombardment that requires you to avoid damage. There’s a fair amount of theorycrafting to be done once you’ve hooked up with enough Eikons. The controls are intuitive, and the animations and effects are as fancy as you’d expect from a numbered FF (albeit withspotty performance), but again, it’s all smeared too thin. You will fight a lot of foes who exist to create friction, and when quests are dragging on, it’s tempting to brute-force the stagger mechanic rather than playing with the options at your disposal.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix
If the bread-and-butter skirmishes get boring, the crowning bossfights are some reprieve. Most begin as larger-than-life regular battles, with participants fully incarnating as Eikons with distinct movesets. From there, they escalate into absolutely shameless, full-bore QTE-driven cinematics that stand proudly alongside the wilder summons of the turn-based games. The best weave in mechanics from other genres, like bullet hell and on-rails shooting. You could argue that these crescendoes are all the more awe-inspiring for existing in a game’s worth of quests to deliver lunch, but I think that’s letting Square Enix off easy. In a shorter, more focused RPG that is less tentative about its strengths, less fixated on scale, these bosses would have really sung.
Still, I’m not sure even cutting the playlength dramatically would have made FF16’s fundamentals essential. The use of a single protagonist and the specific choice of Clive as frontman are a glass ceiling the game strains to move beyond, though it does, at least, use that glass ceiling as a mirror.
