New Review: Despite a genuine and noteworthy attempt at quality storytelling, Final Fantasy 16 also suffers from uninspired, repetitive gameplay.

 

Final Fantasy, a series that played a key role in defining the “modern RPG” multiple times since its creation, has struggled, like many long-running franchises, to find its footing in the modern era. With each new installment, it’s evident that Square-Enix is desperate to once again re-invent the RPG franchise into something that will truly define what a Final Fantasy game should be.

Setting aside the Final Fantasy 7 Remake project, it’s been nearly 7 years since the last numbered entry, Final Fantasy 15, came out, itself an intended spinoff that had been branched out into a numbered entry in its similarly excruciatingly long development process. We’re many, many years now from when this series was at its most creative and most influential; with a growing number of years separating main installments, and with these new games generally being solid, if somewhat forgettable, adventures, it’s been hard not to feel like the last several entries have struggled, with varying degrees, to capture the same magic.

Final Fantasy 16, in the end, doesn’t quite get there, despite its best efforts, and while numerous aspects of the game show major promise for the series going forward, others have me scratching my head as to what exactly Square-Enix is attempting to achieve with its long-running, iconic RPG series.

In terms of narrative and direction, Final Fantasy 16 gets off to a very promising start. Producer Naoki Yoshida, himself having saved Final Fantasy 14 from complete disaster, expressed his disappointment with the fully open world Final Fantasy 15’s storytelling, and wanted to assure fans that 16 would once again tell a truly memorable, compelling tale.

His efforts to bring storytelling back into the forefront are noticeable from the moment the game starts. The dialogue’s extremely well-written, the voice acting as close to perfect as anything I’ve heard from a Japanese translation; cutscenes put the characters and their interactions with each other and their personalities front-and-center, and a few hours into the game, I remember expressing that I hadn’t felt this way with a Final Fantasy game in well over a decade. Main character Clive is incredibly well-developed and likable, able to demonstrate not only ruthlessness (this is the first M-rated Final Fantasy game and without a doubt earns it) but also a sense of humor and unwavering determination that makes him genuinely compelling. Even during Final Fantasy 16’s often extremely bland gameplay quests, Clive’s dialogue and his interactions with others manage to provide enjoyment. His past relationship with his younger brother, Joshua, is in many ways the heart of the story, and both characters come across so well. 

Others come and go throughout; unlike many Japanese RPGs, Final Fantasy 16’s combat system is purely action-driven and is focused so much on controlling Clive that his companions in combat are swapped in and out all the time and often barely register. Still, considering this, the other party members do as good a job as they possibly can in leaving an impression given their somewhat reduced role in the game. Special mention definitely goes out to Final Fantasy 16’s version of Cid, easily one of the best and most entertaining Cid characters that this series has seen, and that’s quite a legacy to live up to. Jill makes for a strong female lead as well, and Torgal’s a great example of how games can always benefit from introducing a main character who happens to be a dog. 

Though the characters are compelling and entertaining enough on their nature alone, it has to be said that Final Fantasy 16 does stumble a bit in its other storytelling aspects. The main scenario feels hazy and hard to understand from the beginning, and doesn’t really manage to ever make itself clear. It feels similar in this sense to Final Fantasy 13, which similarly threw you into the action and setting, hoping you could pick up on what was happening without much explanation. Until I completed 16 and read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, I never felt that I had much of an understanding of what the Mothercrystals were, what purpose they served, why the world was the way it was, and why the main characters were doing what they were doing or treated how they were treated. It doesn’t help that the plot, in what often feels like an attempt to extend playtime, sends Clive on meaningless, truly boring sidequest-like main quests that lead nowhere satisfying and break the flow of the narrative often at key moments.

Had Final Fantasy 16’s scenario and its presentation of it met the excellent caliber of its characters and their incredible dynamics, it’s possible that the game could have found a way to compete with the true classics in the series in terms of narrative: instead, it falls short. At times, 16 feels like a page-turner, with me not wanting to put the controller down in order to see what was next, which is something I haven’t felt from a Final Fantasy story in a long time. While it’s unfortunate to say that it doesn’t quite follow through, the genuine attempt to refocus on storytelling is a huge step in the right direction for this series, and one that I hope it continues to attempt going forward.

The gameplay, on the other hand, ultimately comes across as yet another failed experiment, though it too isn’t without its charms. It has to be said first and foremost that while Final Fantasy 16’s combat system is indeed more along the lines of Action Games like God of War, the game itself is still very much an RPG, and still offers far more exploration, freedom, and sidequests than the extremely linear Final Fantasy 13, which was actually turn-based. So it’s important to understand that there’s varying degrees to all these things.

In terms of looking at straight up combat, the system is simple and fun on a basic level, and quite frankly I liked it much better than the attempt at an action system featured in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. You have basic attacks and more powerful attacks to Clive himself, much of which is done by mashing the Square button and Dodging, though the more powerful attacks can be triggered by holding it. Much of your combat variation however comes down to Eikons, 16’s version of Summons, which you break out with a button press, and whose moves you use after they’ve spent several seconds charging up. You unlock more Eikons as you go, and while you can only equip 3 at a time, you can reset the Ability Points you’ve spent on one if, later in the game, you want to use those to upgrade a new Eikon you’ve acquired and like better. I personally just stuck with the initial three I acquired, and Final Fantasy 16 isn’t even remotely challenging enough to require you to seriously consider your strategy, or to consider switching these up for any reason, but the option’s there. 

There’s not much in the way of health recovery; some Eikon moves recover health after being used, and Torgal can be instructed to revive an almost useless amount of Clive’s health as well, but for the most part, Final Fantasy 16 relies on Potions and High Potions. You carry a handful of each, and after dying in battle, the game gives you more. Bosses contain Checkpoints within the boss fights, so at some point I realized that it was best to go all out with using my limited selection of Potions/High Potions, knowing that if I manage to reach the checkpoint, I could die, continue on from there, and have them replenished.

It becomes pretty clear early on that Final Fantasy 16 is simply afraid to challenge the player. It’s something that I’m conflicted about, being someone who doesn’t like Action games very much, and as someone who rarely finishes them, it’s likely that had Final Fantasy 16 been a difficult game, I’d similarly never have reached the end of it. So it’s in that way that I’m happy that the game is the way it is, but I wish something was done to lessen the mind-numbing repetition of mashing the Square button, dodging, and Using Summon Powers, which, once established, continues for basically the game’s entirety. You can make some strategic use of the Stagger Gauge, but really only a couple battles towards the end required me to do anything to break even slightly from how I was fighting, or to modify my strategy in any way. Playing Final Fantasy 16 becomes, as a result, a mind-numbing exercise in repetition. 

The game’s quests don’t help much either; sidequests all follow the same blueprint of accepting a quest from someone, going to exactly where the radar tells you to go, fighting some enemies, and then Fast Traveling back. It’s bland, but something at least expected, but this design carries into the main quests as well, after a point, and in the second half you spend far less time discovering new locations and seeing new things as you do wandering back and forth from one mindless series of enemy encounters to another.

Some of Final Fantasy 16’s environments are jaw-droppingly beautiful (such as the desert and its explorable town) but the majority are, by design, dark, grey, dreary, rainy, and just not all that visually interesting. Many of the environments are large, and certain ones link to each other where they can be traversed between on foot, allowing for exploration and backtracking. But unfortunately, Final Fantasy 16 makes use of a mandated Fast Travel system, which majorly distracts from the feeling of this being a unified world and takes away a lot of the sense of exploration and adventure. 

Your characters have a hideout, which serves as a home base of sorts. Once you leave the hideout, you find yourself on a fast travel map, where you have to select the next location you want to go to. There’s no way to walk from the hideout to any other location, and no way to walk between locations that aren’t grouped together, without warping back to the Fast Travel map and selecting it from there. I’ve never been a fan of fast traveling in video games, and though I understand that at times it’s useful, I find that in games that mandate its use, it always detracts from the proceedings. At one point, the main characters supposedly embark on a “long journey” to get to a distant desert; it takes 2 seconds to select it on the Fast Travel Map, then it cuts to them walking through the desert. They spot a town and say that they need to stop there to rest, as if they’ve been journeying for days. None of this translates to the player, who was just with the characters back at their hideout 2 seconds ago.

To Final Fantasy 16’s credit, I certainly felt like I was more a part of the world than I did in the towns in Final Fantasy 15, which were big but felt dead and un-related to the narrative, and certainly more so than in Final Fantasy 13, which removed the towns and explorable areas almost entirely. Still, many times upon arriving at a beautiful, personality-filled town, I wish the game would slow down a little bit and allow the characters to spend more time there. Often, it only takes talking to one specific character before it’s time to immediately venture off to the next location, though thankfully a bunch of sidequests all then open in the town for you, should you choose to hang around. Just don’t expect any of them to be particularly exciting. Many of the game’s big cities remain off limits, visible only in cutscenes, but without a question Final Fantasy 16 has explorable towns with NPC interaction and sidequests, and it has areas with nice amounts of exploration. So for those worried that FF16 has gone full-on action game, rest assured that this applies mostly just to the combat system, not the rest of the gameplay.

Visuals are incredible, as is to be expected from this series. The visual effects in relation to the Eikons are stunning, with some of the best lighting effects I’ve ever seen attached to some pretty spectacular cutscenes and even playable sections as well. The setting, while unique to the Final Fantasy series, doesn’t otherwise feel especially original, with its dark, dreary medieval vibes not my particular cup of tea, but it does look nice for the most part. Characters look great and animate well, and the framerate proved not to be an issue for me at all throughout. The true beauty to behold is the almost complete lack of any load times to speak of, something that feels almost unheard of, especially after the previous generation of gaming, but it’s an incredibly nice touch. The only thing I found myself slightly missing is this series’ famous use of elaborate CG cutscenes, which Final Fantasy 16 seems to have done entirely away with. The in-engine cutscenes of course look amazing, but some CG cutscenes too could have added additional weight to a few of the big moments, and could have provided the story with a little more punch. 

The music, sadly, is entirely forgettable; as I type this, I can remember only the 2^nd “hideout theme” and almost nothing else, which is such a bummer after the incredible soundtracks that this series used to be known for. Throughout the game it’s generally pleasant, but nothing that I’d ever really have much of an urge to listen to again.

It's with a heavy heart that I regard Final Fantasy 16 as such a mixed bag, but there it is. It takes some incredibly promising steps for the series towards having a compelling narrative with memorable, truly human-like characters, and though it ultimately falls short on that promise because of a vague story, it comes closer than any Final Fantasy in recent memory. The combat system is fast and fun, but ultimately repetitive and almost mindless, a description that can also be applied to many of the missions you do in the game, both those that progress the story and the side missions. It took me a good while into this 40+ hour adventure for the repetition to truly set in, and for the first half of the game I was fully onboard for the ride. Sadly, as Final Fantasy 16 goes on, and on, and on, I grew more and more tired of it. 

I’m genuinely confused as to what Square-Enix is attempting to do with this series; any fan of Action Games is going to find the combat to be shallow and incredibly easy, while RPG fans will likely mostly be wishing for a return to battle systems that aren’t so reliant on constantly hammering the Square button. It’s a direction that ultimately won’t please anyone, and at some point I think the various developers and producers are going to have to take a look and figure out exactly what is it that they’re trying to accomplish with this action-driven approach, of which this is now the 3^rd iteration, and decide whether it’s even within their capabilities to achieve it.

Final Fantasy 16 though, isn’t a total bust; it has its fair share of fun, and a great cast of characters along with an (at times) very compelling narrative. The battle system and gameplay mechanics are fun before you begin to get tired of them about halfway through, and the visuals are a feast for the eyes. Probably worth a shot for Final Fantasy fans with their expectations set in line, but for everyone else (and I had to say this with Final Fantasy 15 too) I’m just not sure that there’s ultimately enough substance here to carry you across the finish line. 

 

3/5