'Final Fantasy XVI' Did Not Need to be HBO, it Needed to be Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy XVI is not the game I needed it to be.

Final Fantasy XVI, however, seems to be the game that Square Enix and Sony needed it to be. It is a high-quality product that shows off the power of the PlayStation 5’s graphical muscles with thrilling gameplay. Square Enix has been happy to report three million sales in the first week of release. Even the online discourse around the game has been mixed but leaning to positive, maybe overly positive. If you come at this game with a critical lens towards its clumsy handling of slavery, you’ll find a caustic audience shouting you down. Gita Jackson’s nuanced review at Polygon was met with the online equivalent of boos and tomatoes. (Gaming discourse is not at a high ebb in 2023, needless to say.) So, for better or worse, let’s count Final Fantasy XVI as a "W" in Square Enix’s favor.

As for ol’ BlueHighwind here, Final Fantasy XVI is simply not good enough to "shut my brain off" about. At no point does the game ask that of you. This title is is desperate to prove its seriousness, copying Game of Thrones' style at its most grim and cheerless. Final Fantasy XVI wanted to combine themes of environmental disaster with class warfare in complex dance of polities fighting for resources. The bitter fact is that none of that lands. I cannot pretend the game is not trying for something bigger than usual anime tropes of teenager friendships destroying God. Of course, Final Fantasy XVI does end up in exactly that mode by the end, in spite of itself falling right back into franchise cliches. (And who said these cliches are bad anyway?)

The more damning problem with Final Fantasy XVI is that it is a forty hour game. Sometimes it’s an explosive thrill ride leading easily from one adventure to the next. Often it is a ponderous slog of unnecessary filler. If every moment of this game was just watching our hero Clive (Ben Starr) dudebro his way across preposterous action set pieces, I could cheer. When I’m stuck three feet in the muck of dull cookie-cutter sidequests, I can only see how limited the narrative apparatus is.

Sometimes the game is trying so hard to wow you, to make memorable moments. Often the game has no goal other than to drag itself to roughly forty hours of game time. There are cutscenes in Final Fantasy XVI that are spectacular. There’s gorgeous FMV models with fully-realized facial animations that can accomplish any kind of melodrama. Then there's also cutscenes in Final Fantasy XVI can be only be described as depressing. They give up entirely on cinematic language. It's an artless shot-counter-shot edit to do nothing more than relay information. And then there’s the flat automatons of these scenes, just emotionless models in drab clothes in brown villages mouthing nothing.

Why does Final Fantasy XVI need to be forty hours long? The only answer I can figure out is that it’s a fully-numbered Final Fantasy game and those games need to be that long. Never mind that the actual gameplay is a spectacle action-adventure with more similarities to Bayonetta or Devil May Cry than say, Final Fantasy VI. Its chosen genre is usually only about a dozen hours long, and for good reason. There’s only so many awesome show-stopper scenes you can fit in a game, regardless of budget, and they know better than to waste our time between the good stuff. Bayonetta's has never had a good story, but nobody cares because the thrills never stop. Let me tell you, in Clive's adventure, the thrills stop. During the fourth mandatory fetch-quest to build a boat, I really wished I was just shooting angels with my gun stilettos again. (Clive could pull off that look.)

A lot of Final Fantasy XVI's parts only exist out of obligation. The running thought seems to be: "Does our game need this? No, it doesn’t. But any game claiming to be 'Final Fantasy XVI' needs to have this." There’s a crafting system and shops. You never lack for money at any point during this game. It’s an economy without economic constraints, the whole exercise is pointless. There’s huge landscapes full of empty space because RPGs need a sense of freedom to explore. But there’s never anything to see, nothing to find. There’s dozens of sidequests because a game needs optional stuff, but all the sidequests are incredibly boring. These missions are almost impetuous in their dullness, as if made out of spite and contempt for their own existence.

Maybe the series does not need all that stuff. If you're not interested in them, why have them?

In terms of how gameplay is deployed, Final Fantasy XVI reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy XIII. FFXIII also had a great combat (well it did after the first twenty hours) and some of the best boss fights in series history. Yet, it also was full of long stretches of repetitive fights that went nowhere, asked nothing of the player, and only existed because Final Fantasy games need to be long. Final Fantasy XVI is not an endless Hallway but it might as well be. The best parts of the game are set in linear action stages where Clive goes from one staged fight to another. Everything else that happens out in the worlds or in the towns or in your secret base are tedious, it's all just fucking chores. 

I’m a simple man in truth. In the end, I don't want to be this crusty oldhead FF fan who never likes anything and is the bad guy on every podcast. Maybe you won't believe this, but it does not take much to make me happy. I love it when I have a sword and a guy swings a sword at me and dodging at the right time lets me punish the other guy. That's fun. I was grinning so hard during the first big Dragoon fight. I wasn't grinning by the tenth identical Dragoon boss.

Final Fantasy XVI is almost custom-made for my gaming habits. I hate blocking and parrying is too complicated. So there is no block besides the Titan kit and you never need to use it, the game lets you button mash freely. You can craft any combo of super moves that you want. I'm sure you can link me to videos showing the exact min-max procedure for shredding enemy HP. But very little of it matters. It has a stagger system, but its less interesting and less strategic than the version in FFXIII. Your dodge has infinite utility, even attacks you might think need you to jump over actually can be solved by the dodge. From there, you can punish enemies endlessly, their combos almost never go longer than a few swipes, and there you go. Play that victory fanfare. You can master this game by hour four, and it will never ask you to do better. You'll fight the final boss the same way you fought the first Malboro in a swamp.

The other issue that this is a game that is lacking in variety in its encounters. There's no status effects, no elements, and a lot of people have complained about this. But there's also no terrain, no hazards, no time limits, no stealth, no platforming, and no escort missions. As annoying as stealth and escort missions would be, at least they are some kind of variety! Final Fantasy XVI has none. This means means the game cannot use the combat system to tell stories. Nothing happens besides Clive hitting a guy a lot, and then if narrative needs to happen, they'll interrupt with a cutscene or an extremely generous QTE. Whether Clive is pushed to his emotional limits or just weeding the field of generic beasts, the gameplay does not reflect it.

Even your "party" of barely effectively sidekicks are rarely if ever relevant to combat except to beat up a few harmless goons and if you're Torgal the Dog, to give the least helpful healing spell in video game history. Donald Duck and Goofy matter in Kingdom Hearts, these guys simply do not. Why are they even here? Well, because Final Fantasy games typically have parties, and this ally system is yet another desiccated vestigial organ of the old franchise Final Fantasy XVI is trying to evolve beyond.

The flaws of the combat end up being flaws of the narrative. I can live without casting Blizzara on a fire dragon for extra damage, that is not Final Fantasy to me. What is a core strength of this franchise, however, is the sense of comradery and team-up as you acquire a rolling snowball of increasingly weird dudes to fill out your party. And I think Final Fantasy XVI fucked itself irreparably when it decided that Clive would be the only character you play as. The combat variety that parties offered are replaced by the Eikon system, wherein Clive absorbs the powers from people who are avatars traditional Final Fantasy summons. But being able to use Garuda-flavored attacks might give you the same gameplay result as having as anoher playable character, but it does not give the same narrative result. The Garuda avatar, Bendickta (Nina Yndis) dies early in the game, she's done, with little arc to speak of. None of the politics matters because Clive has such huge pecks he can smash empires on his own by the second act. No villains are a serious threat.

Even characters that survive all the way to the final act are given remarkably short shift. Jill (Susannah Fielding), the game's main heroine, is a shocking in how she is written, this a scandal. She has no chemistry with Clive. They spend years together but do not hook up until their thirties, it's bizarre. She is repeatedly forgotten by the game's writers, so she sits out several major battles despite being the walking incarnation of the Ice goddess Shiva. And she gets kidnapped a lot. This is perhaps as bad as Final Fantasy has ever been in terms of writing female characters, you'd have to go back to Rosa in Final Fantasy IV to find a blander heroine that the writers had genuinely less interest in.

But is this just a latent example of writer chauvinism (possibly), or is it a side-effect of Jill never being playable? If Jill were a character you spent time as, they would have to consider things like what she likes and dislikes, how she would react to events independently of Clive, what would make her unique. Without that, those are questions that never need to be answered and the writer's room were apparently oblivious enough to never consider them. Thus we have Jill, this empty space where a character should be, standing lifelessly next to Clive in many cutscenes, never to be acknowledged. "Excuse me", Final Fantasy XVI, tells Jill, "men are talking."

Some characters still come off full of life and full of importance. The new Thunder God Cid (Game of Thrones alum Ralph Ineson) is swimming in swag, no Final Fantasy character has ever been more Daddy than this Cid is Daddy. A random dude named Gav (Christopher York) has tons of rapport with our hero. But most of the cast ends up being flat villains and man, it sucks. I don't want to just fight the Titan avatar, Hugo Kupka (Alex Lanipekun) as much fun as that is. He's a big weird wacky guy. He should be chilling on my airship, we should get ice cream together on the beach, I should be helping him with his math homework to get into a good college. That's what's fun about RPGs.

And really that's the most damning flaw about Final Fantasy XVI, that it isn't fun. It completely misunderstands the appeal of Game of Thrones, copying only the dour and depressing and miserable parts without the comedy and soap opera charm. Final Fantasy XVI is so painfully self-serious there is not even a Chocobo Theme when you're riding the iconic series mascot. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish Final Fantasy XVI had fishing. Or anything that broke up the monotony or just stabbing guys. I wish this game had Blitzball. Hugo Kupka would be unbeatable as a Goalie, he's too big to get anything past him. Like FFXIII, this game is spare and drab in comparison to the baroque variety of what came before. That's what Final Fantasy should be: too many gameplay ideas, many that don't work at all. But at least they're there. Clive should have a Triple Triad deck and challenge the pope to cards.

It isn't all bad, luckily. There's a silver lining here for this game. Not enough of one, it's too little compared to everything else, but it is one. That's the big Eikon fights where the summons of the series go full kaiju battles. I got to transform into Ifrit and run along these giant tendril highways shooting out of Titan's back at hyper speed. Yes, Final Fantasy XVI becomes Sonic the goddamned Hedgehog. I don't think that happens in the works of George R.R. Martin, and that's where he went wrong.

And this is where the game really wants to be. You get these ridiculous stupid shonen moments of Clive and Hugo punching each other and suddenly I get it. Dudes do rock (and be rock). You punch God so hard at the end of this game his face melts in slow motion like its the end of a Rocky movie. You punch him so hard he's got a giant hole in his chest like that gag in Kung-Pow! Enter the Fist. That's what this game should be, that's what this game wants to be. It does not want to Yasumi Matsuno, it doesn't know how to be Final Fantasy Tactics. It wants to be Clive and his bros on an adventure.

Final Fantasy XVI is a huge disappointment - often more disappointing because its so awesome otherwise. If you ever make a Final Fantasy XVI-2, Square Enix or Yoshi-P or whoever, you gotta be true to yourself. You're not this. You're not HBO, you're not prestige television, you don't have the chops to pull it off. You don't want to have sex scenes, you don't have the courage to show nudity. You don't want politics, you don't have interesting moral questions to ask. But you can be Sonic the Hedgehog, you can be Asura's Wrath, you can be the good parts of Final Fantasy XV where its four dudes on a road trip having fun, and there's no reason to be ashamed of that.