The Many Failures of Final Fantasy XVI // (A CRITICAL, spoiler-filled video essay review)

hello everyone or no one overnight siren here to dump all my thoughts into another long video that I don't anticipate many if any people will actually watch all the way through this time the subject is Final Fantasy XV the newest Mainline title in the long-running Final Fantasy series I've actually Loosely scripted out my thoughts ahead of time for once and this is in an effort to try and keep this as a concise and cohesive video and to have some semblance of structure because I know I have a tendency to kind of jump all over the place first and foremost this is a spoiler warning for the whole video I am going to be jumping all over the place and of course this video will have spoilers for all sections of the main story so let's Dive In first and foremost I would like to give some background about me I am a final fantasy Fanboy with a capital f fully forever and always my cousin came to stay with us one week in the summer when I was like eight or nine years old and he brought with him Final Fantasy 8. now I had never seen a game like that I'd only really seen fighting games and racing games and Crash Bandicoot the graphics the story The Music they were all something I had never seen before he was stuck at the section of the game where you have to locate the white seed ship so it's not like it was the most exciting Gameplay at the time or in that game but even just seeing him Traverse this large world full of fantasy monsters and colorful characters I think that was the moment that the nerd switch really went on in my head and that Christmas I asked my mom to buy me Final Fantasy I didn't really know what the VII was at the end of the game so I didn't really know it was part of a series I just knew that was a game called Final Fantasy so my mom got me the only two she could find Final Fantasy 9 and Final Fantasy Tactics now obviously neither game was the one I had seen months prior but I got so hooked onto both of these games that they cemented this series as probably the most formative media franchise of my entire life with Final Fantasy 9 in particular becoming my favorite IP of all time be it video games movies TV shows literally anything now since then I've played the series super super Faithfully I buy each new release as they come out and typically when I do buy a new console it's because I have to because the new Final Fantasy is coming out on it I didn't have a PS4 until I had to because 15 was coming out and I didn't have a PS5 until 16 was coming out and thankfully my loving free company crowdfunded one for me for my birthday all of this is just to say I am a fan of this series first and foremost so all of my criticisms they come from a place of love for this series and from just a disappointment when one of the games falls short of my own tastes I'm not saying anyone's wrong for liking it and likewise I just expect that anyone that does watch this and does stumble across it accepts that these are just my opinions as a passionate endorser of the series and I'm not just some random hater now again I've been a huge fan of this series but Final Fantasy XV was a major disappointment for me I'd initially not been super excited for that game based on what I had seen but I got this random surge of excitement in the months leading up to the release only to feel a crushing disappointment when I played The Unfinished game as it came out because of my experience with 15 I tried my hardest to avoid any personal hype for 16. I knew I'd buy it but I tried not to watch any of the pre-release gameplay videos I just watched the trailers and read a little about the world so I wouldn't be caught off guard by any new verbiage in fact I didn't even pre-order the game until a week before the release I didn't play the demo until just a few days before the actual release when I did play the demo it gave me extremely high hopes the demo had given me all the hype I was trying to avoid previously the gameplay felt fun and cinematic I could see how it had the potential to eventually become repetitive but I just knew that as the game evolved it would surely become very complex I became so hyped by the demo that I even pre-ordered a second copy of the game from a different retailer just to make sure I'd get my copy on day one and then the game got here so let's break it down with the game now beaten I can honestly say if you were expecting Final Fantasy 16 to be a return to form in my opinion you'd be sadly mistaken Final Fantasy 16 is a character action game that made the mistake of being over 50 hours long the problem with 50 hour long character action games is that they outlive their welcome after about 10 or 20 hours particularly if the action is dry and easily repeatable which this game is guilty of on both counts it looks pretty but it becomes an increasingly unsatisfying experience I know a lot of people are probably going to click off right now but I hope you at least listen a little longer as I flesh out my opinions fully maybe I'll change your mind maybe you'll pick up on a point of mind that you can comment on below and change my mind I'm never opposed to having my mind changed again these are just my opinions before I delve into anything I'll come right out of the gate with how I feel just so there's no mystery I didn't enjoy the game overall like any Final Fantasy release there's a lot of discourse surrounding it at one point I see made again and again is this is not a Final Fantasy game well it is it has Final Fantasy in the title so I won't say it's not but I do get what they mean a lot of this game's more Ardent Defenders are quick to say oh will people just say that because it's not turn based and I really don't think that's what people are saying the game is lacking the RPG Elements which I'll expand on later but to me I sympathize most with the it's not a Final Fantasy game crowd when it comes to the tone of the game Final Fantasy is Goofy and full of charm intermixed with fantasy action set pieces and sweeping romances the worlds and stories have their dark Parts but overall they're packed with Charisma and usually a fair degree of Whimsy these are worlds we want to be whisked away to with characters we want to befriend who wants to go to valicia 16 is just constant morose and depression and everyone is painfully serious for almost its entire run time while also being action-packed so while yes Final Fantasy is this [Music] lost thank you put it it's also this [Applause] [Music] and both parts are essential to making something feel like a final fantasy installment and that's where 16 misses the mark so I do want to start with something that I have nothing negative to say about and that's the graphics I don't play many games admittedly I honestly I'm one of those people who returns to the same few Comfort games every year or so but otherwise just plays the newest Pokemon the newest Final Fantasy the newest Metal Gear Solid and other big hype games that come across my radar like near automata and Persona 5. aside from that I spend most of my time in Final Fantasy 14 and Final Fantasy 11. that being said based on my limited expertise this is the best looking game I have ever played even in action mode the game looks great I often find that even in 4K HD TVs it doesn't really make much of a difference to me so maybe something is just wrong with my eyes but I noticed very little difference between the new graphics option and Final Fantasy 16 versus the frame rate option and that let me choose the frame rate priority mode without feeling like I was missing out on a visual Marvel because in my opinion I still got a visual Marvel the only complaint I do have which isn't a complaint about the graphics but just about the options in the game the fact that the motion blur was not an option to turn off in a day one patch was a major Miss for me the motion blur did hurt my eyes a little bit and especially towards the end of the game as I was racing to finish before it got spoiled for me I really would have loved the option to turn off the motion blur but that patch came out unfortunately after I was already done with the experience before getting into some of the heavier stuff like the gameplay and the story stuff I think I can actually kind of rationalize more I do want to briefly touch on something that is entirely subjective and again just my opinion the music my mind is blown that Final Fantasy 14 and this game have the same composer I like pretty much everyone else who's played it love Final Fantasy 14 soundtrack but for 16 I really couldn't tell you a single track from it besides the Titan battle I'm pretty sure I'm guessing the soundtrack issues came from maybe a wide appeal angle they were going for because it did sound like a movie trailer almost the entire time generic bombast that pretty much goes nowhere just throwing as many horns and choir vocals as you can and everything Final Fantasy has always been a series relying heavily on memorable melodic lines and this game has none of them there's no theme of love no to Zanarkand no battle on the big bridge no you're not alone no Melodies of life no aerith's theme no dancing mad there's just nothing like that there's not a song from this game that is going to give me nostalgia in 10 or 20 years and again that's just my opinion now that everyone's clicked off of this video or the people who have remained have their pitchforks out let's really get into the muck I did enjoy the demo but the more I played of the game the more I became convinced that it was unfinished maybe even as unfinished as Final Fantasy XV but certainly better at hiding it due to zeroing in entirely on the story one thing I can say to kind of put a linchpin in the entire next section is that this game is shallow and easy I am going to expand on both of those points so let me explain first with the shallow aspect in the Overworld of Final Fantasy 16 what you see is exactly what you get it's nothing like older games where you can find great items via exploration there's really no hidden paths or hidden items there's no special stuff you'll go to an area of the map that's off the beaten path and you'll find basically nothing but duplicates of crafting materials that you end up having thousands of expanding on the crafting that's another thing that makes this gameplay very shallow the itemization it is truly awful and the awful itemization makes exploration of the world of Valencia an even bigger and more pointless chore the gear you can craft with all the worthless items you find are just stat sticks with no secondary effects or specific properties swords Grant higher attack and stagger armor grants higher defense and HP there's no status ailments no elements no added effects like Auto barrier shell or haste there's not even any kind of variation in stats on the gear like it's not like you'll have a sword that has high attack but low stagger or vice versa or an accessory with low defense but High HP every piece of equipment you get is an objective improvement over the last it's just fluff that serves as the illusion of progression while giving no room for interesting or meaningful decision making outside of your accessories which you can't craft coupled with the fact that every major story beat gives you a new crafting material that gives you an objectively better weapon than what you would have had before anyway it makes exploration even less important because progressing through the story will just give you something objectively better soon enough another ding towards exploration and a reason that the gameplay is shallow is that every vendor sells the same thing except for some difference in orchestrian roles and lesser duplicates of generic accessories that Grant x amount of additional damage or reduce cooldown for a specific skill if you opt not to explore when you do stay on the main path you just go from cut scene to cut scene with some running and fighting in between Everything feels scripted and empty because the enemy camps are always at the exact same locations with the exact same enemies at each camp and there are invisible walls everywhere so the game really starts to feel like you're just on Rails side quests are a bad joke without any depth or challenge I mean side quests were never Blockbuster quest lines but this is just ridiculous they provide some okay World building but they really don't give you anything interesting or challenging in the way of gameplay now going back to when I said the gameplay was shallow and easy I want to explore what I meant on easy and expand on that obviously it is subjective but these are my thoughts the combat in theory is okay but they implemented it in the worst possible way being able to learn an enemy's movements so you can then Dodge perfectly without the need for a Telegraph and counter-attack is a great mechanic however there's so little Variety in the enemy models that their attacks become so easy to read that this just becomes tedious and repeatable and predictable the whole system is built around the idea of you basically just spamming square and seeing an epic fight and again because the game has so few enemy models it just makes gameplay between bosses even easier because you've seen these enemies hundreds and hundreds of times by hours 20. and it's not like the enemies are getting new mechanics or abilities as the game progresses those flower enemies you see at the beginning are the same flower enemies from the end maybe with a different color palette so it's not like they're getting new mechanics or abilities to keep things fresh yet all the while Clive is getting new abilities so you're actively outpacing the already weak enemies to the point that the fights become nothing but trivial the enemies are using the same abilities they did on hour 5 with no variation while Clive gets a new Arsenal every couple of hours new ways to beat the same enemies the normal enemy camps are also spread out enough that by the time you go to the next Camp your abilities are already off cooldown at most camps have four to five enemies so by the time you get the third icon you'll have access to six abilities these abilities can each basically One-Shot an enemy so what you do is you go to a camp one shot each of the enemies with a different icon ability by the time you get to the next camp Oh my icon abilities are off cooldown use one each again to kill each enemy rinse and repeat you seldom have to Auto attack and when you can you can just lunge with an auto attack so it does a finish anyway while the enemy is lying on the ground not attacking you and even when they do attack you they do so little damage that it may as well not attack at all the icons do have big special abilities like diamond dust and Earth Earth's Fury or Earth and fury but those are really not useful either because they take up a standard ability slot and mess up the combat rotation with their long cooldowns and the difficulty of boss fights isn't really much harder in my opinion because even if you lose a boss fight you restart the fight with full life and full potions while the boss only has half his life and there's not an option to turn this off it's like you're being treated like a child a little earlier I did mention that this game seems unfinished and I think for me the tell for that was that most of this game's number systems are simply not tuned correctly which has led to it becoming shallow and easy there's no incentive to craft 90 of the time their standardized level ups and mountains of Gill with nothing to spend it on honestly at Mid game I even found that AP was no longer very useful because you can just respect into whatever you want at any time with the amount you have already so it's not like you are ever in a situation where you dump all your AP into one ability only to realize oh man that doesn't fit with my play style or that doesn't gel with the way I play and then you have to go and grind a lot more AP to make up for the stuff you just lost the game systems are just loose baggy and sometimes even pointless there's really no challenge no strategy no need for grinding and no need for farming I think I realized that I just need a bit more freedom I need goals to work towards in Final Fantasy 16 I feel like the only reason to play and fight is to move the story forward to get to the next cut scene there's no distractions from the fighting other than fetch quests which are awful now if I didn't lose people for my discussion of the music I'm really going to lose them now this is going to be the most divisive part of the video I'm going to talk about the story one thing I've heard a lot in defense of this game is that the gameplay wasn't for me but the Amazing Story made it worth it I kind of have to ask was it amazing I kind of have to disagree for me the storytelling has always been just as important if not more so than the story itself while I do think the story of Final Fantasy 16 is interesting when briefly summarized on paper it really fails in its execution in almost every way I think the thing that irks me the most about this game is there's no Journey you're going to hear me say that a lot in this section I think the game actually would have been better if it had been more focused not to say more linear necessarily but more focused Final Fantasy 16 loses the journey feeling that made every previous FF so special I don't feel at the end like I've come so far because I spend so much time running between the same locations listening to the same NPC's talk often about the same damn things and then the time skip feels irrelevant because most NPCs don't visibly change in the five-year Gap hear me out every single chapter in this game revolves around the same formula wherein you start at The Hideout proceed to travel to a sub Zone to complete MMO fetch quests followed by story heavy combat section this almost always ends on a cliffhanger forcing you back to The Hideout so you can do more fetch quests while you're doing this fetch Quest usually the story will have it that you're doing these because someone needs to form the next plan of attack or the side quests are to help you help construct something for the next plan of attack you repeat this process ad nauseum until the end of the game this game at times feels just as linear as Final Fantasy 13 but in an even worse way in a somehow circular way somehow 16 has found a way to be both linear and circular at least in 13 that game took you and the characters on a journey through a world from one zone to the next with minimal backtracking if any until chapter 10 or 11. in fact I don't think you do backtrack at all through until those chapters now yes that game didn't give the zones time to breathe but they still felt like they were part of a larger world because of how you traversed them in 16 your anchored to a base of operations that you constantly return to there's no traveling through a Zone following a story which leads you to the next Zone uncovering the world of Alice Thea for a Final Fantasy game it is truly sad that there's no Journey another negative point is the bad immersion what kills immersion is the fact that the game is missing this coherent world you only get small Maps connected by a world map where you can teleport to the next point in the main story and while yes you can choose to go wherever you want for side quests at any time that actually makes the world feel even less coherent and smaller because there's no sense of how long it takes to get from point A to point B because for us the player it's instant and because we spend so much time going back and forth between these zones instantly with no time in between it also makes the world feel like it doesn't have Stakes hell even when Odin forms that force field around Ash or that area of Ash the game still allows you to fast travel back to The Hideout it just doesn't feel like a living world it feels more like you're playing through chapters of a story I love getting sucked into an FF game and Final Fantasy always did this for me but this game just doesn't it does at points like you feel great fighting a god-like enemy and you're totally immersed but then suddenly you have to watch through multiple cut scenes for like half an hour it's the stop and start that really kills the momentum and thus immersion for me but it's not only because of this I also think there's really no good World building in Final Fantasy 10 for example you had a big world where you at first play a small role the world lived without you and it felt like it lived without you Final Fantasy 16's World feels shallow it seems to exist solely for you it doesn't feel like there's a lot going on in this world when you're not there now I know someone will point out that oh well when Clive's not there there's this massive geopolitical storyline going on in the background but that's also a problem that storyline is so disconnected to the story that we do get to experience because the geopolitics of valisthea have virtually no bearing on Clive's experiences after the demo section they only affect the gameplay slightly because it makes it so when you do go to certain locations they're swarming with enemies because they're in the middle of a war or something but aside from that these events have no impact on Clive's Quest his motives his thoughts or his feelings so you have two totally different stories going on that have basically no intersection despite the fact that these stories should both be important to the realm now speaking of what I just mentioned we never get to see those spectacle-heavy locations in their Splendor at times of peace that is another major problem for me this robs us of getting memorable and iconic Final Fantasy locations that we'll remember for years to come there's no balam Garden or midgar or Village of mist or Alexandria or besaid or Clara or Phantom Forest or Luca or gold saucer or bujerba all the visually striking locations in this game are places that we only get to go to while they're being ravaged by war or by an Aether flood and then we never get to return to them we never get to explore twin side or araflam or or flame however you pronounce it but we sure do get to explore the marshes around Martha's rest I guess so is Martha's rest meant to be the memorable nostalgic iconic location in this game aside from that there's really just The Hideout but we spend so much time there that I dread going back in those past games I never dreaded going back to besaid I never dreaded going back to Alexandria in fact I was always excited when the story got to go back but in this game anytime I have to go back to The Hideout I'm like okay so I'm gonna talk to Vivian I'm gonna talk to tomes like it's just repetitive and small also because of this certain moments which should feel like major story beats end up feeling unimportant or insignificant for example Clive finally returning to rosalith it's just bam he's in the city he got smuggled in or whatever and he's in combat there's no cutscene of him returning breathing in the air dealing with what his home has become the story doesn't let this moment breathe because rosalith is not an explorable area it's just a dungeon where you're not able to return to it's like in Final Fantasy 14. in that game both Doma and alamigo were made four-man dungeons instead of explorable cities and almost everyone I've spoken to hates that decision so it's kind of mind-boggling that the same team for 16 is the team from 14. so why did they do the same thing here when so many 14 players hate that decision with those locations I'm also going to talk about the side quests again once again I know they're not the centerpiece and I know they do provide some good Exposition but they are way too dialogue heavy at times to the point that they feel like they're just padding most of the side quests are also extremely redundant story-wise how many times do we need to have it shovel down our throats that Clive's allies are morally good or that the people are poor and dying this game has exactly two good side quests and they're both in more the game also tries to tell story through Gameplay at times which is a great idea however 16 fails at it they fail at it because the gameplay of some of these quests is so mind-numbingly bad one example there's a scene where you have to collect sand from some certain River if this obvious filler had to be included at all they should have just been a cut scene where you get to watch the characters Advance their relationships and the story but instead the game has you run around seeking the right sparkling thing on the ground to interact with and it's just a tedious very small amount of payoff in the context of a quest that is already entirely sidelined to the main drama going on now I know this can seem contradictory because at times I'm saying there's too many cut scenes but at times I'm saying you could make this a cut scene but that's because the cut scenes could just be more focused some of the main cut scenes are so long and expository where the dialogue can really be more concise to make room for more cut scenes that build character interaction and build characterization speaking of the characters that's what I'm going to talk about next overall I think the characters are weak Clive and Sid are the only exceptions the other characters are either Bland underdeveloped one note or cut down before they have a chance to really become something special for the sake of time I'm only going to talk about the dominance and the main villain before getting into each character individually one major complaint I have about the characters as a whole is that the core characters already know each other from before the start of the game I think having Clive Joshua and Jill already be close before the events of the game and then having them become the main core party members later on robs the player of the chance to see them grow as friends I think that's why Sid is the most effective party member we get to see him and Clive's relationship grow from Clive being initially kind of annoyed or unsure about Sid to having him eventually really appreciate and kind of Revere him part of the magic of past Final Fantasy games is seeing these bonds form seeing zidane and Dagger become lovers seeing Titus start to Revere Aaron as time goes on instead of seeing him has like an annoying stepdad seeing Waka grow a soft spout for the owl bed through his travels with Riku Clive is a good character he does feel boring at times but I think that's just because he's the one constant in the game from the very beginning to the very end and thus he has the burden of shouldering the entire narrative his own goals are really the only ones that the story actually concerns itself with so at times that can make him feel oversaturated if that makes sense but I do like his backstory a lot I like his visual design he's acted well and I think he's written mostly consistently is he my favorite Final Fantasy main protagonist no but I'd say he is upper middle of the pack Joshua was a very boring character to me now I'm not sure if this makes much sense to say it may seem a little contradictory but I both like that the game surprised me with the fact that he was still alive because I truly didn't see that coming but also I wish he had stayed dead because him being alive lifted too much of the burden from Clive's shoulders and removed the Revenge aspect of the game entirely once it was revealed that Joshua was alive he just seemed too deus ex machina to me he was too aware of the inner workings of ultima's plot he somehow knew about Ultima right from the start and he was also too morally pure he just became totally uninteresting to me there was no gray area with him and the game really never lets us know how he knew about ultima's plot from the first place Joshua just became this Exposition character handed to you on a silver platter Sid is easily the best character in the game because he feels human he's quippy and dimensional even in the worst of situations it's nice to have a character with some levity to them and that's what we got from Sid this makes him feel real and relatable sometimes when people are down in the dumps one person does crack a little joke to try and put a smile on people's faces and it's hard to root for people who are just consistently serious sometimes Sid does get a little too cool guy syndrome where he just has too many one-liners but I'll take it he was a joy to have around benedicta was the epitome of wasted potential she was easily the most interesting character in the first few hours of the game she was complex she had human emotions mysterious and unclear motives and she was morally kind of Gray obviously she was a villain but I felt like there was a potential to have her kind of switch sides the decision to kill her off so early in the game will go down to me as one of the worst mistakes of this entire story it made no sense to kill her off before we got to see what her true intent was with the Barnabas and koopka storyline or to even see more of her storyline with them to see more scenes with them it really felt like we were maybe 40 through her character Arc and then poof she's gone I was actually shocked when I realized she was dead I thought we were going to see another cut scene where she was still alive wandering back to Ash but when I found out she was actually dead it took me off guard and losing her so early also left us devoid of a face to call the villain for a while afterwards instead we spent the next 10 hours with the faceless the Empire as the villains which wasn't as compelling I did like the character of koopka I thought he had some potential but again it would have been nice to see more of him before benedicta's death prior to her dying we only saw them flirt in the demo briefly and then the next time we see him he's just pure rage because she had just passed I love seeing a character that is fueled by rage but it would have been nice to see why benedicta meant so much to him and if he really meant anything to her if Barnabas meant anything to her or if she was just invested in Sid the game lightly suggests that but I think it needed to be explored more all we get to see koopka as as a result is him just a one-dimensional angry monster I also think Dion was super underdeveloped I really think the game could have explored his relationship with Joshua more and maybe had him and Clive meet once or twice before they fought to give the fight against him some emotional weight it actually reminded me a lot of Sid Reigns from Final Fantasy 13 where we know we have an ally on the inside but we have to fight him before we really care about him Barnabas was another character that I felt was very wasted potential but in his case I really didn't care as much he just felt like an extension of Ultima it did feel like the game wanted to explore more about his mother because why include her at all if you're really not going to delve into their relationship at all like they showed some weird scenes with them together but then never expand upon their relationship it was just kind of teased so that was another thing that really made me feel like oh this was meant to be fleshed out more but the game was either rushed or unfinished I thought Annabella was an interesting character who unfortunately had a really really poor conclusion to her story her story really did have very little connection to the main story because again the geopolitical aspects of 16's world had virtually no effect on collaborous party at any point but I did like that she was someone without any powers or fighting ability who had still caused so much Mayhem and destruction through nothing but her pure hatred and political maneuvering it just would have been nice to get Clive's perspective on how he felt about his mother how did he feel about not being loved how did he feel about her betraying him but he really never comments on it other than a few things in East pool where he's just like my mother did this okay but like how do you feel what do you plan but he never has any plans to do anything about her he just knows she exists out there but he has no real interest in going for her or trying to convince her of anything at all at any point I suppose I also just can't see how her story could have ended any other way but I think that is more of just a product of how disjointed it was from the main story of Ultima once we got to Twin Side the story just needed to finally go after Ultima so by that point it was just no time left to explore this political storyline so there was no further use for the slow burning political set pieces it was very late seasons of Game of Thrones where the political storylines just stopped mattering next up is the main villain Ultima in my opinion he is not a great villain he has Zero Charisma zero human Essence and no real understandable or sympathetic goal not every villain needs these things but in a story that feels so gritty as this one and feels so realistic in a fantasy world it helps to have a villain who has at least one of those traits going from benedicta Hugo and even barnabas's cult leader ranting and then Annabella and the emperor's plotting going from all of that to ultimas rambling about Mythos logos Mythos Mythos it's so staggeringly a huge downgrade I did really like his design though it felt very old school Final Fantasy however overall ultimate feels almost like necron from Final Fantasy 9 but if necron had been the main villain in that game just this otherworldly thing that comes in at the end with no real attachment to what's going on except here he's here for half the story okay now on to the worst and most disappointing character Jill is the one true constant through the game other than Clive and she offers nothing she sucks the energy out of virtually every scene she has no characterization no personality and no perspective she has nothing that makes her memorable other than being a girl who wears blue and is Shiva she may as well just serve as Clive's inner monologue they're always either agreeing holy or disagreeing briefly to a very minute degree to whereas they'll reach a compromise within seconds and it just makes these conversations between them just feel like padding to an already long game her romance with Clive is also very odd to me personally since they had grown up as kind of Step siblings I'm not sure how long they lived together but they certainly lived together and seemed very close as children then they reconnect after all these years and have no chemistry or any hints of romance or any scenes hinting that they have feelings for each other it's just bam they almost kiss in that East pool scene and that establishes to the player oh these characters are in love but there hasn't been any legwork required to make this feel believable or organic or earned in past Final Fantasy love stories that feel believable the characters that are going to be in love have a little bit of teasing between each other that's flirting you see Renault really kind of get Squall out of his shell you see aerith really tease cloud you see zidane flirt like hell with dagger but in this game they're really just party members and then suddenly oh they're in love okay the other thing that makes characters interesting is small talk and little nothings banter but she's always business with Clive she always just talks business there's no banter no jokes just a matter of fact statements even with Sid in the room who is really funny she doesn't really say much and she just stands there like a third wheel next I'm going to talk about the story itself and I may make some more comments about the storytelling or the characters where it's relevant I do bounce back and forth a lot but again I think it is all relevant to the greater picture the story of Final Fantasy 16 attempts to explore themes of greed corruption revenge and avarice but unfortunately it fails to effectively convey them with the exception of the Revenge storyline which falls off halfway through this is largely due to the pacing of the game it's Stop and Go nature can cause players to lose track of their objectives or Worse lose interest the inclusion of tedious side quests contribute to this problem but the main culprit is the poorly written script characters often engage in Long expository dialogues that could have been written more concisely and more impactfully it initially succeeds in engaging people like me during the first 10 hours or so but this approach becomes so increasingly frustrating as the game progresses it started off really strongly the prologue was good and the bits following the other dominance were good but eventually it basically dropped every pretense of a complex political tale and just went straight for the weird pseudo-religious angle the lack of impact on the political storyline with Clive's personal story felt like a major Miss which could have given this game a stronger identity the game was obviously heavily influenced by Game of Thrones which is almost entirely fueled in the early Seasons by the political storylines but in this game the Empire moving from Sam Brack to the crystalline Dominion had really no effect on anyone except Vivian at The Hideout who in fact appears 30 hours later than she should in the main story other than that I did mostly enjoy the story itself I just wish it had been more fleshed out there were so many lingering questions or things that felt like they needed to be explored more for example why was torgel with said that just felt really convenient it felt like a convenience for the plot it made no sense that Clive's long-lost dog just happened to be with Sid who he needed to find to progress the story also what happened to Leviathan The Lost if ultimate needed Clive to absorb all the icons which I believe he did wouldn't it have been really essential for him to have also absorbed Leviathan how does an icon even become lost but again none of this is explored there's not even a tome's entry about it this is something that either feels like it was cut for time or like it's going to be a DLC and I fundamentally do think DLC has ruined gaming because companies now feel content to release unfinished products because they know they can just patch things in later the biggest plot in consistency to me is Sid's plan to destroy the mother crystals for hundreds of years the world has established that the mother crystals are essential to life they fight Wars over the mother crystals I understand Sid's logic and I think it's an interesting concept really that they have to destroy the mother crystals but too many people just agree with him because the game just needs them to agree the game doesn't have time for them to ask questions because it has too much time dedicated to you doing worthless side quests I'm not living in the world of balestia so it's easy for me to agree with since plan but these are characters who we need to believe exist and live in this world we need to believe they live in a world of extremely limited and increasingly finite resources for which the mother crystals have been their only salvation for hundreds of years yet all these characters that occupy this world are so gung-ho with yeah okay let's destroy them without much hesitation at all that just seems really unbelievable to me made worse is the fact that they don't see any positive effects after destroying the first one or even the second one if they had destroyed the first mother Crystal and saw the blight start to recede in some places sure then that makes sense that these characters would say hey Sid was onto something and continue the plan but in fact not only do they see no positive changes after destroying Drake's head but things actually get objectively worse in their world the blight continues and Wars become fiercer because now there's one less mother Crystal resources are more finite at this point wouldn't it be more believable for the characters to say oh yikes we just took away literally 20 of the world's resources and destroying it also released those weird ass Ultima monsters maybe this plant isn't right maybe we should reconsider but nope they just blindly continue on destroying the others with no proof that this plan is working at all and no regard or concern that they may be hastening the depletion of the world's resources this is simply not believable decision making and kind of ruins the story for me a little it ruins again the immersion I want to see believable characters who behave believably in an unbelievable world and that's not too much to ask for because that's what we've gotten from most of the other games in the series we know chocobos aren't real we know mother crystals aren't real we know magic isn't real but these characters need to act like they are but they don't they destroy the mother crystals because the story needs them to not because it makes sense and I think that's a problem with the game's story overall people are just way too accepting of stuff for example when you first see the machine things in Phoenix's gate Great there's a mystery but then a few hours later you randomly see them in the Overworld and it's not even a cutscene you literally just walk past them on the way to port isolda and Clive and Jill have a few lines of Overworld dialogue where they're like what are these things doing here weird let's look and do it later but then it's never addressed this is not believable because to me the characters wouldn't pass these they would pause and be like wait this is very important these are those creatures that we had never seen before that looked like living entities created by the fallen and we had only seen them deep under Phoenix's gate now they're in the Overworld this could be a major problem why is this happening now maybe we should explore where they came from and what their goal is but Clive and Jill just don't care they just walk past and then they never comment on them ever again and not only do they not comment on them the populace at large never comments on them you never walk by an NPC in Martha's rest or lost wing who says did you see those machines with the glowing blue blades they never comment on did you see those weird creatures with the glowing swords it's just like they've been there all along but we know for a fact that they haven't been there all along because when we see them in Phoenix's gate they're new to Clive and Jill this story also became very repetitive Beyond even the gameplay every time you go to a new spot we have to meet some new liaison of Sids or the hideouts who has some secret spy nickname like the Dame or the desert hair and they give us some special pin so we can be identified as their Ally and all of our allies are all secretly helping the bearers for no personal gain because they're all pure and good and have zero depth to them I feel this game also needed to flesh out a lot more about the Fallen I feel like we got several inconsistencies about them and most of them were vague summaries but knowing what happened to them and why would have been more essential to understanding Ultima as a character and understanding what we needed to do to avoid the same fate my last story complaint is about Clive as a protagonist and more specifically his goals like I said I do like him as a character however I feel like Joshua being alive ruined a lot of Clive's personal momentum Clive being driven by Revenge was good but once Joshua was revealed to be alive what was Clive's motivation moving forward just to save the world a motive like that is so morally clear and unambiguous and so universally agreeable that it just isn't interesting I think he needed either a motive that's more gray or some personal connection to the villain to drive him forward but ultimate didn't do anything to Clive he just called him Mythos a bunch so what is Clive's personal goal other than to rid the world of the blight to find out more about Ultima why what's driving that did Ultima do something that Clive needs to find out if Ultima had been the reason that rosalith fell sure or if Ultima was flat out like I'm the reason you specifically are a freed and I made you kill Joshua then sure those are easy fixes for this issue but as it stands the only thing Ultima had personally done to Clive is kill Sid but Clive really never talks about that as a motive he just wants to learn about Ultima because that's what the game needs to happen not because Clive as a character is given any personal drive to do so there's not a carrot provoking him onward like a carrot on a stick and when Clive finds out that Ultima wants him to absorb the other icons Clive doesn't even ever stop to say okay I'll stop doing that or he doesn't say I will continue but only because I have to he just keeps doing it for no discernible reason while knowing all the while that it's feeding into ultima's exact plan as a final complaint about Clive I think he became much weaker as a character once the brand was removed however I do understand that that kind of had to happen for the story because it allowed him to more easily Traverse the world and get information from non-allies but at the same time I think that did have a hand in the story becoming a lot less dark overall the story actually felt like it became less dark really as soon as you defeat Typhon and there's that First Five-Year time skip that's not to say that a story needs to be dark to be good but it did give this story a very specific tone and it made the story feel to me a little tonally inconsistent this story can actually in my opinion be broken into three different sections of quality the best portion being the beginning through Sid's death that section is definitely the story at its best then the story is okay from there through the Bahamut Fight but then after Bahamut it just feels mostly downright bad because everything starts feeling more rushed and more vague now all of this is also not to say that the story isn't still dark after Sid's death but it's kind of a different type of dark prior to Sid's death it's this weird foreboding gritty Darkness with peaks of other worldly mysteriousness that peeked through but after Sid's death it just doesn't feel the same it never seems to capture those Heights gonna bounce back to this point again for a second but thinking the game felt rushed or unfinished I have to mention the medicine girl I know I'm not the only one that felt like she was going to be a bigger character maybe like she was going to be Leviathan The Lost as soon as they first show her and there's an active time lore thing for this random medicine girl it makes me think oh she's gonna have some significance and then she shows up again and a third time it all felt very convenient there must be some mystery with this girl maybe in a post-credit scene it just revealed that she's still an icon but no it never really goes anywhere it felt like this was another one of those plot threads that they had in mind but they just didn't finish one last complaint I have and I know I've probably said that a hundred times so maybe I should just start saying another complaint I have is that this game like all recent Final Fantasy releases wants to be really flashy and really epic as early as possible so it can grab you right from the start there are epic cut scenes and epic battles but to me a story has to progress it has to build to something when you start with something super epic looking you have to either consistently say at that level or get more spectacle heavy to the point of hyperbole otherwise it just feels like oh why is this boss fight against Joe Shmoe or this random encounter against Bandits or random animals a threat at all we've seen Clive level entire zones with explosions and fight things that look like gods in 16 there is no slow build up think back to the first few hours of any Final Fantasy game one to ten when any of those games had big spectacle moments in the first few hours it was usually at the detriment of the main cast it was showing off the power and the force of the enemies we were fighting against like Shinra dropping the plate onto the slums or queen Braun destroying the theater ship or sin destroying Zanarkand these showed us the might of our enemy and told us through doing that this is how strong you have to become through your adventure meanwhile also in earlier games the party members would start with nothing but basic Auto attacks and spells that looked like little puffs of fire the boss battles would be against more Mortal looking enemies that posed no threat to the World At Large like the mechanical spider from a the plant brain from nine that octopus squid thing that Riku and Titus fight in 10 they didn't feel like threats to the world but they felt like legitimate threats to our cast because we hadn't seen our cast fight Gods yet it gave us room to build up to a fight against something that could destroy the world these fights allowed us to feel an organic progression to bigger and badder foes but in 16 right from the start your character fights like a super epic badass and we see Jill as Shiva fight Titan who's the size of a skyscraper so we already know right out of the demo that Jill and Clive are major forces to be reckoned with because the game doesn't trust its audience to latch onto anything unless they're impressed visually immediately and maybe they're right maybe audiences do need to be visually dazzled within the first hour but to me this always feels like it removes a lot of the stakes one thing I found interesting about the story is that in ways it is very similar to aspects of Final Fantasy 9's ultima's goal is very similar to garlands from nine they're both otherworldly beings who want to harvest energy of another planet or consonant in this case to revive their race or compatriots and they both have some big thing to put on this new planet or continent to help them harvest the energy Garland is Ultima the IFA tree as the mother crystals and Barnabas is like Kuja if he had been like brainwashed the entire time this is not necessarily a bad thing but I do think they could have made even more ways to differentiate them maybe by letting Ultima tell us more about the fallen and more about the origin of his people the origins of his plan how it would work it just needed to be explored a little more and we have reached the ending one aspect of the game that I've seen most people agree on hating is the ending now whether Clive or Joshua or Dion survived at the end is almost besides the point yeah you can piece together some Clues to figure out what you think happened but there needs to be more emotional payoff imagine how much weaker Final Fantasy 9's ending would have been if it only hinted at zedane's survival and did not feature his reunion with dagger or if AIDS ending didn't show Squall on the balcony it's not enough for the audience to figure out what happened they want to see characters interacting with each other in the post-credits scene we see that the world is rid of magic I don't hate this it's something we've seen before in Final Fantasy 6 and I didn't hate it then either I might have liked to have seen more of than a little cottage though show me what an actual Village looks like without magic and not just this lady in the woods with her kids but also did Joshua actually write this book or was this meant to suggest that this was all a storybook a la it was all a dream if Joshua did write it how when the last 15 of the main story just felt like such a Mad Dash to the ending after Meandering so long to get there that it really did not feel satisfying or well developed so those are my thoughts I haven't timed this out but I'm sure it's going to be a lot longer than I planned it to be but hey I waited a long time for this game and I spent a lot of time playing it so I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about it I tried to keep my thoughts as organized as possible so I hope I at least succeeded in that at the end of the day I'm still a massive Final Fantasy fan and I always will be for all the memories the series has given me and for making me who I am today but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed with the direction the games have been going with the last two major releases overall I'd rate this game towards the bottom of my series ranking but probably still ahead of 15 but I may need to Stew on that a little more I'd definitely place it around 8 and 13. I'm just not sure which order I'd put 8 13 and 16 in I really did try and hold out judgment for a while with this game while playing it but I think for a lot of it I was in denial at the 70 Mark I looked at the PS5 home screen saw that I was 70 through and I was in disbelief I found myself just wishing it was over or closer to being over because it was dragging on so much at that point and I felt so bored and I think that's when I finally admitted to myself that I was not enjoying the game and it is okay to admit that you didn't enjoy something that you spent a lot of time on it's okay to admit you didn't enjoy something that you spent a lot of money on or that something wasn't good that you were initially excited for I'm happy if you liked this game and I'm hopeful that the next one is one that I like I just wish it was coming sooner I wish we could live in a time like the 90s where we got a new Final Fantasy every year so even if one was a miss it wasn't a big deal because hey another one will be out next year as a kid I was sure we'd be at Final Fantasy 30 by now but hey that's where we are now games take six or seven years to come out and don't feel half as finished as they used to we'll see how I feel about Final Fantasy 17 in five years for anyone who did stick out the whole video thank you so much please subscribe if I see any type of reaction to this video maybe I'll start making other types of reviews or something I am going to start streaming more on Twitch that's twitch.tv overnight siren so if you kind of like my vibe I guess feel free to subscribe there I promise I'm not always this negative but I am always this analytical because I take the things I spend my time on very seriously and I take the things I care about like Final Fantasy very seriously anyway that's everything this has been overnight siren and please let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree

Channel: Overnight Siren

Views: 39,437

Keywords: final, fantasy, xvi, ffxvi, final fantasy xvi, final fantasy 16, ff16, review, lgbt, gaymer, let's play, lets play, video essay, spoiler, story, gameplay, spoilers, clive, clive rosfield, jill, cid, kupka, dion, barnabas, ultima, guide

Id: xLGl-WAPXt0

Length: 59min 15sec (3555 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023