Track this topic | Email this topic | Print this topic

A couple weeks back folks were talking about the FFXVI Demo, and I'm just wondering if any of you have played through the full game?

I'm watching a Let's Play [because I don't have a PS5 and physically struggle with the Action part of the Action RPG] and so far enjoy the story [or, well, most of it], but I'm wondering if you're all enjoying it [and not just the callbacks or being basically a superhero].

What did you think?

I'm only about two hours in so far because I don't have very much time in my house to play M-rated games at the moment, but I'm enjoying it so far. I'm coming to it after a good couple hundred hours in mostly Horizon games, so it feels a lot less fluid in movement and environment, almost clunky to me in those ways. And I can feel how much they wanted to essentially build a single-player MMO in the XIV vein, which isn't that appealing to me because I have never really cared for MMOs regardless of how good they are. And, I don't know if I have said it in here but I certainly have in Discord, I think the effort to make sure that the game was M-rated still feels forced, like they were planning a game to make sure it got that rating rather than just writing a good game that happened to end up needing that rating.

All that said, I think I'm going to like the game a lot. I'm still pretty bad at the combat, but I think that will get better as I distance myself more from Horizon and get more experience with the button mapping. I'm going to try to avoid using any of the assistance equipment and see how it goes. And I think the story is going to do just fine now that I've seen a little bit more of it.

--------------------

"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

I can for sure see a case for a forced M-rating, and I might have plotted the story differently for several reasons (toning down on caricatures, maybe abandoning callbacks for callbacks’ sake, etc.), the further into this Let’s Play I get, the more I’m intrigued by the story. Here’s hoping you find the same.

I haven't played through the full game yet. I've also been watching a Let's Play. But so far, I'm not really enjoying the story 'cause there are a few parts that I'm not as thrilled about(((

I completed the game late last night! Here is a non-spoilery review of the game.

1) The voice acting is phenomenal.

Everyone is good! But I especially liked Benedikta. Her VA really owned the character.

2) The music is wonderful!

With the exception of one track during a certain boss fight that I felt didn't belong in the game (it was a banger track, it just didn't FEEL right), I'd say the music is top-notch. That's not surprising giving Soken-san's track record with FFXIV.

(About FFXIV: I love Endwalker's music, but it reuses a lot of themes. This is brilliant in its own way, but in others felt a bit, hmm, lazy? But Soken-san was composing XVI and the guy has recovered from cancer, so I can give him a break.)

3) The sound *editing* is also wonderful.

They make strong use of the speaker in the PS5 controller, and it really added to the gameplay, I feel. I especially loved hearing Torgal barking mid-fight.

4) The graphics are beautiful, for the most part.

They ARE gorgeous. But there's a slight highlighting, on foreheads or off armor, that distracted me. I believe the game was done in the Unreal engine, which is a perfectly servicable engine. However, ever since FFXV I've had a slight preference for the Luminous engine; the shiny aspects of the Unreal engine is majorly why. It's juuuuuuuust enough to toss me out of the game.

- okay, I consulted Duck Duck Go, and it appears it's NOT Unreal but a web search was inconclusive as to what it actually is. Whatever it is, I didn't quite like it. I hope they don't use it again, because it was like... some scenes felt beautifully rendered and flat at the same time? It's hard to describe.

5) Character movements during cutscenes can be distracting.

I wouldn't say Uncanny Valley, but some movements felt off or unnatural, and again, threw me out of the game. FFXIV has lesser graphics than XVI, and yet I rarely get distracted by characters' movements in that game (with the exception of sometimes watching the characters breathe.)

6) It was hard for me to differentiate the various city-states.

Like, okay, I knew they were different. But remembering which was the religious one versus which was the empire was difficult for me. I have the best sense of the feel of the Rosfield's homeland, with Sanbreque being second, and that largely has to do with imprinting on the characters from those areas.

7) The story is rather complex and yet simple at the same time.

How can that be? you ask. Well, at one point during my play, I listed the various story arcs that were happening at that kind, and counted TWELVE off the top of my head. That's a bit much! I say that because I actually had forgotten about one of story arcs until a character mentioned it being the main motivation for the major arc of the game! That... shouldn't have happened, I feel. A friend of mine said in Discord several times "Everything happens so much in this game."; I'm not entirely certain of her meaning behind those words but man do I feel it anyway.

As for being simple: several characters seemed to have their main motivation be the same thing: revenge. And well, I am not all that fond of revenge stories, so it was hard for me to get into the game at the beginning. So much so that I put it down for nearly a two-week period and seriously thought about not finishing it. That continued to make me sad, because I had so looked forward to this game.

8) The story gets better the further you go in the game.

I think this is because the beginning of the game left me with a lot of questions, and as you play, those questions are answered one by one so by the end of the game you have a good picture of what's happening. Some would say, "Good storytelling here!" because isn't that how stories are supposed to work? But honestly, I felt a bit frustrated with all the questions I had... they SHOULD have been enough to keep me playing so I could find out more, but they just... weren't.

9) There are some characters I really liked!

* Benedikta was intriguing! And her VA being such a delight made a real impression on me.
* Dion stole my heart from nearly his first scene.
* Gav is a lot of fun! I really enjoyed him.
* And another character, who is a pretty major spoiler so I won't name here, is exactly my kind of character.

10) The gameplay was interesting -- and story-driven -- but exhausting.

This is an action game, so it has a lot of combos and dodging and stuff. But rather than just having combos for combos' sake, each combo's ability has a story reason you can use it, as does the Limit Break. I greatly appreciated this about the game!

There's a story-driven mode, IIRC, but I played the action-focused mode. However, I made use of several accessories to "dumb down" the controls: an auto-dodge accessory and a "one-hit combo" accessory. Which means I mostly mashed the square button to play. This was exhausting! My muscles are sore! There were times I held the controller with one hand or the other, and used my index finger to mash Square rather than my right thumb, just to give some of my muscles a break.

While I really appreciated the DESIGN behind the gameplay, and am glad they gave a full action game a try, I'm hoping future entries go back to easier combat. Because, let's face it, I am getting older and it gets harder to play games that require a lot of button-mashing.

11) This is definitely a Final Fantasy game.

I had my doubts at first. But as the game progressed, and especially in the last 25% of the game, it felt more and more like an entry in the series. The stuff that happens near the end is classic Final Fantasy.

12) I was not moved by this game nearly as much as I was hoping.

FFXIV has spoiled me, as has past entries like FFX. I wanted to have some kind of emotional reaction; I largely did NOT. I actually started wondering if I was depressed at the beginning of my gameplay, because it felt like anhedonia (I certainly had flat reactions to most things in the game).

There WERE things that made me gasp, and other things that made me cheer. But mostly, that emotional reaction I expect from Final Fantasy games was missing.

So, final verdict: what grade would I give the game? Earlier today, I was thinking B-, but after playing the final dungeons I'd raise that to a B. It's a decent game! I'm glad I played it! I'll probably play it at least one more time, to stream it eventually. Will it be a favorite in the series? Probably not.

But: Final Fantasy as a franchise is always trying new things. I'm glad they took a chance with this game. I can appreciate the work that went into it (and indeed, I watched all of the credits roll as is my practice, out of respect for everyone who worked on it.) I'm glad I stuck with it and gave the game a chance.

--------------------

Watch me play games on Twitch!
Schedule:
Mondays & Thursdays: Final Fantasy VII -Rebirth-
Saturdays: Final Fantasy XIV Side Quests (or maybe more Rebirth, we'll see!)
7:30pm - 10:30pm Central or thereabouts

Agreed, the voice acting is phenomenal—especially Benedikta’s VA.

There were a few tracks I didn’t love, but, overall, I thought the music was great. I didn’t notice the sound editing or graphics or responsiveness of character motions, per se, on account of not actually playing the game.

For me, I didn’t find the city-states difficult to differentiate between, but I would have really liked for the differentiation that was there to matter in some way to the story. Just like you, the characters from those places helped immensely, but it definitely felt like there could have been more. I mean,

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

Ultima created these people, right, seeding them with magic and the eikons, and those people have greater access to certain types of magic, which I think should have made a clearer impact on their lands

.

“Everything happens so much in this game” sounds like an apt descriptor to me, and, yeah, the story gets much better the more information you actually have about what’s going on. It was frustrating in the beginning, and I don’t know what balance I’d have struck had I been in the writers’ room there, but I agree that we could have gotten a clearer picture of what’s going on—while still leaving an air of mystery for the bigger reveals. (Come to think of it, I’d have loved to be in that writers’ room to brainstorm alternative ways to draw players into the world, drop breadcrumbs for the ultimate plot, and finally open up the game’s many mysteries.)

And, yeah, there were several really interesting characters. I’ve really come around on Benedikta’s character; at first, I thought she was a half-*ssed femme fatale, but as I realized how much her origins had messed with her, and how she values loyalty so highly, and obviously I felt for her after her fateful run-in with Clive. The VA hand-fed me brilliance and I owe her my life and all that. I really wanted more Benedikta, to grant her a little more agency at the end of her involvement in the story. I didn’t love Dion, but I liked him a lot, almost as much as I liked Gav. I thought Cid brought a great energy to the game, and he drives the narrative for much of the early- to mid-game. I loved Jill—though I strongly disliked how she came about

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

granting her power to Clive, which didn’t make sense to me

. I think my favorite was

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

Joshua, the younger brother turned protector, and the one who does the lore delving to reveal our real antagonist

. On the other hand, I didn't care for Clive.

I’m glad Let’s Plays exist—because I would otherwise never have experienced the story because of just how little interest I have in lengthy and challenging action games. Some of those set-piece battles looked downright painful to play through.

I loved all the callbacks to previous FF games.

I felt emotions at the ending, but they were as much intellectual as they were visceral. I certainly appreciate the Win that the ending represents, but I felt many more powerful emotions from various characters earlier in the game and wanted a bit more payoff, so to speak, at the end.

In the end, I think a B rating fits nicely.