Is Final Fantasy 16 Good?

Since completing Final Fantasy 16, I have spent some time thinking about my time with this game and have gone through several stages of sometimes liking and hating my time with the game. Is FF16 a good Final Fantasy title is not an easy question to answer.

Final Fantasy 16 is a complicated game one that tries to push the series in new directions but stumbles quiet a bit on its way.

The Good

Starting with the positives, the biggest stand out is the incredible production value that went into shaping the visuals of the game. The game is absolutely stunning to look at with some incredibly cinematic scenes that rival major blockbuster films. The battle between Ifrit and Phoenix to start the journey is deeply pierced into my brain. The series received a serious amount of polish that was missing from FFXV.

Furthermore, as if the stellar graphics weren’t enough, the cutscenes sport high calibre voice acting that went a long way into bring those characters to life. The dialogue was at times sharp and at other times witty and there was a strong emphasis on bringing alive old English and it sounds great and lends the game some authenticity.

Where it Falls Short

From here though things become complicated. The story is quickly introduces us to many different players without really giving them room to breathe. Kupka, Benedikta, Barnabas, Anabella are rendered in beautiful scenes after some major battles but the interactions with them are mostly limited with the exception of perhaps two characters.

The story borrows a great deal from Game of Thrones and deals with some heavy themes like injustice, slavery, a changing world order, and combines it with traditional series elements like magic and summons. It can be somewhat of a downer because those familiar Final Fantasy elements are looked at through a somewhat realistic lens and they are used as mean to be oppress and keep people down. I certainly don’t mind a twist on the old formula but I don’t believe that the creators were fully cognizant of how much a wedge that this could drive in the fan-base.

There was also room for the story to expand it’s scope and story by having many protagonists but instead we are saddled with one character both from a story and gameplay perspective for the entire 40-hour run of the game. The plot, as stated earlier, borrows heavily from Game of Thrones but they didn’t think to let us explore the story from different angles. It’s a very rigid tale. There was an opportunity to have the players play as Joshua, maybe even Dion and introduce variety into the title but everything is instead stuffed into Clive.

And when it comes to characters many of them look identical. Anabella looks like Benedikta and Clive looks like Barnabas. It’s so odd and rather confusing the first time playing the game. I dont know what happened with the art here but I dont think I’ve seen so many who are supposed to completely apart look so much a like.

While the environments do look great, exploring the world is odd and cold. Everything feels abandoned and empty and none of it really has much character that makes it memorable. It also doesn’t help that all the towns feel really disconnected from each other and there is just too much of a reliance on using fast travel to navigate the world. You don’t feel like you’re exploring or uncovering a new world. It’s incredibly dissatisfying to explore the larger world.

Conclusion

Though visually stunning, with incredible voice-acting and solid dialogue writing there is s still a lot left to be desired from the Final Fantasy 16 experience. The game feels unusually stiff, cold and disconnected in very strange ways. While I do appreciate the game taking a more mature turn and learning from Game of Thrones, there is still a great deal of room left for improvement to deliver that experience of a golden age Final Fantasy game.