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| Title | Final Fantasy XVI |
| Developer | Square Enix |
| Publisher | Square Enix |
| Release Date | June 22, 2023 |
| Genre | Action RPG |
| Platform | PlayStation 5 |
| Age Rating | Mature |
| Official Website | |
I have made no secret of how much I’ve been looking forward to Final Fantasy XVI since it was first announced. As a lifelong fan of the franchise, I was eager to see what new story was in store for this vaunted series; and as an avid Final Fantasy XIV player, I was stoked to see some of my favorite devs creating a new, standalone title. Would it live up to expectations or flounder under the weight of its own name? Read on to find out!
Clive Rosfield is the first son of the Archduke Elwin Rosfield, of the Dutchy of Rosaria. His younger brother, Joshua, a frail and sickly boy, was born the Dominant of Phoenix – basically this world’s version of a summoner. Clive, himself, is blessed with the Phoenix’ power, allowing him to use fire-based magic and attacks, and so he acts as Joshua’s First Shield, protecting his younger brother from danger at all costs. With war looming on the horizon, Elwin and Joshua head to Phoenix Gate to pray for the fire bird’s protection in the coming battles. Clive takes a detour to clean out a nearby swamp of encroaching goblins. Not long after he rendezvous with his father and brother at the Gate, it’s attacked by those who would see Elwin and Joshua dead. While desperately searching for his brother in the commotion, a hooded figure intercepts Clive. When he wakes up, it’s to the Phoenix battling another fire Eikon, Ifrit – a creature that should not even exist. As Clive watches helplessly, the world around him is forever changed, leading him down a path of vengeance, anger, and – ultimately – redemption and self-determination.
First and foremost, the game is not shy about showing pretty brutal acts of violence. There is a lot of blood, dead bodies and cutting people down in the middle of battle. Producer Naoki Yoshida has been vocal about his influences when creating this game, including Game of Thrones and the previous works of Yasumi Matsuno, including Final Fantasy Tactics and FFXII. These influences are readily apparent, but the game doesn’t really deal with anything darker than previous titles – it’s just more up front about their presentation. I don’t think it detracts at all from an ultimately uplifting story about living life on your own terms and the power of friendship, but just know what you’re getting into if you pick it up.
This is also a stylish action RPG in the vein of Dragon’s Dogma, with that game’s Ryota Suzuki taking the helm as combat director. I will be the first to admit that I am not exactly the best at action games, but the combat here feels fantastic. You have a basic melee attack mapped to the square button, as well as a single-target magic spell mapped to the triangle button. Your melee attack can chain to a three-hit combo, and if you time your spell immediately after, you’ll perform a magic burst for extra damage. The circle button is mapped to the feat of whatever Eikon you’re currently equipped with – Phoenix Shift for Phoenix, which launches you toward an enemy; Deadly Embrace for Garuda, which pulls enemies toward you and can also drag larger ones to their knees; Titanic Block for Titan, which puts up a shield that, when paired with a perfect block, executes a blistering counter attack; etc. Holding R2 changes the square and triangle buttons to one of several Eikonic abilities you choose to map to them, allowing for a surprising amount of customization. For instance, for Phoenix I have Rising Flame mapped to R2 + square and Flames of Rebirth mapped to R2 + triangle because they fit my preferred play style, and I genuinely like how they look and feel. Mixing and matching which Eikonic abilities you assign provides a lot of depth to an otherwise pretty simple system, and also gives you options for when fights aren’t going your way. During battle, every action Clive does will also naturally fill up his Limit Break (LB) bar. Using the LB will increase his attack power and speed while also replenishing a bit of his health.
Regular enemies are simple enough to take down using your standard combo and magic burst (though why wouldn’t you use your fun moves to finish battles faster), but bigger enemies have a stagger bar that needs to be whittled down before you can do any major damage to them. Parrying an attack will leave them open for higher stagger damage, as will certain Eikonic abilities. Knocking a stagger bar to the halfway mark will momentarily incapacitate the enemy, so you can wail on them and burn their stagger bar down to nothing faster. Once fully staggered, unleashing multi-hit Eikonic abilities while activating your LB and maximizing your combo + magic burst will deal the most damage. If the enemy isn’t dead by the end of their stagger, their bar replenishes and you start the process over again. If you’re only using basic combo attacks, this process can feel really grueling. But, smart use of Eikonic abilities, Clive’s LB gauge, parries and precision dodges ended up making most of these battles a lot of fun for me, especially later on when I leveled up more of my Eikonic abilities and unlocked new Eikons to mess around with.
Clive does not just fight with a sword, though. Periodically throughout the game, you will engage in kaiju battles with other Eikons, and these are over-the-top, flashy, bombastic battle sequences. Dominants can “semi-prime,” meaning they take on some characteristics of their Eikon without fully becoming them; and they fully “prime” to become the Eikon itself. Clive will engage in fights with both during his journey, and the scale of these battles feels suitably epic. During Eikon fights, you have access to a much more limited but powerful set of skills, and everything feels weighty and impactful. They’re really fun. Eikon battles are also where you will see the majority of the game’s “cinematic” quick-time events. Pressing square when the screen glows blue will do a “Cinematic Strike,” a stylish and hard-hitting attack. Pressing triangle when the screen glows red will perform a “Cinematic Dodge,” propelling Clive out of danger. And mashing the square button when the screen flashes will cause a “Cinematic Clash” where Clive and his opponent vie for dominance. These “Cinematic” events can happen during regular boss fights, but they’re most often used against Eikons, and they look really cool.
In terms of combat, Torgal is a bit of a mixed bag for me. You control him using the D-pad, though he will do regular damage to enemies whether or not you command him. Timing his “Sic” command with your attacks deals extra damage; his “Heal” ability is a short regen that generally feels useless; and his “Ravage” command will launch most smaller enemies into the air to set them up for air combos. Getting his “Sic” command timing down should be one of the first things you do, since you’ll be using it frequently, but for the most part, I never felt like having Torgal with me in combat made that much of a difference. He’s still the best, most perfect good boy ever, and I love him, but he doesn’t add much to fights outside keeping the riff-raff occupied when I’m focused on a bigger mob. This might change on higher difficulties, but on a normal difficulty, action-focused run through, he felt like an afterthought.
One of XVI‘s most hyped up features was its accessibility items. Rather than offer difficulty levels (easy, hard, etc.), the game opts to provide players with customizable difficulty through the use of special gear. These “Rings of Timely ____” change the flow of combat drastically, slowing down time to give players a chance to evade (Ring of Timely Focus), letting Clive automatically dodge attacks that can be evaded (Ring of Timely Evasion), auto-use potions (Ring of Timely Healing), and turning the square button into an auto-combo that weaves attacks and Eikonic abilities together on the fly (Ring of Timely Strikes). They make the game eminently approachable for even the most novice action game player while allowing the developers to design more challenging fights in general. When it comes to addressing difficulty in games, I think this is a good compromise between the “git gud” mentality and asking devs to expend more time on crafting the game around varying difficulty levels, or (as is usually the case) only tailoring fights to one difficulty level and having all others be an unbalanced mess. That being said, I only used these items briefly to try them out because I felt the game was already a little on the easy side, and wearing the rings ruined the balance entirely for me.
Final Fantasy XVI does not have a traditional skill tree. Rather, Clive has a base set of actions he can use. Initially, Clive can only access things like his downward slash, jumping off enemies, taunting, and his Phoenix abilities. As he acquires more Eikons he can learn specific skills from each of those, expanding his tool kit. Every action can be leveled using AP, increasing various aspects such as strength and duration. Clive can equip up to three Eikons at a time, and each of those Eikons can use its specific feat as well as two abilities. Mastering an Eikonic ability will let you assign it to a different Eikon’s kit – so if you really want to use, say, three of Garuda’s abilities, you could assign a Mastered one to Phoenix. You can also earn AP back by resetting all Eikon in order to respec to something more suitable to your style, which was a boon later in the game when I just did not want to grind for AP anymore.
While combat is fun, frantic and addicting, outside of fighting there isn’t much to do that isn’t the main story or sidequests. Unlike other Final Fantasy titles, XVI is woefully lacking in mini-games and other distractions. This isn’t a deal breaker by any means, but it does feel a bit barren. A card or dice type game would have fit this world really well. The regions of Valisthea themselves, while stunningly beautiful, are also mostly just set paths you cannot stray from, or open areas that offer little of interest outside of Hunt mark locations or derelict towns that provide some environmental storytelling. Dungeons are also frustratingly samey and suffer the same hallway-cutscene-hallway design as Final Fantasy XIII and FFVII Remake do. There is also no overworld map, and instead you pick locations and teleport to them, similar to how FFX and Grandia worked. Once in a locale, you can unlock waypoints for fast travel, which you can access at any time by using the map screen in the start menu. Occasionally, the story will lock you into a specific area, but otherwise you can travel at will between waypoints, and I often found myself using them just to get around faster, since Clive runs very, very slowly, and you don’t unlock your chocobo until several hours into the game.
Final Fantasy XVI also lacks several quality of life features I would expect from a game this size and by the same team that worked on Final Fantasy XIV. There’s no mini-map or compass, so I often found myself needing to open the map while out in the wild since I’d get turned around while fighting. You can place markers on the map to help you navigate, but they don’t really make up for the lack of either. You cannot interact with objects while on your chocobo. There is no manual dash button, so you’re at the mercy of whenever Clive ramps up speed while out in the field before you can sprint, and there is absolutely no hoofing it while in towns – even when those towns are abandoned combat arenas. In general, Clive just moves very slowly and more often than not feels like he’s lumbering around, especially in the Hideaway. There’s also no in-game clock, which is baffling to me considering how standard that feature has been in RPGs over the years.
I’m torn on how I feel about the item limit. At the beginning of the game, Clive can carry no more than four potions or three hi-potions. You can increase this amount through sidequests later on, but there’s no stockpiling 99 of every healing item here. On the one hand, this means you can’t beat hard fights by simply out-healing your opponent; managing your health and your resources is as important as executing precision dodges and parries. On the other hand, it feels arbitrarily restrictive, since if you die, you’re fully restocked for both potions and hi-potions anyway, even if you went into the fight with less than the maximum amount. You’re also similarly limited in how many elixirs and tonics you can carry. It just feels like if the game is going to replenish your healing items to full upon death anyway, they might as well have let me stockpile more than four potions at a time. You access potions, hi-potions and tonics in battle using the D-pad (same as Torgal), or through the pause menu, so maybe they could have had it slowly refill with the potions you had in stock once you’ve depleted what’s immediately available. (Also as an aside, the amount of times I’ve wasted my potions because I thought I was on Torgal’s menu and using “Sic” are innumerable and infuriating.)
Read on for the lowdown on XVI’s characters and worldbuilding ->
