You have a gun to my head. “What is your favourite game?”, you demand. “Of all time?” I have no choice. “Final Fantasy VII”, I respond. I know that this is a relatively normie opinion, both in videogames as a whole and within the world of Final Fantasy specifically. But sometimes the normies are right. It’s a good game.
I say all this not to extol the virtues of Cloud and the gang but to intimate my level of investment in the Final Fantasy franchise. I have played a great number of Final Fantasy games. Back of the napkin math, I’d put the number somewhere around 20 different Final Fantasy titles. Some of them I’ve adored. Some of them I’ve liked or at least tolerated. A small number of them are interesting and interestingly-flawed games.1 I don’t think I’ve really hated any of them, because even the sort-of-bad ones are charming and weird.2 Broadly speaking, I am a fan of the franchise and am fairly invested in it, even if I haven’t really loved one of their new (i.e., non-remake) games in quite a long time.
For these reasons, I had been keeping my eye on the coverage of Final Fantasy XVI, cautiously optimistic about all of the positive buzz that its previews had generated. Its initial announcement didn’t really excite me, as the medieval fantasy flavoured Final Fantasy games had never really caught my fancy in the way that the others had.3 But I couldn’t help but be allured by the promises made by the preview coverage: “It’s just like Devil May Cry!” “Its story is intriguing!” “Its set pieces are unmatched!” It felt like a type of hype that could actually be executed on—surely, the idea of a Final Fantasy game with tight combat, a decent story, and some interesting RPG mechanics wouldn’t be too much to ask? I mean, they had just had Team Ninja make them a Nioh-like Final Fantasy. They’ve probably figured things out. Right?
Let’s go ahead and address the lampshaded-giraffe: I am about to revive months-old discourse, a discourse that was (to me) tiresome from the outset. At this point, it’s less beating a dead horse and more doing that ribcage-xylophone thing with its bones.4 I hope to say something novel and/or interesting on the topic, but I would be remiss if I did not point out that I am several months late to the party here and I don’t even know if it was a party that I wanted to attend.
When Final Fantasy XVI released, I was in Japan. I certainly did not have a PlayStation 5 with me and the only game that I was playing with any regularity was maimai.5 I was intermittently checking Twitter but was instantly enervated by any allusions to discourse about Final Fantasy XVI. I heard these discussions alluded to on podcasts, but was mostly just enamoured with all of the glowingly positive things people had to say about the game. So enamoured was I that I ended up purchasing a copy of Final Fantasy XVI for ¥7280 at a Don Quijote in Osaka.6 And, even then, with a new copy in hand (and no way yet to play it), I still did not find myself interested in the questions that seemed to be bouncing around everyone else’s minds: “Is Final Fantasy XVI a real Final Fantasy game?” Or, more specifically, “Is Final Fantasy XVI a real RPG?” No, even as everyone—from the Twitterati to the YouTube Intelligentsia to the Polygon-Kotaku-IGN click-mongers—got a hand on that particular ball, I was content not just to avoid dunks but to ignore the ballgame altogether. But you know what they say: you either slam with the best or you jam with the rest.
Once I returned home and actually began playing Final Fantasy XVI, I had to begrudgingly admit that at least one of these questions was of some interest to me—though, it should be noted that I had not and have not seen anyone directly address the truly-interesting aspects of said question.7 So, let’s take these two questions in turn, and see if there is any fetid discourse meat left to suck off these old horsebones.8
Is Final Fantasy XVI a real Final Fantasy game?
When asked what makes a Final Fantasy game, series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi replied that “Final Fantasy is Final Fantasy if it has a blue window with text in it.” Final Fantasy XVI does not have blue windows with text in them and is therefore not a Final Fantasy game. Done. Easy. Next.
Is Final Fantasy XVI a real RPG?
It turns out that the answer to this question is also quite simple: No. It isn’t. As with the previous question, I do not find this to be an especially or intrinsically interesting topic of investigation. Examining whether a particular game belongs to a particular genre is unlikely to be intellectually stimulating or fruitful unless it serves some higher-order goal (e.g., determining the prototypical features of a given genre). But, in this particular case, I do think that the explanation for why Final Fantasy XVI is not an RPG provides a useful basis for a broader discussion of the game, its strengths and its failures. After all, the problem isn’t that Final Fantasy XVI isn’t an RPG; the problem is that it pretends to be.
As previously discussed in brief, I do not think that Final Fantasy XVI is a very good videogame. I wanted very badly to like it and there were parts of it that I liked a great deal. On the whole, however, I think that the package is simply not very compelling, and I feel that most of its faults (and some of its strengths) can be traced in some way to its genre-identitiy crisis. Often, a good media experience—like communication more broadly—is just a matter of setting up expectations and then delivering on those expectations. Occasionally, an excellent media experience is a matter of setting up expectations and then explicitly violating them. This must be handled delicately and deftly, however, and is really just the exception that proves the rule. The reason that Final Fantasy XVI is such a disappointing experience is because of how often it instills in the player the expectations of an RPG and how consistently it fails to fulfill those expectations.
The Combat
The primary strength of Final Fantasy XVI is incontrovertibly its combat. There are those who were not especially keen on this combat, but I cannot imagine that they think some other aspect of the game outshines it. No, Final Fantasy XVI is an entry in the proud tradition of third-person character action games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, and, in my opinion, I think it does quite a good job in this regard. Its combat might not be better than the babyskin-smooth and widely-beloved products of Platinum Games, for example, but I do not think that it compares unfavourably to them. I found the combat to be engaging and interesting, varied and dynamic, and basically as rewarding as I wanted it to be. Generally speaking, I got out of it what I put into it. Once I got the hang of things and learned to perfect-dodge nearly every attack in the game, I found the combat to be especially immersive, eliciting a sense of flow comparable to that of games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.9 I enjoyed this combat against random encounters, I enjoyed it against optional elite enemies, and I especially enjoyed it against the fast-paced humanoid bosses of the game.10 So: Final Fantasy XVI is not an RPG, it is a character action game and it is a pretty good one. What’s the problem?
Everything Else
The problem is everything else. Outside of the combat, the game is loaded with vestigial role-playing mechanics, empty echoes of the franchise’s history of “true RPGs”, devoid of all the life and joy that they once contained. The game insists on presenting with the pace and narrative of an RPG but without any of the carrots that normally make such an experience engaging (or even tolerable). Party customization, character skill choice and growth, gear and appearance customization, narrative choice and impact: all of these standard features of an RPG experience have been either eradicated from the game entirely or reduced down to their weakest and emptiest forms. The only remaining “role-playing” in the game is restricted to combat in the form of choosing how to fight. The second that a combat encounter ends, however, this opportunity for customization or agency disappears entirely.
What’s uniquely strange about Final Fantasy XVI is that it does want to remind the player of the existence of these sorts of systems and mechanics, even if it refuses to deliver them. The game has equippable gear and a crafting system but one in which each piece of craftable gear is trivially and linearly better than the last, rendering both systems utterly inert.11 The game has a series of optional quests that are nearly all simple fetch quests or monster hunts and that, nearly to the last, end predictably (if slowly) and without any meaningful input from the player. The game has multiple characters who can fight alongside you, but at no point are you given the option to choose who fights alongside you or how. The one exception to this rule is your nearly-always-present hound, Torgal, over whom you are given a small and uninteresting degree of control.12 Speaking of Torgal: did you know that he is given his own dedicated profile screen in the main menu, along with a character level (orthogonal from your own) and stats? Don’t worry, none of that means anything and the player cannot interact with it in any way.
Ultimately, these systems are all just empty painful reminders to the player of all the nice times we’ve had playing RPGs (like Final Fantasy) in the past. Why are we still here, playing this game? Just to suffer? Each of these systems is on rails, and although (I assume) they were intended to fool the player into thinking they were having an agentic experience playing a role-playing game, they serve only to ratify the opposite. Everytime I craft another generically-better and yet wholly-uninteresting gear upgrade, I am reminded that I am not playing an RPG, but I am expected to pretend that I am: I am expected to deal with the cruft and grind and gruntwork of an RPG; I am expected to put up with the narrative pacing of an RPG; I am expected to invest in the characters and plot of an RPG. The game is so clearly set up to deliver on these sorts of mechanics and yet… it just doesn’t. I have trouble imagining how this came to be, though my best guess is something generic like “lack of unified creative vision.” Final Fantasy XVI smacks of having pivoted hard partway through development (i.e., pivoting out of being an RPG, though potentially pivoting into being “more” of an RPG), either due to changes in lead positions or due to interference from other elements at Square Enix. Regardless how exactly how it came to pass, Final Fantasy XVI ended up as a character action game that is weighed down by the dead vestigial limbs of another genre.
So, you are undoubtedly asking, aloud and nervously: what should have been done differently? Well, the answer is both annoyingly trivial and trivially annoying. The game should have dedicated itself to one genre. If the developers of Final Fantasy XVI wanted to make a character action game, then they should have committed to making a character action game, investing in the strengths of that genre and shoring up its weaknesses. If the developers of Final Fantasy XVI wanted to make an RPG (albeit one with action-driven combat), then they should have committed themselves to making an RPG. Instead, they made a game that has the weaknesses of an RPG and none of the strengths. Other games in the character action genre do not have this problem. They do not pretend to be anything that they are not and so they do not remind the player of other (better) experiences that they have had, or frustrate the player’s desire to engage in systems that are ultimately too thin and underbaked to be rewarding.
This mismatch of genres is perhaps most laid bare by the game’s plot and narrative. Final Fantasy XVI insists on presenting the player with an extremely elaborate world, complete with its own labrynthine politics, sociology, and metaphysics, and a massive cast of characters. It delivers all of this to the player in the form of lengthy dialogue, interminable cutscenes, and (perhaps most enervatingly) mini history lectures that are literally presented as lectures to you by a scholar.13 Part of the reason that all of this plot delivery is so painful to receive is that it is necessarily at odds with the game’s strongest (if not most prominent) component: combat. The game engages players in blisteringly-fast and dynamic combat, only to grind to an absolute halt in order to spend ages on stilted plot development or half-baked character development. This gives players some of the worst narrative whiplash I have ever experienced in a game, which is only exacerbated by the fact that the writing in the game is simply not very good (on which, more later). When playing the game, it is quite clear that the aspect of the game that received the most care and attention (and, I would guess, pride) is its combat. And yet, I would estimate the player spends only about 30% of their time in-game on combat. The rest of their time is dedicated to staid cutscenes, tedious fetch quests, or inoffensive exploration of offensively-bad levels.
It did not have to be this way, however. There is a reason that Bayonetta and Devil May Cry do not devote more than half of their runtime to plot.14 It is because these sorts of games are ill-suited to that level and type of storytelling. Slow and complex stories of the type in Final Fantasy XVI do not mesh well with this type of character action combat; the two experiences are too distinct and contradictory and they contribute to two very different (and incompatible) paces. The developers of games like Bayonetta understand this and so they devote the game’s runtime to the action, which they correctly recognize to be the game’s strength. Slow, complicated, high-investment stories of this nature are much-better suited to traditional RPG mechanics, which are similarly slow, complicated, and high-investment. Ultimately, if the developers of Final Fantasy XVI did not want to make an RPG, they should have compromised heavily on the story that they told and the way in which they told it. They should have cut things down dramatically in order to tell a lighter and more streamlined story, one whose pace was more in-line with the game’s primary strength (its combat). They also should have cut basically every system that did not contribute directly and significantly to that strength: equipment, crafting, leveling, the skill tree, etc. Essentially, they should have developed an actual character action game, and not a character action game wrapped in the flayed skinsuit of a traditional Final Fantasy game.
Alternatively, if the developers did want to tell this story—and I suspect that they did, for better and for worse—I think that they should have committed themselves to developing a full and fleshy RPG. This means developing interesting and elaborate skill trees and equipment sets (for multiple characters). This means designing and writing interesting quests, that aren’t just pingponging between NPCs or killing some variant of the same boring elite monster. This means giving the player genuine and meaningful choices in how to play the game, how to behave in the world and in the story, how to fight battles and solve problems. Of course, all of this is easier said than done. I know that these systems are expensive and complicated and time-consuming to develop. But, unfortunately, that isn’t really an excuse for making a bad game, so much as it is an explanation for making a bad game. It is possible, after all, to make an action RPG with full, complex, engaging RPG mechanics, alongside interesting, nuanced action-based combat. It’s been done at least twice before, in fact, by a scrappy little company known as Square Enix, in the form of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Strangers of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins.15 So, as with Jeffrey Dahmer, although I am sympathetic to the struggles that the Final Fantasy XVI development team may have faced, I do not consider those struggles to be adequate justification for their choices and actions.
And, finally, to return to one of our inciting questions: Is Final Fantasy XVI a true RPG? No—but it probably should be.
Some final errant thoughts:
The story of Final Fantasy XVI is surprisingly.. well, bad. I say “surprisingly” because it certainly seems like the plot, world, and characters of Final Fantasy XVI were very important to the development team. Moreover, I found the opening of the game’s plot to be quite promising and intriguing. As things progress, however, each of these aspects effectively falls apart. The plot, which was much-toutedly meant to resemble that of Game of Thrones, quickly disposed of any pretense of being a political fantasy epic in favour of a more traditional JRPG hero narrative. The world, which has been elaborately and meticulously written (in theory) is presented as staid, uninteresting, static, and anodyne. Even after Great Changes have taken place in the world, each town is just as uninteresting and dead as the last, filled with reminders that You Are Playing A Videogame and Not An Especially Well-Written or Lively One. Finally, the characters of Final Fantasy XVI begin as thin, shallow tropes and they continue on that way for the duration of the game. They do not reveal hidden depth or dynamism as things progress; their relationships remain simple, obvious, and undeveloped. They seem largely disinterested in the world and, in fact, seem like they are largely separate from it. I wanted very badly to enjoy each (or at least some) of these aspects of the game’s narrative but I found them to be rewarding only occasionally and briefly.
Relatedly, one of the most surprising failures of this game is its character design. I generally found the characters to be deeply boring, both in their visual design and in their personalities. I did not hate Clive’s visual design, though I found his understated personality to be uninteresting and ill-suited for the story as presented. Furthermore, I resent having to play a cipher-like character like Clive while having no input on Clive’s behaviour or appearance. The most interesting character in the game is Cid, who is present for vanishingly-little of the game’s story. What’s most surprising about Cid, however, is that they used a generic placeholder-NPC character model for him and then forgot to ever update it with a real one. His character model appears to be about 20 years too young and to have no connection to Cid’s personality or rich gravelly voice. It genuinely seems like a mistake (even though I am sure that it was not). Character personalities and visual designs tend to be one of the strongest aspects of Final Fantasy games—even in the weak ones16—and so it is bizarre to me that the game struggles so much in this respect.
The game keeps giving you broaches and seals for you to “wear.” Over and over again, the game adorns you with a broach or a seal as a of narrative solution (e.g., allowing you to enter certain areas or speak with certain people). Characters also comment on these repeatedly, and yet, they are never actually presented on Clive’s character model. Why? Why insist on this bizarre plot contrivance if you were not going to actually model these broaches? You could have used any other simple, silly plot contrivance that didn’t require a change to your character models. Why write yourself into a corner in this way? Everytime a character made a comment on a broach that I was “wearing”, I threw up a little bit inside my mouth. And now the lining of my throat is all sensitive and burny.
I spoke only briefly about the empty mechanics and systems of Final Fantasy XVI. Given my tendency towards locquaciousness, I thought that I would spare the reader some of the unnecessary explication of the flaws of these various systems, given that they can largely be boiled down to “The system is empty and linear, and removing it from the game would have no significant effect on player experience.” That said, one particular set of systems is especially deserving of my ire and thus some wordcount: the crafting and material/looting systems. These systems are some of the most unfufilling, half-baked, and ill-considered in the game. If these systems had not been so egregiously poor, I might not have even thought to write this essay. It’s not that they are necessarily that impactful on the experience of the game, so much as that we are regularly asked to interact with them despite them having effectively nothing to offer to the player. In this way, their vacuousness invites one to examine the other systems in the game as well, highlighting just how empty they also are. For those curious as to just how soul-suckingly empty these systems are, I invite you to read on for but a glimpse into how paper-thin a system in a AAA ¥7280 “RPG” can be.
As you explore the interchangeable hallway-levels of the world of Final Fantasy XVI, you are occasionally invited to meander into some off-route optional side area. Often, these efforts are rewarded with a chest. Very occasionally, such a chest will contain a piece of gear or equippable trinket—great! Much more often, however, these side-paths will contain only some stack of a useless crafting material that hasn’t been relevant since the beginning of the game (if it was even relevant then). One of the final chapters offered me a chest that contained 20 Bloody Hides. This stack of 20 Bloody Hides went well with my extant collection, putting me up to a total of 1136 Bloody Hides. I have no idea what Bloody Hides do. I crafted every piece of gear in that game save one (which did not require Bloody Hides). If I did require Bloody Hides at some point—and I’m sure that I did—I certainly did not need 1136 of them. Furthermore, I certainly did not need them at the end of the game. They did go nicely with my 1542 Sharp Fangs, however.
In this way, the game fails utterly to incentivize exploration. If anything, it punishes the instinct by reminding players that exploration will almost never be rewarded and, in fact, that there aren’t really any rewards possible in a game like this.
These implications are further ratified by the crafting system, which is effectively just a basic leveling system, but technically optional. Nearly every upgrade will be obtainable as a matter of course as you play the game. Each piece of craftable gear is better than the previous one and the player is never given the opportunity to make meaingful choices, such as compromising armour for speed, or choosing a buff that enables this or that playstyle. No, the upgraded weapons and gear one obtains barely change Clive’s appearance and have literally no effect on gameplay, other than providing minor stat buffs. They are unlocked in a way that is effectively automatic with progress in the game and so could be completely removed from the game without really negatively impacting player experience. Indeed, some players would find the removal of such tedium to be an improvement.
Systems like these could have been better. Undoubtedly, these additions would have had costs in terms of time, money, and developer sweat. But they are changes that are achievable, easily-imagined, and have clearly been implemented in other games of a similar nature (and often of a much smaller scope). And so, it is the close examination of these systems (and other, similarly-lifeless systems) that gives the player the feeling that they have been cheated out of some better, deeper, richer experience. It is pissing around with empty time-wasting tedium like picking up Beast Hides that invites one to recall better and more interesting gameplaying experiences, ones that we’ve had both with Final Fantasy games and with “True RPGs.” It is for reasons like this that it matters whether Final Fantasy XVI is a true RPG.This is the second post in a row where I use horsemeat as an analogy. I need to expand my repertoire of metaphors.
Footnotes
I’m looking at you, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.↩︎
Ah, the obligatory Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus mention. Remake it so that I can play it in 4k60, you cowards.↩︎
Approximately 8% of the people reading this would physically vomit if they heard my opinion about Final Fantasy IX.↩︎
That wasn’t the line.↩︎
With all due apologies to the haters, easily my 2023 game of the year.↩︎
Once again I must apologize to my haters, as this was about $35 cheaper than buying it locally in my home country and provided me with superior cover art.↩︎
I am quite confident that many intelligent people have said many insightful things about Final Fantasy XVI and, indeed, about the topic of this essay. I just simply did not enounter those discussions and, in the interest of keeping My Fires of Critical Investigation Burning Pure, have not sought them out.↩︎
That was the line. You can check out now if you were only here for the horsebones.↩︎
At least in kind, if not in degree. To be honest, this analogy is much more generous than Final Fantasy XVI deserves, but I thought that I should pay it its dues before I pick all of its nits. In truth, the game whose combat experience it most resembles is Astral Chain, though that comparison is probably both less useful and less generous.↩︎
I draw this distinction because, although I did enjoy the large setpiece boss battles, I enjoyed them more for their spectacle than for their combat.↩︎
For a fuller—some might say, too full—discussion of this particular system, please see the “Final Errant Thoughts” section.↩︎
At one point while playing the game, I looked up some tips on best to use Torgal in battle. The most commonly offered advice was basically just to ignore him. Sounds good!↩︎
I am not exaggerating when I say that I complained aloud at the beginning of nearly every one of these. Even the game seemed to be aware that these were annoying, as either the scholar or Clive would always make some comment about how this was either an annoying exercise or just a bad time for a lecture.↩︎
And there is a reason that so many people complained that Astral Chain did do that.↩︎
These games have their own problems, of course, but they are, if nothing else, a successful synthesis of traditional RPG mechanics/storytelling and action-based combat.↩︎
See Footnote 3.↩︎