SPOILERS So, Final Fantasy XVI... (Spoilers & tl;dr on game design)

[X-SOLDIER]

I do hope that you'll forgive the rather poorly formatted draft state that this is currently in, as I do expect to clean it up a bit with at least a few links to moments and other things that I cover. This is full spoilers as there are some important things to cover that involve the end of the game and it's not really possible to avoid addressing them.


This is something that's been on my mind that I needed to just put out there – and I'm not generally the type where I like to absolutely eviscerate something, but especially when there's still a big window where people are genuinely enjoying it. There's probably a lot of stuff here that you may not have noticed or that didn't stand out to you, but after reading this may become the things where as soon as you know about it you can't un-see it, and it ends up being intrusive to how you view the game.

As such, if you really do enjoy FFXVI and find it to be a deeply enjoyable and immersive experience, please just know that I'm EXTREMELY glad for you, and I genuinely want you to have that. It's something that I really wish I was able to... but that I just can't. Make sure that you have the entirety of the honeymoon period that you want with the game before feeling the need to check this out at all.

This thread isn't going anywhere, and hopefully by the time most anyone is up for checking it out it'll just get refined into something better over time that maybe I end up posting as an article or something, but for now I really don't want to have that type of prominence for this conversation even if this were refined enough to be more than a very early rough draft of most of my thoughts. So with all that preamble rambling, out of the way here's what I poured out of my brain over the last couple of days.




An Introduction of the Evolution of Action-based Combat & Rewarding Players via Critical Paths to Victory:


ARPGs primarily rely on two types of mechanics in order to exploit a critical path to overcoming combat, and understanding what those are and how they’re utilised will convey a lot of information about the underlying system of the game and how it’s attempting to teach and reward the player.

First is defense-breaking, where the enemy will have a meter of some kind (which may or may not be visible), and when that threshold is passed, the enemy is stopped in order to allow for a massive reward in dealing increased damage. Initially this was a key component of classic ARPGs like The Legend of Zelda where the boss is essentially a puzzle that has a required solution to be able to overcome it. Over time, that became just a weakness to beat the boss more quickly, but it wasn’t a hard barrier where a boss would be otherwise invincible. This kept a balance of needing to figure out a boss’s weakness, just like classic turn-based RPGs of the time used typically in the form of elemental vulnerabilities that would weaken a boss for a turn, or break otherwise near-impenetrable defences. In more modern ARPGs, all enemy types in Elden Ring have Poise which leads to guard-breaking and opening up the ability to execute a critical attack or one with a larger execution time that cannot be defended against or evaded. A variant of this would be FFXV or FFVIIR’s limb-breaking where not only does it open up a vulnerability window, but it also changes the combat behaviour of the opponent, typically by limiting how they’re able to attack you. This is a mechanic that, while there is an a balance between the Direct Damage & Stagger Damage of attacks, this can be circumvented by the brute-force approach, which is why it’s common in games that allow for stat-based investment for that to be a viable critical path alternative to victory, as you can simply over-level and obliterate the enemy through overwhelming damage or essentially prevent them from ever being able to attack at all. This is why those are the tactics that the overly hardcore Souls community dislike, because they de-emphasize the inherent way in which the underlying combat system can also be designed to allow the other type of system to thrive, which is around timing & execution or solving the puzzle “as intended by the developers” which is a bit of an incorrect summary. The alternatives are a part of these combat systems that developers include to allow there to be multiple creative approaches to that puzzle solving that still exist within the mechanics in the game as designed, but that’s where there’s a bit of a rift between what gets lumped in to the “competitive” and “casual” groups of gamers.

Back in the Castlevania games the design philosophy for bosses was that any boss should be able to be defeated with the weakest weapon, no upgrades that weren’t hard required to reach that particular area, and without taking ANY damage. While traditional RPGs’ focused on stats and trading damage back-and-forth in turn-based combat, ARPGs became more focused on realtime execution where taking damage was a sign that there was still a possibility for mastery that didn’t require grinding levels, but in expending time to learn the boss. This is the same design philosophy that exists at the heart of all of the Souls series and in the Souls-like games, and where the previous system is de-emphasized as the level system’s caps limit survivability and the exponential growth curve for levelling up encourage investment in not worrying about dying, but in embracing defeat as a part of the grind in learning how to succeed. In order to be able to reward that type of mastery, there needed to be an emphasis on dodge mechanics, which dominated early ARPGs as dodging and shielding were both paths to taking less damage where the mobile dodging could deliver multiple attacks quickly, whereas the armoured approach would deal single large blows. All paths were viable strategies, but tanking through combat was more similar to the over-levelling advantages. What means is that the more agency the player has to be able to control the fight, the harder it is to design an experience where the developer can expect all players to have to solve the same puzzle with the same set of tools. Fights that are supposed to present a particular challenge or provoke an emotional response might not land that way if a player just stumbles into the solution or levels past the challenge, so breaking up fights and changing the challenge is a means to ensure that those things stay impactful.

So, this is where the multi-stage boss fights come into play, as they are prolonged, the answers to the solutions change-up the combat mechanics keeps things fresh, and they aren’t as easily steamrolled. There are meaningful delineations to represent progress in the course of what are often fairly lengthy fights. On top of this, post-fight cinematic were a huge reward in Squaresoft’s RPGs for overcoming big challenges as much as items to boost your stats and make combat easier were. Then, even mid-fight cinematics provide a break in the action for the player to catch their breath and prepare for the challenge to ramp up that became more and more common. This carried into original God of War games that pushed this with the QTE events allowing the cinematic moments and gameplay to intersect especially as the gap between in-game graphics and pre-rendered cinematics diminished. This means that ALL players were experiencing the same sense of cinematic presentation that the storytellers wanted. Eventually heavily stylized games like Asura’s Wrath essentially crafted an entire experience of what’s essentially an interactive anime really utilizing QTEs are the core focus of delivering that reward to players by emphasizing on rhythm game-like timing to have the player’s actions match the flow of the cinematic scenes, and variations where those prompts were missed that changed the living-cinematic experience players had, which injected gameplay elements into the previously scripted presentations of over-the-top spectacular presentation. This continued bringing in more and more synergy between the gameplay styles of RPGs and ARPGs, and games like the Batman Arkham series and Shadow of Mordor took all of that countering and active combat in an ARPG layered with the pacing and exploration of a traditional RPG, and still had big boss set pieces that relied more and more on reaction as a necessary skillset, with some degree of puzzle-based staggering to the combat and QTEs. This is where Fighting Games’ crossover with the ARPG player base came into focus with the timing-centric answer to providing a greater reward to players focused on the skill-based timing elements. Parrying a block could prevent SOME damage, but perfect parrying would prevent all chip damage, a mechanic made most famous in Evo 2004 with Daigo vs Justin catapulting that mechanic into the forefront of what represented mastery of a skillset under pressure like a real-life boss fight. That sense of thrill from extreme mastery of execution became THE experience to try to encapsulate in rewarding player reaction, which you can see in how big the reward is emphasized in modern fighting games.

It’s the refinement of that parry mechanic that brought about games like Bloodborne where blocking and armor weren’t an option, but the answer was more aggression to preemptively counter your opponent’s attack at exactly the right moment, and to recover damage through aggression. This is why there was a bigger risk-reward payoff for being able to read your opponent, and that came not only in the form of being able to deal significant damage, but it was done in a moment where the opponent is interrupted and immobilized. This is where the player starts to be able to wrest back control of the pacing of the fight to earn themselves a moment of reprieve and success all at the same time. This gives it the same psychological reward as the stagger system without the ability to as easily exploit it through just a sheer commitment of grinding a commitment of time, but where a skill ceiling exists like the one that separates pro players of a Fighting Game from someone who just plays a fighting game for fun, which is why the Souls games also bring in the competitive PvP aspects to the game as well as focusing on minimal stat runs and other challenges where that skillset is prioritized and the other is removed. Sekiro hybridized this with the Posture system, which uses a different approach to Staggering where your block timing was like a perfect parry that was a meter you AND your opponent had, and where killing them outright was a greater challenge if you didn’t learn to take advantage of pressure. The transition between phases of the fight were still the brief pauses for a “critical hit” that came about thought prioritising that over attempting to just break through the opponent’s HP. There is a specific emphasis on mastery of the trade in the fight between opponents – but what this system ultimately reflects is a specialisation in that gameplay system based on reading telegraphed timing, where depending on how rewarding the perfect parrying is that skillset is transferrable between games in the same way that being able to hit headshots in an FPS is a similar reflection of a timing-based precision skill that is transferrable within that game genre. It's why extremely good players who have mastered this mechanic like ONGBAL who makes no HUD no damage showcases of Sekiro and other Souls games can have no-hit showcases of major bosses in other games that utilize this mechanic within days of release, which he did for Lies of P's demo even showcasing the Perfect Guard, taking on boss challenges in Jedi Survivor, and also for FFXVI's most challenging hunts.

Having a mix of both systems that allows players to find an approach that suits them best is why an ARPG like Elden Ring is so successful, because it gives players the option to choose however they want to win by using either of those systems without emphasizing one over the other. This is only really possible if there is some degree of concession on how comfortable the director is with varied player experience. Not only does Elden Ring also includes all of the other classic RPG mechanics like status effects, massive magic systems, and summonable assist characters, on top of and damage type resistances and weaknesses that provide a massive range of variety in how players can customize their own experience with the game, even the quest marking system and other elements are extremely minimalistic to the point that what exactly a player will experience on their road to the end credits is DEEPLY flexible. This is why there are an outspoken minority of hardcore players who criticize players who overlevel, use summons or take other paths that they’ve long been reinforced to see as exploitive and unintended to the creator’s intended vision – and why I previously brought up that as a false narrative but one that FEELS true to a lot of players. This is especially important when looking at more narratively-focused games where things like the canon version of events matters and reinforces similar inherent biases not just in players, but oftentimes in the directors and designers who want to deliver a very specific vision of an experience to players, which is what contributes to a lot of hand-holding UI of telling players what to do, where to go, and overly telegraphing moments with the intent that it’s like playing a movie, but sometimes in a way where it ends up in railroading or hand-holding in a way that’s not engaging to allowing the player to still have a sense of problem solving.

In contrast to this overly flexible approach, other ARPG games that build more upon the Fighting Game mechanics that allow player expression to be a problem-solving type approach in moment-to-moment choices of a known system like DMCV focus on other techniques like knock-ups, hard knockdowns, juggling, and other mechanics that focus on controlling your opponent in a way that the system is designed to facilitate. This fighting style is something that can’t totally transfer when you’re facing against Boss enemies, and were something Fighting Games have historically and do struggle with as a result, and in ARPGs, the bigger opponents are a natural endurance fight more than one where the skills to control the battle opponent apply. This is why, before the intersection of the countering system came about, they typically implemented the other RPG classic mechanic from fighting games of a meter that builds up into a Limit Break, where the player gets a window of increased durability and damage output so that they can ignore the opponent’s control over the cadence of the fight and get that same reprieve while feeling the same sense of reward from an amplified effectiveness in battle. At its core, games like Asura’s Wrath are a complete distillation of that one experience where the basics of combat exist with the Burst mechanic as that at a small scale, but nothing but the TRUE Limit Break of the Rage meter truly matters AT ALL, vs the modern God of War games where the Rage is fused into a Limit Break-like mechanics that’s typically used to swing the tide of battle when health is low, and give a cathartic underdog sense of accomplishment and regaining a control of the tempo of the fight against your opponent by giving you something that is completely on the player’s terms for a brief window of reprieve. DMCV has numerous tools that are differentiated between Nero, V, & Dante given the difference in their fighting styles, but it's why Dante & Vergil having Devil Trigger feel significantly more powerful than Nero and why it isn't until the final confrontation that Nero's Devil Trigger awakens, because the power fantasy is growth where the comparison between the characters works best because they're different, like the variety between the roster of a Fighting Game.

The design language of all those mediums came to share a unified language for communicating those emotional themes and the ways in which we experience those psychological rewards from them as an experience rather than just numerically distilled XP. That’s how the turn-based RPG & ARPG systems came to walk hand-in-hand, and why Final Fantasy has been working at taking a lot of different steps to find a balance of how to deliver an experience that works for both types of players. This is where the changes in FFXV, FFVIIR, & FFXVI have come about as the player base that are into these stories and experiences are largely all united by things that they love as the core of the systems are all about nuanced decision-making on the fly. While traditional RPGs provided more options and slowed down the time to work through them, ever since FFVII’s ATB, the integration of more active ARPG style systems and new mechanics have brought them closer and closer together. Finding a balance that works while making the experience a new one is difficult, and it’s hard to know what works until you try it out.



FFXVI and why this combat system fails the RPG players who are less suited to real-time combat – but who may still have loved FFXV & FFVIIR



From early on in the game, while the skill points seemingly provide a wide range of options for customization, they’re all low cost as this is mostly just a progress barrier to act as a pseudo tutorial for the player to spend time with the mechanics and learn them piece by piece. This is why it allows you to refund them as much as you like, but that level of extreme flexibility also shows that there is ZERO weight in committing to a specific approach. This immediately underscores a stark difference in FFXVI, which is that there is a MASSIVELY diminished ability to over-level your way through adversity, because invested points aren’t a focus that has to be thought about deeply. On top of that, despite there being a lot of different things to unlock for Eikons, you only ever have access to two attacks and one ability for each Eikon that can be active at a time, and only ever get up to 3 Eikons total (which will be a slow process). This puts a significant cap on the elemental attacks that you have access to in the game, so immediately it’s clear that there’s no system to allow you to switch between all 8 elements on the fly in order to exploit elemental weakness as a critical path to success against enemies.


Instead, Clive’s Eikons are closer to different functional attacks in a fighting game, where the Eikon’s elemental nature is just a flavour of design rather than a functional component of the combat system itself. To underscore that point even more, the game ensures that you have access to certain combat functions all the time as you’re learning by providing Torgal to do exactly those things while you trade points to learn which Eikon abilities do what, and gradually make a build that can effectively rotate through the necessary chores within their cooldowns whether or not Torgal is present. Additionally, the game has extremely limited availability of items, and will auto-heal if you pick up more than you can carry, without even allowing you the option to choose whether or not to attempt to collect it. This heavily underscores that preemptive planning, stockpiling, elemental weaknesses, status effects, level grinding, and ALL other alternative strategies do not matter in any way whatsoever to how the game has dictated that it is going to be played.


As an even more definitive emphasis on this, all of the Accessories provided to ease the difficulty of combat are all exclusively about mitigating the punishment of failing to react to the timing of enemy attacks, and thus allows less skilled players to effectively take more damage without being punished. This means that the ONLY option that players have is to solely focus on one single critical path to overcoming combat, which is disproportionally biased to players of a very different background to approaching gameplay. The feeling of success in FFXVI is tied directly to the investment in that system, and where the key mechanic for a critical path to success that is being left open… is a Stagger bar – which is typically something where traditional RPGs and ARPGs will allow players to choose over-levelling as a compensation, but the story progression and significantly de-emphasized levelling system of FFXV really doesn’t do that at all. Even after multiple hours when the Limit Break system gets unlocked, it’s just a glorified regeneration and durability window taken from the modern God of War games, and it doesn’t even take hold of the tempo of the fight for the player the way those systems are typically allowed to. So, for players whose massive range of interests when starting a Final Fantasy game are suddenly diminished, what are they left with?


Especially early on, FFXVI offers nothing that ultimately makes the play style feel unique. This is largely in part because of how the Staggering mechanic doesn’t provide opportunity for a wide range of approaches to make use of it, but rather that it becomes a repetitive routine of where the non-staggered period feels like a way to artificially pad out the durability of enemies where the massive superhuman hits of your Eikon powers feel like they don’t really pack a punch. This gets even more pronounced over time as they just become the bread-and-butter of core gameplay, and you hit the point where each Eikon’s powers aren’t an addition to your arsenal. Only 6 attacks and 3 abilities will ever matter, and you will run through those on cooldown exactly like the chores grinding in an MMORPG just waiting for a window where they actually make effective headway against an overly spongy opponent while avoiding field-effect AoE attacks. That’s no surprise given that FFXVI is designed as a one-class single-player MMORPG with the combat of DMC crammed into it, relying on God of War QTEs during its big cinematic moments.


Rather than feeling like each big boss encounter is a unique puzzle to figure out how to counter and exploit, that eventually just becomes a repetitive exercise in Dodge, Stagger, Damage against everything in the game and you’re cycling through your same 6 abilities over and over and over again. The only variety is in the Dodge waiting period where the combat gives the impression that you’re just in a holding pattern of evading field effects & dropping abilities on cooldown – which is the MMORPG Raid boss approach. It’s taking two systems that will find ways of rewarding a grinding repetition by giving it an appealing structure. If you’re not enthralled by that approach to combat with generic enemies like laying a combo chain in the training mode of a fighting game, or overly enthralled with the power fantasy of the visuals of the Eikon powers, there’s very little for you to engage with and even less if you need Accessories or are using Story Mode. While there ARE ways for this gameplay to carve itself into the niche of the pro-Soul-like players to do coordinated no-hit runs against some of the game’s tougher enemies – this is only because, like hitting headshots, that’s a transferrable skill to the core game design – it has NOTHING to do with this game’s specific implementation of combat being a deep or rewarding experience to anyone not already wanting exactly that experience.


Now, if you wanted to boil down everything about that experience to its bare bones minimum where you’re just a one-note character throwing out attacks while waiting for a meter to build up and then do something cinematically meaningful… you’re actually hitting the much maligned minimalistic gameplay of Asura’s Wrath square on the head (which FFXVI takes from fairly liberally, and is at the core of many thoughts I have on the game). FFXVI is taking that and investing more focus into the “waiting period” of that gameplay loop that was the lack of gameplay Asura’s Wrath was criticised for – but it does so at the expense that you have to go back into that loop multiple times as a result, because the Stagger Bar breaking ISN’T the breakpoint in that push towards a reward in the cinematically scripted encounter. In Asura’s Wrath, once you fill up hit that Rage meter – combat’s over and the adrenaline-pumping cinematic conflict sequence is under way, but when you break the stagger bar in FFXVI, you’re forced into a rush of trying to boost multipliers and piling meaningless UI all over the screen to be rewarded a big damage number total, and then to continue with the grind of that same gameplay loop again 3-4 more times, while possibly giving the boss some new flashy moves (but only if there was a little cutscene recently). For me, this is why FFXVI focuses an inordinate amount of effort into the least interesting part of the gameplay, specifically because it’s you repetitively going through a template of cooldown chores for abilities that don’t seem meaningful and where even once you start to have enough Eikons to need to choose between them, the gameplay differences that they make don’t feel significant – and you literally have NO other option to bypass that slog no matter which mode of the game you’re playing or what accessories you have equipped. And it’s that stagnation that only grows even more as the game starts to show you what it provides… and what it doesn’t.





A stagger-ing lack of variety that feels frustrating in the face of what it removes, and how it fumbles its presentation constantly.





There is nothing in FFXVI that will make Clive’s gameplay feel as different as even just swapping between Cloud & Tifa in FFVIIR. So, unless you’re REALLY into that style of DMC-like ARPG combat, and overcoming the dodge-timing challenges that it presents as a part of the experience, it’s going to quickly start to feel repetitive. One of the key things to look at is when and where the cadence of this type of ARPG combat allows for taking a breath. Souls games don’t pause for action moments, because the skill ceiling is mastering that timing unassisted in order to open a window of slowed-down time in which you can exploit enemy weakness, and Elden Ring is a good example as timing for parrying, guard-countering enemy attacks, or even pressing attacks to break poise and stagger them will ALL yielding a brief window to trigger a critical blow. Sekiro’s combat slows down on Posture breaking only to allow for the execution of critical hits that either change the boss’s phase and combat behaviour, or to end the encounter with a pre-determined cinematic flourish. Asura’s Wrath is the opposite of those as the grinding, repetitive combat IS your moment that’s closer to rest, and the ACTUAL breaks are the scripted cliffhangers delivered like intentionally planned commercial breaks of a serialized anime episode. You’re emotionally preparing for a flood when you breach the combined Limit Break & Stagger that trigger the change into an unstoppable frenzy of precision timing in tune with the cinematic playing out before you. All of those games focus on how breaking the enemy provides a change in the focus for the player that keeps them in the moment. Whether to calm the nerves or to make your heart race, it’s about synchronizing the cognitive reward to the thing that’s playing out on screen.


FFXVI’s stagger mechanics don’t do that, but rather they are a moment where you’re rushing in and being even MORE frantic in order to try and eke out as much meaningful damage as possible. None of FFXVI’s moments of feeling yourself having control are EARNED, they’re just pre-assigned but in a way that still forces you to react to them, rather than feel any sense of satisfaction from it. The incredible elements of the story and the gorgeous visuals mask that, but even when it changes into the cinematic moments, those fundamental misunderstandings of how to implement a gameplay system to match this are glaringly obvious, especially in looking at where the control is in the storytelling component of the gameplay.


One of the key differences can be seen in comparing how Asura’s Wrath vs. FFXVI implement their use of cinematic QTEs. FFXVI will pause the moment in time and call out the type of action with the on-screen colour, and then you as the player have a diminishing progress bar for you to trigger the correct button in time – upon which the speed of the action snaps back into motion again. This is the EXACT same ability that one of the Combat Assistance Items can give you for Evading enemy attacks by providing a dodge window. Its design is solely reactive – this is not a moment of you succeeding in exploiting a critical path of the combat system, so it doesn’t carry the same reward that those breaks in pace SHOULD do, like the way that Staggering or breaking the limb of an enemy do in FFXV or FFVIIR. At its core, the reason that this EXACT mechanic is included on player assisting items is because It is slowing down the cadence of combat to accommodate the player’s ability to react in time… which is what traditional RPG combat does where the SYSTEM dictates the pace of the encounter. This is why normal ways to help assist players of traditional RPGs has something like FFXV’s Wait Mode or FFVIIR’s menu where time gets slowed to allow you to implement specific actions in a tactical way. The time dilation is functioning as a means to more effectively direct your actions into a critical path solution towards victory… but that’s not what ARPGs do. In DMC, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and other ARPG games, it is the ENEMY that dictates the pace of the encounter, and the combat system allows the player’s SKILL to open up opportunities to control that pacing. The better you get, the easier the combat becomes, because it’s a reward for learned behaviour and is why games like DMCV have background music that gets better as you maintain better combos and lose yourself into the flow of the experience in sync with the character you’re controlling. All of these systems operate in a way that FFXVI’s combat system doesn’t – but FFXVI still disproportionately rewards players who already have that skill set from playing games that correctly teach those timing skills, and who can apply them to enjoy this game right out of the gate, while leaving other players with nothing to cognitively be engaged with.


This isn’t a misunderstanding that’s just in the system of the combat mechanics, but it’s also omnipresent in the way that FFXVI’s entire UI is set up curing both combat and cinematic moments, where it doesn’t seem to have ANY real understanding of what information is meaningful, likely because it’s designed by individuals who are desensitized to those things and look past them in other types of games that it’s building off of. This misses that those are something that don’t just come with the territory, but reflect a deeply different mechanism for cognitive reward and incentivizing mechanics underneath the hood that are a total mismatch with how the mechanics of their game is built. Rather than critically examining them from a design perspective, it simply emphasises this fundamental lack of a deeper understanding of why they’re using the tools that they are in the way that they’re applying them, which is why they create a tonally frustrating and discordant end product that undercuts its most brilliant moments almost without fail throughout the entire game.


The moments of cinematic in-game cutscenes that come about during combat are awash in a wave of neon damage numbers, attack/dodge info, and other MMO-style UI cluttering up the cinematic visual presentation. This is particularly egregious when a boss gets staggered, because the flurry of attacks is to build up a multiplier in order to pull off a larger end result. When a stagger begins, each of your attacks have a damage output that looks like DAMAGE(Multiplier) for example 1443(x1.2), and those cascade all over the place cluttering up the visuals of what’s happening, and when that frantic race against the regenerating Stagger Bar ends, if the enemy is still alive you’re treated with a massive text box with your big damage total displayed over the top. FFVIIR has a stagger bar where the multiplier is placed under the bar itself in a fixed position, so if you’re using a character like Tifa you can easily keep track of how high the multiplier is by watching a single location, and easily discern Normal & Critical Damage because that information matters. In FFXVI however, that exact same visual information is a scattered mess and is utterly meaningless as the player has no time to visually process it, it's not placed in a centralized location for visual focus, and there is a major boss health bar to convey the damage you're dealing that's exponentially more prominent. If that’s what you’re focusing on it’s also competing for space with the visual presentation of you unleashing a concentrated barrage on the opponent, because a fighting game system is all about reading what is safe and unsafe by being able to CLEARLY SEE the movements of your opponent, which is why the UI of DMCV is completely different and shows nothing to interrupt view of the enemies, and has explicit locations to easily get critical information at a glance or without moving visual focus away from the opponent with standard health bars being a part of the target focus icon. Even if you want to keep the number in FFXVI during stagger scenes, ALL of those things can be consolidated into a single number that goes up with the multiplier next to it that stays out of the way, and then which gets that big text box around it as soon as the assault is over for added visual awareness of the change in Stagger state ending. Rather than having all of your systems competing with one another and undercutting the usefulness of all of them, this would be how the UI should be designed if the purpose of those moments were understood – and no one will experience this more than players who are there for the story and who want the combat system to just get out of the way, but especially because FFVIIR does this already. This issue even extends into the in-game cinematic moments and even worse into the Eikon Battles a lot of the time.


In FFVIIR, whenever there’s a boss that shifts into a new phase or a moment of a cinematic clash, all of the overlaying UI elements vanish for a cinematic camera perspective when the two trade blows, which pauses the ACTUAL exchange of damage. This is because the gameplay elements are just a vector through which the player interacts, and the STORY doesn’t have those UI elements in it. When the battle transition with the Failed Experiment shifts, the Unknown Entities being killed don't show damage, and even a decisive blow like when Cloud returns to help them kill the Failed Experiment, the combat unobtrusively ends to finish it off without exposing the damage of the killing blow. Whereas in FFXVI, very often those damage numbers are being surfaced like omni-present details that are critically important, and only absent in fully rendered cinematic moments that occur entirely outside of the combat system. The most obnoxious part is that those CAN be intentionally omitted to focus on the cinematic presentation, because in the Dominance Trailer, Garuda slicing off Ifrit's arm is an attack dealing 35,090 damage – however thankfully in the final game, Garuda slicing off Ifrit's arm is one of the few moments that's closed off an encapsulated into a pure cinematic before going back to showing the UI, however Clive's cinematic finishing blows to the first stage of the Garuda fight still pop in those damage numbers over the top of that presentation needlessly. The fact that this WAS altered makes it infinitely more frustrating in all the points where that's not done – because it is inherently about understanding where the importance of shifting between the meaningful surfacing of damage exists and when the cinematic presentation of damage and surfacing that information to the player in other ways is more effective and better serves the story it's telling. When it switches into the Eikon battles, the damage numbers get massively amplified – but they’re pointless in this UI because there are two MASSIVE health bars at the top of the screen that are giving you all of the information that you need to know about the status of the two relevant opponents and how much damage they are taking. Like in Asura’s Wrath, if you have a massive bar at the top of the screen that represents the totality of the information necessary to convey to the user what’s happening, all of the other details are just extraneous interruption that are polluting to the cinematic presentation AND actively impede how you interact with opponents in a Fighting Mechanics-driven ARPG. This is why Elden Ring opts to place its boss HP bars at the bottom of the screen to make them closer to the other necessary UI that changes most often at the bottom left, and have the Player's vital stats all at the top right, as it reduces how long visual focus needs to be away from carefully watching the target.

The ONLY things aside from those health bars in FFXVI's Eikon Battles should be the minimal control UI at the bottom, and the clash-specific QTE prompts that help to connect the player into the cinematic action, which should be building up a rhythm and pacing where the main character's emotional state matches as closely as possible to the reactions and cognitive experience that the player is going through. This is why it's utterly terrible that the defining crescendos of FFXVI are taking the all-important action combat reward of allowing the player a moment to catch their breath, and utterly fumbling the delivery. When Ifrit does a cool cinematic attack for the first time, the game will display “YOU’VE LEARNED SPITFLARE!” In the middle of the emotional payoff of that cinematic, only to pause the screen the very next second to present a dialogue box explaining what the ability is and how it works. The cinematic presentation is being ruined by redundant text AND it’s interrupting key moments in multiple different ways where the UI is competing with itself over which version can be the most egregiously implemented… but they’re not even the worst examples of this issue.


EVERY. SINGLE. MOMENT of conflict in FFXVI gets a sudden pause-insert victory screen suddenly slammed into place with all of the subtlety of a Netflix “Are you still watching?” suddenly intercutting itself into the middle of a movie theater premiere during the middle of an action sequence. That’s not where a pause belongs, and this is not where the catharsis reward of providing that to a player happens. Asura's Wrath intercuts cliffhangers, because they are VERY meticulously timed to match the timing cadence of a TV anime's commercial break and the cliffhanger ending of an episode – and DMCV does the exact same thing with it's abrupt teasing chapter ends straight into a cliffhanger combat summary. ONLY when those moments are a full stop do they surface the culmination of the points that you earned through the technical execution of everything that you did in combat against the enemy, complete with a D-S ranking of performance. Standard Fighting Games throw in combo data from the side of the screen to build up points for surfacing the effectiveness of a combo string which you can see with the Daigo Parry, and how additional frame data can be shown in training modes when learning explicit numerical mechanics are important than having just the normal visuals. FFXVI copies that superficially important data, which is why the right hand side of the screen is buried in even more vapidly useless information about how many Perfect Dodges you’d performed – which never get shown in a victory screen, nor do they provide any point-based benefit to your level, so they are UTTERLY IRRELEVANT TO SURFACE TO THE PLAYER IN NORMAL GAMEPLAY. Worse still, that's the EXACT screen location that FFVIIR uses effectively to unobtrusively display all of that information when a fight concludes without interrupting the cinematic pacing.

When it comes to FFXVI's cinematic presentation, unlike people watching competitive fighting games by standing around an arcade looking to hone their skills, that data doesn’t help players who are watching understand what’s happening, nor does it have any reason to be prioritized over the cinematic's connection to matching the emotional state of the player. The presentation of those moments is explicitly cinematic because THAT is what is carrying the weight of the information conveyance for a visual presentation, and it’s abundantly clear that the groups were responsible for marrying the two systems together have absolutely ZERO understanding of what the necessity of the information being conveyed is nor what those systems are actually doing. Time and again in FFXVI, these just happen directly in tandem to when the back-end of the boss fight system transfers that to the player – which doesn’t matter. When the player receives it is irrelevant, because it cannot meaningfully change the entirety of what follows, and worse still, it ruins what the cinematic is doing. Well-designed UI focused around thematic presentation intentionally has ways to lie to players ALL THE TIME, because what it's responsible for is curating the experience that matches what is intended – which is exactly why a lot of games use HP Bars and not damage numbers because it expands how well the designers and developers have flexibility to reliably evoke those moments of tension. A fatal hit can be barely survivable when the UI has far more HP numerically contained in the last sliver of health, and the player just assumes it's distributed evenly. The overlap of those systems isn't only ineffective to the experience, but it's actively working against itself in terms of how it can give the player a feeling of something with tiny shifts in data to make the game enjoyable... which is where there are ALWAYS going to have to be a conceit between if you want a game that is purely competitively accurate or if you get a game that more reliably delivers a reliably predictable curated cinematic experience... – which is the whole reason for FFXVI's limitation of the ability to overlevel yourself through combat encounters and not feel the tension. Boss fights are making the player FEEL like they're close to losing or like they're overcoming everything, even when it has ways to do that which cheat in favor of the experience that compliments the cinematic storytelling – hence the visual limitations in DMCV & Asura's Wrath focus primarily on that while rewarding execution of accurate combat, whereas FFXVI doesn't give anything other than generic rewards... and even then, every "reward" undercuts its own cinematic and emotional effectiveness.


Suddenly as Ifrit takes a hit, everything is frozen and the words “EIKON OF FIRE VANQUISHED” appear in massive text with the jingle of coins, the rolling wheels of numbers, and the meaningless scroll of experience & skill points playing that you have to wait through and accept in order to un-pause this interruption. I’ve seen countless streamers playing the game take a moment to talk about what just happened in those moments, because the game is TELLING them that they should be taking a break, and letting all of those endorphins rush in and relaxing – but that is almost never true. In COUNTLESS parts of FFXVI’s most critical moments like the fight of Phoenix & Ifrit against Bahamut this will just literally un-pause and dive back into the full adrenaline-pumping intensity of the cinematic storytelling that this intersects. The game's time is frozen, so emotionally, it's expecting that the player is still on that high, and that they haven’t just taken a MASSIVE breather and calmed down. You can’t even skip or disable that, so those moments cannot be avoiding from ruining the experience. When this occurs in key boss fights, the “defeat” that was just announced isn’t one and you’re over-dwelling on a moment where the opponent is about to continue fighting, just like in the very first Phoenix Vs. Ifrit battle or like when Clive seemingly defeats Garuda only for her to leap back and force him to become Ifrit – simply because it's changing from a regular battle to an Eikon Battle. In the early stages of the final boss fight when Ifrit, Phoenix, & Bahamut face off against Ultima Prime this happens in the middle of a massive cinematic attack that you never get to see fully because this shoves itself into the experience, and even WORSE is that you get one upon defeating the final boss that triumphantly tells you that your reward is 0 experience and 0 of everything else, which is the most amazingly tone-deaf slap in the face to the spectacularly crafted story experience of this game over, and over, and over, and over. This needless insert of a classic FF Fanfare victory screen doesn’t hold the satisfaction of something like Elden Ring where the massive all caps text of “DEMIGOD FELLED” shows up at the end of a boss fight – because when that does, the game is still always continuing to move and the additional XP and other things happen quietly in the background, as very often things continue to play out in front of you. This is because the UI is always utterly secondary to the presentation of what’s supposed to be the cinematic reality of the moment that’s taking place.

The endorphins, dopamine, and other flood of chemicals where you’re meant to feel rewarded and drink in the experience that’s playing out in front of you, is a carefully curated experience where the timing of how and when those things occur is a carefully and intentionally crafted experience. Even moreso, in the Souls games, that type of text is rare and changes with the strength of opponents into specific categories, rather than being specified to every event whereas in FFXVI, this victory screen and fanfare gets the same level of congratulatory emphasis when you complete any generic sidequest of giving someone some piles of wood. So the more you play of the game, the more it manages to undercut itself as you take time to explore throughout the game as well, dulling any sense of reward it conveys in the game’s most pivotal moments the more you focus on the RPG elements rather than just barreling through the main quest even when it’s not almost comedically presenting text that is just flatly inaccurate. This uneven pacing of bouncing through brief moments, and miring everything in a deluge of numbers and cooldowns is an MMORPG staple which brings in even further pieces of the game design being unfriendly to core RPG players.

FFXVI is a game where exploration of the world is difficult and often discouraged or uninteresting. There are gorgeously cinematic things happening all around you like Shiva & Titan duelling, but the game wants you to run across the crumbling landscape, not look at the scene unfolding around you. Urgency is railroaded at some times, whereas Joshua escaping the castle as it’s under attack and is burning down all around you is completely at your discretion about how pressed you feel about opening a string of doors into rooms with a couple of guards in them. The moments where you’re not being pressed to rush about, the small bits of dialogue and the layout of the people are excruciatingly MMORPG-like, and so even wandering feels like an unrewarding chore rather than being immersed into the world with all of the experience of being hurried through a queue in the grocery store. You don’t pick up items, you just get close to them and they magnetize into you so there’s no agency to player choice in exploration it’s the “you got close enough, keep going to see what we actually care about” of game design. Most stages technically have items laying around but mostly they’ll be potions that will just get auto-used if you already have 4, or in the first castle sequence will include a pile of 3 gil – which is one of the least satisfying notifications that I’ve ever gotten from a Final Fantasy game EVER, and you started out FFXV flat broke. The MMO-style quest & sidequest markers pollute your visual experience and there’s no way to easily toggle them, or decide that you don’t want to see that massively glaring MAIN QUEST icon in your field of view at all times, which is unbelievably off-putting especially after Elden Ring’s more minimalistic UI really helped to emphasize when a game cares about the beauty of the world and its cinematic presentation, the design alone is enough to encourage you to look at all the things going on around you, but FFXVI is constantly trying to pull your attention to something that isn’t necessarily important or unknown to you. Even FFVIIR’s implementation of passive bystander dialogue on the left is implemented in FFXVI – but the active dialogue is a cluttered mess of MMORPG icons, as just seeing an “X” prompt would be sufficient to know you can pet Torgal, and you don’t need a dialogue speech bubble on top of that to telegraph that Torgal isn’t a merchant or something and what’s about to transpire involves Clive speaking. The game doesn’t know what elements of UI matter to what it’s attempting to achieve.

Even when it comes to fetch quests for the explicitly marked NPCs, there are basics of design practice of UI simplification that should be implemented, but the game is blindly following MMORPG standards and likely even outright copying what they’ve done before. When you have a unique item to deliver to the quest giver, you can’t just naturally go up and have a conversation with them. You have to walk up to them, see a dialogue box containing the one and only possible item to give them, check the box to select that item, then press the button to confirm to give that, and then watch a generic “handing over” animation of Clive saying “here you go” AND THEN it proceeds to play the natural cinematic scene. By comparison, FFVIIR will just remove the necessary quest-specific item and have a minimally visible notification over on the right side of the screen stating that it was removed from your inventory as the scene continues to play out like a natural interaction in front of you, because it DOES understand how & when to implement those gameplay design elements to effectively achieve a cohesive experience. Those are the sorts of design interrupts that are thoughtlessly present throughout FFXVI because it’s just essentially building from an MMORPG template to create a single-player experience with a different combat system, rather than understanding how those sorts of systems achieve their core purpose from a design perspective. That uneven staccato is even present in how and when the game transitions from massive set-pieces cinematic cutscenes and then jumps back into gameplay, shifts time, or even location where they’re implemented like the bite-size chunks of brief departure from MMO gameplay and back again. To add even more issues to that, the game even implements entire systems to further remove immersion into the flow of its experience when it DOES get things going.





More Gameplay Options with Terrible Player Conveyance, and Gameplay Limitation with Negative Story Consequences





Pausing the game will allow you to get Active Time Lore. This literally rewards you as a player for interrupting the flow of a carefully crafted cinematic experience by giving you TONS of interesting information. This is the sort of thing that you’d expect to be passively updating in a menu for you to browse at your leisure when you pause OUTSIDE of a cutscene… except that it isn’t anything like that there. You won’t even get direct access to ANY of that lore for hours of gameplay until you meet an individual where all of that data is still relegated to conversing with an NPC at a specific location, rather than taking a moment to read up on at your own leisure whatever you happen to be up to. So, there is still a pressing incentive to have the attention of a four-year-old asking “Who’s that? What’s this?” In the middle of a movie that you’re all watching for the very first time. I remember discovering this by accidentally pausing, seeing it wasn’t in the main game menu, and then the first time that I finally got over the terrible distractions from the combat hamstringing my enjoyment of the cinematic experience, the very first time I finally got so immersed in the story playing out that I actually didn’t think about the fact that I was a person playing a video game, it didn’t occur to me to pause and try to read about one of the new characters in the scene that just played out – and now there was no way to rewind and learn about what I’d missed and so I was feeling REGRET at not ruining the pacing of cinematic presentation to try and grab hold of the tiny details that the game (to that point) had no other way to provide, and were some of the only things that were managing to keep my waning interest from being totally divorced from everything that was happening in the game no matter how much I wanted to be invested in it.


Now let’s get into the Eikon Battles. These are plagued by all of the cinematic issues that the game suffers from elsewhere, but most frustratingly is that they’re literally less satisfying presentations of what I’ve already done in Asura’s Wrath at best, and they’re egregious copying of it at worst. The lock-on projectile firing that you do in Phoenix vs. Ifrit in the opening is like the opening sequence of Asura’s wrath, except that the lock-on projectile volley gives a much more engaging mechanism to keeping your reticle fixed on a target and firing off a wave of attack, rather than just repetitively hammering the attack button to death. However, it DOES start doing this exact thing during the battle against Bahamut, as soon as Bahamut starts utilizing patterned orb attacks exactly like when Asura is fighting in space and having planets and stars thrown at him. Even the massively scaled Ifrit vs. Lost Titan has a fight that’s like a scaled down version of Asura vs. Wyzen, and where the presentation of the big moments of payoff by embracing a power driven by trauma and deep inner turmoil are far less impactful because the cinematic delivery of FFXVI is an absolute mess. When Clive & Joshua are facing against the Akashic Behemoth’s Ecliptic Meteor attack, he has the raised fist against the meteor that’s the direct shot used in Asura’s Wrath in the reveal trailer, the Wyzen battle, and is echoed in the final post-credits sequence. Last, but not least, FFXVI even has a finishing QTE sequence in the final battle where Clive punches Ultimalius in the face using the exact same sequences that Asura does when punching the game’s final boss Chakravartin in the face. It’s difficult to feel like those work as a visual homage the way that General Radahn’s appearance as the spear-riddled Asura-themed giant does in Elden Ring, especially when what FFXVI is doing here was infinitely better presented in a game that’s over a decade old now, and the only reason it’s failing the presentation is that it doesn’t understand what the core design principles are that made that game work despite its significant flaws.

52:27 - 53:22

30:25 - 33:04

At first, this fumbling it feels like this might be forgivable because the story itself is still an extremely solid one, but even the experience of the story as a Final Fantasy game gets undercut by the focus on the DMC-style gameplay coming at the expense of the story itself. Even in the vanilla release of FFXV where only Noctis was playable, the integration of the actions of the other Chocobros in combat helped to define them within your party to the point where even temporary interlopers like Aranea felt like full-fledged characters even before the full DLC that allowed us to realise them as playable characters came out (or was tragically scrapped). Especially after FFVIIR the difference became rather stark in seeing just how much Tifa, Barret, & Aerith felt like key members of the team, whereas the NPC-only Red XIII significantly lacked that sense of close camaraderie that the others had. FFXVI essentially gets the worst of both ends. You get to play as Joshua briefly during the starting sequence where using his powers comes at a cost to him. You even play from the perspective of the Phoenix a few times during Eikon battles – but you never depart from that single focus. Even Asura’s Wrath had several sequences devoted to playing as Yasha with a slightly varied but mostly identical gameplay to Asura… but that served to effectively underscore just how incredible Asura’s unyielding strength was in the same way that Clive’s abilities as Mythos would be more impressive had we been able to have small curated moments as Joshua, Jill, & Cid in order to see what a NORMAL Dominant is like and what their limitations are. Not only that, they all use swords AND they all have abilities that Clive is going to wield in the game anyway, and they also have the ability to fight as NPCs, so it’s not a huge ask to have the moments when they’re on their own be ones where we get to play briefly as a way to connect to that character a little more. The biggest ask would be Dion since he wields a different weapon and never directly joins in combat, but also feels more than deserving of that type of focus. However, the game is restrictively one-note in ways that not only don’t give those moments, but they make them feel lesser.


In FFXVI, you eventually get access to Torgal and right from the start, there are odd elements of game design that preemptively lean on that connection without context in the most awkward ways. When Torgal is still a puppy in Jill’s arms, Clive is taught how to locate the Main Quest marker using his “Animal Instinct” while in the castle as a young boy, which makes no sense at all given the way that the narrative progression of the story and the gameplay design aren’t appropriately synchronized. This is a skill that would have made sense if Torgal was the thing using his animal instinct to guide you somewhere you’ve never been. This could have even be a way to change how and when quest information is displayed, but that would require more than a superficial understanding of those things that FFXVI seems to lack entirely. While Torgal has a series of actions on the bottom left of the UI similar to the Chocobros in FFXV, all of Torgal’s actions are supplementary tools to make up for Clive having cooldowns, so they don’t get big moments of cinematic focus on what he’s doing the way those attacks did. On top of that Torgal’s actions aren’t about Torgal or the party as a whole, they’re simply a tool that’s solely a means to an end for Clive’s gameplay, and that doesn’t even change when Torgal’s true nature as Fenrir seems like it’s going to make his presence even more pivotal. Torgal only ever gets just enough emphasis to remind you his companion-like importance at a distance, but in FFXV even when Aranea briefly joined the Chocobros to fight when she drops in at night, she appeared in the in-game menu as a part of the active party in a way that helped to sell that sense of companionship even though you couldn’t change anything about her and her presence there was entirely superficial, it had a purpose. While you can see Joshua’s equipment during the castle sequence, you never even get anything like that for the other Dominants or companions who accompany you. While the overburdened, do everything myself, main character is what Mythos embodies, there were still ways to maintain that while giving others their moments.


Creating a gameplay focus centered on how that Clive CAN verbally cooperate with his dog during conflict strikes a really deep blow to the narrative of the gameplay experience, as this even FURTHER diminishes the presence of those who join alongside Clive but ESPECIALLY key characters to his journey like Cid, Jill, & Joshua who are pivotal relationships to Clive in the game’s story and they’re even superhuman Dominants – but the gameplay design of all the time spent with them in combat utterly dismissive of them to the point that they’re even less noticeable than Torgal in moments of combat where they are present. This also means that there’s no significant sense of escalated tension when they get cut off from him or when they HAVE to step back in order to allow Clive to take on an Eikon threat all on his own, or when he’s forced to leave them to recover and face missions without anyone else. They’re so ineffectual that when, instead of one of his superhuman Dominant companions, Clive is accompanied by a regular human as an accompanying NPC by your side – you can’t even really tell the difference. However, it’s far worse when those characters are even a more key component in the current narrative of the conflict that’s taking place than Clive is – and they’re relegated to the equivalent of a background set piece, which happens MULTIPLE TIMES in the game’s story. We don’t get any narrative focus that’s intertwined with the gameplay even when Jill goes on a mission FOR HERSELF to explicitly free the women she was enslaved with, take down the cabal of religious sycophants who abused her & murdered her countrymen, and overcome the trauma of the system that turned her into a monster that has haunted her every waking moment since you first found her. Absolutely NOTHING about this makes any sense from a design, narrative, or functional perspective, and it severely undercut that entire sequence.


Games like DMCV utilize that singular perspective in service of the story because the protagonists of Nero, V, & Dante are splitting off on their own from one another and are in varying degrees of tension or temporary cooperation with one another, but even that still offers the ability to play different characters to mix up the experience, with multiple characters taking place in branching paths of the story giving you more reason to revisit and replay those variations of this type of combat system. It feels like FFXVI didn’t want that, but also was unwilling to compromise on ANY segment giving partial control of any character other than Clive, despite them sharing goals… except when it let you play as Joshua at the opening, or needed the Phoenix to fight in the sky against Bahamut. Cid being Ramuh’s Dominant means that his abilities are already gameplay elements that were designed for Clive to use in combat, and early on in the game, any moments of Cid being playable would be like using Clive when he was just limited to his Phoenix powers, and would have offered a way to explore those powers via another character, where it feels like the story is expanding and opening up and thus placing extra emphasis on how Clive literally becomes Cid later on due to his death. The moments of sharing the path another walks that defines a critical component of their narrative could have and should have held far more impact, even had we needed to take brief moments to actually do that while faced against Benedikta, or even just on smaller side missions. They don’t have to be moments where you can live swap between the party moments like in FFVIIR, but moments that allow you to get a real perspective of the relationship between the other characters is a clear benefit that FFXV and the DLC building out into the Royale Edition of the game overwhelmingly demonstrated as a critical component of the storytelling itself. This also brings things to the actual gameplay and where it inherently struggles in this type of storytelling.


Even the tone of the DMC style gameplay is focused around utterly brutalizing inhuman opponents into the dust without remorse like the waves of mindless demons in DMCV, and in FFXVI the in-game prompts are even tonally inconsistent to what the cinematic action and sword-stabbing evisceration shows. This is fine for the end-game against the Akashic minions, but even the UI of the game is wildly inconsistent on what a given conflict is meant to feel like emotionally. At one point there is the battle opening prompt of, “SLAY THE ENEMIES” that contradicts the quest marker to “defeat the bandits” and also ending text of “Enemies Bested” when all the men are left simple staggered around you. Especially as Clive gets stronger and is channelling the powers of numerous Eikons, the idea of him pummelling a gang of glorified bare-chested townsfolk with the same effort it takes to obliterate a squadron of fully armoured inhuman knights is where the gameplay being skill-dependent rather than level & stat dependent shows its deeper flaws. In FFVIIR, it’s no issue if you roll up to find a squad of generic Shinra MPs and absolutely steamroll through them with buffed up Materia in seconds only to be beset by a group of RoboGuards moments later who offer you a substantially greater challenge both in their durability and combat capability. That’s because the skill execution isn’t a huge factor in overcoming them, but FFXVI can’t really deliver a satisfying combat encounter that doesn’t pose a skill-based challenge because of how it’s focused itself so obsessively on that gameplay design path. So no matter how tough Clive gets or how many apocalyptically massive opponents he takes on single-handedly, he’s always somewhat on-par with the random bandits that any generic side quest encounter pits him up against in a way that makes his abilities feel tonally inconsistent in their power and how effective they are. This is an issue given that this is repetitively shown to be a world where we witness the frailty of regular human beings so often falling to a single sword stroke no matter how important they are, like when their father gets decapitated in front of Joshua in the blink of an eye. This is why DMCV doesn’t have a story where it pits you up against regular humans, but FFXVI has one where those conflicts are a necessary component of what it chose to offer.


When it comes to skill-centric execution gameplay in a fantasy setting, Elden Ring is a stat-focused game with skill elements where you ARE able to build yourself up and utterly obliterate the more minor threats, as the core constraint is that even at your strongest, a slip-up in execution means that a generic nobody-type enemy can, and often will still easily kill you. This is because the core balance is that death is expected and your frailty is something to constantly be made aware of, and not just an artificial limitation on how stretchy the leather of your potion bag is. While that’s fine for the types of stories that the Souls series tell that aren’t as narratively direct, that doesn’t work as well for the narrative of something that’s rooted in a rage-based power fantasy aspects of that type of traumatic examination of cyclical suffering like Asura’s Wrath – which answers this sort of issue by having a continually advancing escalation of power in the story to the point where your blows are obliterating literal planets and the scope of the conflicts that you face don’t have to be continually limited by making excursions into small moments of real-world conflict against normal humans. There are ways of managing and mitigating that, but they HAVE to be a synchronization that marries the story and gameplay elements together to be greater than the sum of their parts in ways that FFXVI’s are anything but. Even FFXVI’s levelling system technically exists, but it’s got the feeling of almost just being a superfluous detail to the ever-expanding set of skills and talents that suffer from an avalanche of meaningless upgrades, which brings us to the MMORPG-meets-mobile-touch-interface UI.


In a game like Elden Ring, the controls are shown laid out in the D-pad configuration because that’s where they’re mapped to and the items on them can change between spells, held items, and weapons in your right & left hands, so the information there is always necessary for the player. In FFXV the D-pad are the weapons that Noctis is using which can be configured between a wide range of different weapons and combat styles. In FFXVI the bottom left D-Pad is initially the assignment of items which have EXTREMELY limited supply, however that’s made to be swapped out for Torgal’s commands, so that a majority of the time, the screen is needlessly displaying a copy of the gameplay controls that you can visually refer to at all times. If that’s helpful to the player it’s only because the control scheme isn’t internalized in the player’s mind, and like with the Eikon battles, they constantly need a visual on-screen layout of which buttons do what in order to know how things work for every different type of combat encounter. In contrast, DMCV has Dante’s 4 different combat styles listed in that configuration, but they are nearly invisible in the UI and located by the HP and other stat bars for greater ease of visual reference so that the player is ONLY looking at the top left or at the action in order to prioritize visual focus & attention. What this is communicating is that there’s not a real understanding of what’s necessary when or how to optimize a UI design to emphasize cinematic presentation – which I will once again point to Asura’s Wrath, as despite its flaws, it strips away literally everything that isn’t absolutely necessary or could interrupt that cinematic presentation.


FFXVI does have individually customizable information that makes sense to be on screen, as the bottom right shows the generic attacks of the face buttons, with the toggle changing the buttons to show the Eikon abilities and cooldowns – which also completely vanishes for a column of contextual button control during Eikon battles. This WOULD be ok, except that this isn’t actually how the controls are truly configured because the game has 3 different preset control schemes. One of the first things I did was swap the controls from A to B to see if that made the dodging mechanic more intuitive for me, as that sets Dodge to use Circle rather than R1… which was great and helped immensely – except that Control Scheme B ALSO moves all the Attack & Magic controls off of Square & Triangle and onto R1 & R2 respectively, which now makes zero sense with this permanently on-screen UI, where visual display of your combat abilities are placed over the configuration layout for Square & Triangle. The fact that there is NO option for a control scheme that allows you to keep Attack on Square, Magic on Triangle, and JUST place Dodge on Circle is absurd, and any of those should have emphasized reason for a different visual presentation that actually accommodated a flexible control scheme, in a way that showed the abilities present to the current Eikon Clive used and what their cooldowns were. However, it seems over-committed to the symmetrical layout and UI clutter is like something that you’d expect to see in the touch controls of a mobile game like DMC Peak of Combat, and where the combat is as equally as littered with constant deluge of numerical damage UI spam like Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia. There are REASONS that a static mobile game like Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia gets away with the big flashy attacks and massively absurd numbers covering up the enemies from view, for the exact same reason that MMORPG raid bosses get obscured in an avalanche of competing player abilities – the dynamic presentation of the combat grind is EXTREMELY limited... which is the polar opposite of the ARPG and Fighting Game hybridization. So, let's talk about those numbers and why they're so bad in FFXVI.

Making numbers into bigger numbers is one of those things that our brains just REALLY likes to do. It's why stat boosting in RPGs is good, but also why so many modern RPGs have gotten lost in the weeds of the meaningless this armor gives 5% frost resist and boosts attack by +2 more than your current armor that gives +6% Lightning resist. Those are the point where the minutiae of the details really lose the scope of the way that big number go up really just is a simple cognitive reward – but it's one where WHEN that reward matters is critical. Those only really make a big difference in a Stat-focused RPG, as in a skill-focused game, the execution and cadence of battle is necessary to win, since the threats will scale with you to some degree. The in-game notifications for Perfect Counter and other things are staples of Fighting games where it's helpful to the audience to understand what's going on, and they're also helpful in training modes to understand when and how well you're pulling off certain Block counters, but FFXVI's implementation of those notifications are all awash in a meaningless stream of congratulatory things with different star values... but those aren't even compiled on a victory screen or in any way meaningful to the player in combat, and they're a distraction for the viewer trying to watch the action – and the same is true of the damage numbers scattered all over but ESPECIALLY in the Eikon battles because they're interrupting the job of the cinematic presentation. You can even see the difference when FFXV's "Dominance" Trailer has the gameplay with all of the UI in place compared to the fully cinematic presentation in the "Revenge" trailer with no UI enabled at all, and see just how cluttered the UI gets with information that's superficial.

[yourubehd]wvunu2e29tc?t=30[/youtubehd]

One of the single most important things in Fighting Games is that the hits have to FEEL weighty, and the impacts have to SOUND hard. Blocks, Perfect Block, Counters, Criticals, Chip Damage, and all of those things have to have a different presentation because that's how your brain reads what's happening second by second. In FFXVI hitting an enemy regularly with an attack and hitting them while they're staggered should look, feel, & sound totally different in a way that mirrors the increase in damage. More hitsparks, bigger impacts for each blow, more blood, all of those things should communicate the difference between wailing on a stunned and defenseless target that lets the player know how much of the health bar is getting obliterated with each impact without ever needing to look at it directly. The ENTIRE PURPOSE of FFXVI having cinematic battles is to hand over the job of conveyance for those things to the VISUAL, and to step back from the numerical systemic values that you're needing to artificially inflate as those scales change. You can still have big damage numbers if you want to help showcase the difference between a blow that will take a mere chip off of an Eikon and will annihilate any tiny enemy, but SHOWING that is better. The superficial exposure of the underlying statistics doesn't do its job for skill-focused, and this is why they're ONLY exposed in training modes, and they should be a standard element of the UI. It's not making it more "Final Fantasy" by having them. The best option would be to have them as an optional toggle in settings, always show them in the practice arena, – but leave them off by default, because there SHOULD be an understanding that the place that carries the burden of communicating that already exists as every enemy has a health bar, but especially in the Eikon Battles. Most of all, your ability to boost those damage numbers into something meaningful isn’t something that you have a high degree of control over, and even then the customization options available to you are significantly lacking, which gives classic RPG players even less to care about in the tiny ways that you CAN customize Clive outside of his 6 Eikon combat powers.

Unlike with FFVIIR where each time a character gets a new weapon, you have a dedicated skill to learn and master giving you a reason to balance and try out new weapons, FFXVI’s weapons are just bland stat-increases and seemingly every time you make it back to your central Base, there are multiple new weapons that you’re essentially just equipping for the visual aesthetic, but they don’t hold and specific value or character that gives them any pivotal significance. Even the ones that are made in representation of the pivotal battles against certain Eikons and can’t be upgraded that aren’t just Longsword +2 don’t hold any real meaningful impact in the way that FFVIIR’s weapons. There’s no flavor to the attack that comes from unique swords and it feels lacking just in how bland the stat elements are even before FFVIIR’s system utterly blows it out of the water by having individual upgrade paths for every weapon of every character and the differences in Materia slots and Magic vs Physical and Attack vs Defense specialisations that helped to make YOUR version of Cloud feel unique. Despite a FFXVI’s abilities seemingly holding a multitude of different choices between the Eikons’ abilities you use, nothing about Clive really stands out significantly in anyone playing him, as everything is a mix-and-match of tools that have even less distinction than the special abilities of character in a fighting game, which is where the core weakness of the DMC-action in Final Fantasy story hits home – it not only sidelines every single NPC, but it makes the main character a gradually more and more bland with nothing to compare him with, again – unless you are REALLY captivated by the gameplay loop to the point that you overlook its weaknesses rather than focusing on them.





Misunderstanding Needs of the Classic RPG Player Amplifying Disconnect with Solutions to the Wrong Problems



This is why if you’re not caught up by the gameplay’s delivery and especially if you try to mitigate that with taking advantage of the Story-centric accommodations that FFXVI offers, the game is going to more prominently expose all of its weaknesses as there isn’t a massive rewarding gameplay loop for you, and the game is undercutting the reward for treating its story like a piece of cinema at every possible opportunity. Especially for RPG players, the things that lower the skill ceiling of the difficulty of the game to make it approachable also significantly remove any of the meaningful decision making, which is the exact opposite of how to make an action game work better for fans of turn-based gameplay. While FFXV had a wait mode, and FFVIIR essentially perfected the blend of action & RPG in the Final Fantasy style, FFXVI seems like it’s a team who took no lessons from what those games learned whatsoever, and instead committed to taking a blind step into fusing a different action game into FFXIV’s MMORPG elements in an attempt to translate into a mainline Final Fantasy game that appeals to a more broad audience. From a personal standpoint, it’s like what I experienced nearly a quarter of a century ago in 1999 all over again where my obsessive love of everything about the active RPG elements in Parasite Eve that was a big step up from the ATB in FFVII had me looking forward to the sequel… However the Resident Evil like take of Parasite Eve 2 was so off-putting that playing the game itself was suddenly just a struggle, and it wasn’t fun for me at all as everything about the story that I was endlessly curious about was locked behind a gameplay experience that gave me less options for meaningful choice. Back then, I slogged through it with GameShark codes, but that would cause the whole game to freeze if you opened a Save Point so I only ever made it several hours in after multiple attempts and habitually going to save only to effectively push the reset on the experience and give up, conceding to just read through the strategy guide to get a sense of the story that I’d never experience on my own, since YouTube playthroughs didn’t exist back then, and I didn’t know anyone who liked that type of game. Parasite Eve 2 and FFXVI are the two games where playing them was like trying to enjoy the experience of an exquisite banquet that was made where multiple people enjoy it, but where every bite is like force-feeding myself mouthfuls of sand. I’m left with nothing but the overwhelming feeling of wanting to WANT to enjoy myself, but everything else stands in the way of me effectively doing that at all.


That being said – I GET that this just happens with certain games, and not everything works for everyone. I watch playthroughs of things like The Last of Us, DMCV, & RE2 Remake, because I know that I have a worse experience attempting to play them than I do just watching them, and I REALLY enjoy that because the games are incredible and they serve their stories brilliantly, and that those combat systems are AMAZING for the people who really dig that style of game. However, even then – all of the myriad of other issues make is extremely difficult to even enjoy that about FFXVI when I was and am fully committed to getting through the story. Not everything is going to be someone’s cup of tea, and being totally candid – Asura’s Wrath barely qualifies as being a game at all, and it’s really more of a glorified interactive anime, but it is utterly captivating to me in every single second. I’m not put off by the gameplay being bland and repetitive because those moments are means to an end of struggling to hit the emotional climax needed to break through them. Could they have made more compelling combat and would it have been a better videogame overall if they did? Absolutely. For me though, because the ways in which EVERYTHING about the gameplay are slimmed down to focus solely on understanding and elevating the presentation where it matters most, those are weaknesses that I can overlook because what’s stripped down are almost auxiliary to those moments. The end of Asura’s Wrath utilizes the only UI-intruding elements of the QTEs in a pivotally necessary way that’s a level of meta storytelling in the same way that Crisis Core utilises the DMW being just as glaringly prominent. They’re both games with less-than-exceptionally cinematic gameplay UI designs that are frequently pushed into the forefront of the player’s attention – because the end of the story’s payoff revolves around something where the key cinematic moment critically necessitates those choices in both gameplay and UI for the sake of the storytelling that’s happening underneath it to land in a way that it cannot do without it. Crisis Core shows all of the memories of someone slowly disappearing as they pass away, whereas Asura’s Wrath shows you when the seemingly unbeatable enemy starts faltering on their own QTE prompts the way you have done under pressure throughout the last 22 chapters, giving you the understanding that the opponent isn’t different – they’re like you can they CAN be overcome… WHICH IS LITERALLY THE EXACT SAME ENDGAME NARRATIVE PLOT POINT AS FFXVI, WHICH CAN’T DELIVER THAT LEVEL OF IMPACT EVEN WHILE LITERALLY COPYING IT. That’s why, despite those flaws, Crisis Core & Asura’s Wrath games are still both a PERSONAL 10/10 when it comes to how much I enjoy them and what I think of them as a whole and how they understand synergizing and intertwining all of the mediums together into something that’s far better than the sum of its parts, and what make me exceptionally critical of FFXVI.


FFXVI has literally none of that on any level. All of the successes that it has are that the people who find the gameplay satisfying have a way to get themselves in to a Final Fantasy story, but unfortunately, the entire presentation is mired with the pitfalls of both the DMC-style ARPGs and MMORPGs in ways where they’re seemingly just both the blindspots and weaknesses of the creative directors involved rather than a deeply understood component of the game’s core design where those things were the most effective means of delivering the story that it set out to tell. In fact, the more and more of the game that I consumed, the more I felt nothing but a deep regret that this WASN’T a story that was being told in a different gameplay medium, especially with its massive story spanning time and the machinations between various nations and the involvements of everyone coming together to build a new way of life, the choices of how to deliver that felt like they were a poor choice and that both the previous mainline Final Fantasy XV as well as FFVIIR both had a deeper and more nuanced understanding of this. What’s even more frustrating is that objectively, from a visual design perspective, they storytelling in FFXVI is a shining emphasis of things that I’ve been researching and working on writing about for years now. It is literally the thing that I have more drive to WANT to enjoy than almost anyone, and it is utterly frustrating when you can see how it’s like two completely different groups involved in FFXVI’s development fundamentally don’t understand what one another do, and everything about the experience is worse off for it, and it’s delivered in a way that’s just sub-par for what COULD by all rights have been utterly phenomenal. If there were any way to cut all of the gameplay and UI out of FFXVI completely and just experience the story uninterrupted by anything aside from QTE’s – I’d pay full price for that, because it would be vastly superior to this absolute mess of self-sabotaging design.



So, with that premise how do I feel about a rating for FFXVI?



When it comes to rating the game – I’m not in any position to rate FFXVI objectively like a reviewer. Just like DMCV, RE2 Remake, or The Last of Us, they are the type of game I wouldn’t ever be inclined to play or attempt to rate as I’m no good for assessing the merits of that type of gameplay, as I know that they’re detrimental to the core experience for me. I far prefer to watch people play those types of games who like that type of game, and enjoy it alongside the people it’s made for. For me, those types of games are anomalous as they’re some of my favourite things to watch others enjoy and my least favourite to play on my own. For games like FFXI or FFXIV I just consent to give it a null/10, because everything about MMORPGs are fundamentally disinteresting & unengaging for me in literally every way and I have zero inclination to ever touch one for any reason, AND they’re not even interesting to watch someone play – but I know that I would conceivably be VERY interested in the story that they tell, but I’m just left without any real means of approaching that experience at all, which is a conceit that I’m ok with – and it’s why FFXVI is a deeply frustrating experience as it feels like it’s something that I should be able to enjoy, it's a story with characters where I absolutely love them, but wrapped in an experience that is hell-bent on making sure that I don’t get to connect with it no matter how much I try to find a way to do so.


As such, I can give an impression on what the experience is like for me personally when diving in to FFXVI knowing that there were ways that was supposed to be able to better accommodate players less attuned to this particular type of action gameplay. I would say that a game like FFVIIR, FFXV, Crisis Core, Asura’s Wrath, or Elden Ring are a 10/10 in that I both am deeply compelled to play it, and I enjoy essentially every aspect of the experience of doing so, and all of them fall into the realm of something that shares similarities to FFXVI in countless ways. A game like Mario Kart for me would be a 5/10 in that I have absolutely no incentive to ever play it on my own but I’m also in no way opposed to playing it if asked, so I just feel utterly middle-of-the-road about it (pun fully intended). Something like Animal Crossing, Call of Duty, or Only Up! would both be a 0/10. I have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to ever play them under any circumstance as I find literally nothing about the experience, game type, gameplay, or story content to be a draw in any way whatsoever to the point where I can’t even imagine myself installing one of them for any reason.

For myself personally, the GAME of FFXVI is a solid 2/10, in that I cannot force myself to have any interest in continuing to play it. The first cinematic Eikon battle had me feeling like it was a vastly inferior version of the opening of the gameplay design of Asura’s Wrath, and after the end of the tutorial training battle with young Clive, I said out-loud to my empty living room, “Wow I… HATED that?” and then immediately trying to swap the control scheme… only to discover that upon doing so and wanting to see if that helped, I didn’t even have any way to go back and use the training grounds I was just in to retry the tutorial. As you don’t even get a dedicated training ground until after you join up with Cid, and just like the lore not existing in the game’s menu there’s zero indication that would ever exist at that point in the game, it was just a live trial of testing out the control schemes for the first time on my mission to fight goblins, getting exhausted that none of them really clicked or felt intuitive, and even when I could get it to work the gameplay loop wasn’t satisfying, so then just using the simplification items – which just resulted in waves of combat that wasn’t engaging, involved zero player choice in any way whatsoever, and it was just becoming a slow slog where I was honestly just bored and neither the technical execution of the combat nor the simplification of it offered anything that was compelling. I was left struggling to find a reason to pay attention as I kept staring around waiting for it to be over… only to be frustrated as moment after moment of gameplay UI crammed itself over the top of the cinematic presentations that I was actually interested in.


It got to the point where, I conceded to just experience it all vicariously after getting to Cid’s hideaway as the entire experience just kept getting less and less compelling the more I tried to find something to enjoy. I found that even watching through someone else’s playthrough of the game as a means to consume the story itself – it was a gruelling task that I only finally felt willingly committed to after 12 hours of recorded gameplay, which I got through by watching at 2x speed and skipping over the fights as much as possible, as when I didn’t I constantly found myself actively trying to do anything but continuing to pay attention to them because they’re exhaustingly uninteresting. Even upon seeing that there were dedicated repositories for lore and in-game history in NPCs in the hideout afterwards that I’d love to go read through and getting to witness regions that I want to explore, or seeing what it’s like to ride a Chocobo – it’s STILL not even remotely enough to ever compel me to grind through playing that deeply into the game for something that could have just been located within the in-game menu since it’s being surfaced to players for free as a reward for pausing cinematic anyway. Over two days I watched the entirety of the playthrough end-to-end, and I didn't hit long and uninterrupted parts where I got to avoid being kicked out of being immersed in the experience until well over halfway in. At the Bahamut fight is when a lot of the more blatant overlaps and things started coming up that just made me even more frustrated because it was clear that the game was being made by people who KNEW about all the things I wishes that they did... but that the understanding of how to effectively utilize those things even with clear examples of what that is just made it even more frustrating.

The story itself is excellent in just SO, SO, SO many moments, and on the surface there is so much about the content of it that compels me to rank FFXVI right alongside with my other all-time favourites like Crisis Core, Asura's Wrath, XV, VIIR, etc… but unlike in ALL of my favourite games, the reason that their stories resonate with such extreme passion is that the ways in which the gameplay itself delivers that and how even the game’s UI or lack thereof has a purposeful meaning for when & why it’s intruding upon the cinematic experience of that is not only absent from it from FFXVI but this game is a glaringly antithetical example of that type of good game design in almost every single conceivable way. Even simple things like the DMC games’ glass-shattering chapter interruptions and in-battle use of BGM to immerse the player into the moment more the better they perform in the combat all have a clear and purposeful design for the end result, where FFXVI can't even use a damn victory fanfare properly.

Worse still is that I work in a11y for software, so understanding information conveyance and how simplifying gameplay and delivering an equivalent experience aren’t the same thing are things that I’m exceptionally attuned to, so seeing how simplification of the punishment from the combat system was the ONLY answer to help players enjoy the story fundamentally misunderstands what players are looking for when trying to have an engaging experience playing a game is just… beyond frustrating. Even more, examples of how this is done and specifically nuanced in Japanese media for adaptations of Western Fantasy is my biggest focus of study, and FFXVI's story design nails SO MANY THINGS EXACTLY HOW I EXPECTED that I want to gush about, but it's so completely disconnected from the ways that the design hits at a deeper level that it feels almost like superficial mimicry by comparison. FFXVI is game design being applied without understanding ANYTHING about WHY what the games that they draw from works for the same sort of story that they’re trying to tell, where that lack of unified vision relentlessly hamstrings the weight of the experience that it could otherwise have created. The fact that FFXVI still shines out to so many people DESPITE all this underscores just how damn good the story is and/or how compelling the gameplay loop is to fans of that genre, as the myriad of elements that I’ve highlighted here aren’t so glaringly obvious to the point that they undercut the entirety of the experience of playing through the game for a huge number of people. Rather, it seems like FFXVI is an amazing example of what the necessary critical mass that will give enough enjoyment to a target audience to get them overlook those massive shortcomings that should absolutely have crippled any other game as a complete disaster with a fundamental lack of understanding of the implementation of cohesive cinematic game design language.

FFXVI has amazing moments of haunting storytelling like realising that the most vulnerable suffer even more in the push to uproot the most privileged from abusing positions of power, or seeing that even someone as mighty as a king can be suddenly decapitated by a random traitorous soldier. Showing how the enemies you face who commit horrendous atrocities are all fighting for their own versions of what safety looks like while turning a blind eye to how that spreads suffering into everyone else only to save themselves like Hugo wanting to be king of the world, only to turn against everything out of pure vengeance. How others who seem strong are in truth so helpless without the power that lifted them out of that vulnerability that they are utterly inconsolable in its absence and would rather sacrifice their humanity than ever face a reality where they lack that like Benedikta. How the Eikons & Branded are an equivalent of tools of the state like the Jinchuriki & Shinobi in Naruto. The game builds itself upon all of the things that I genuinely love most, and I cannot thing of anything else that I’ve ever desperately WANTED to want to enjoy as much as this. I’m glad that I was able to finally find a way to get myself through the story, but god DAMN I do not think it’s something that I will ever be able to revisit in any capacity aside from watching moments of streamers enjoying it where I focus on their experience of the story rather than maying attention to the game itself, because it is so fundamentally and inextricably intertwined with the absolute worst bits of discordant game design that have done everything possible to ruin the experience of something that designed of my favourite storytelling elements that I have an overwhelmingly passionate love of, and I wish nothing more than for this to have been a game that I could have poured hundreds of hours into rather than conceding to never touch it again because of how far it misses the mark in every other part of what matters to me when telling that type of story.



And that's where this all wraps up for now. Thanks and apologies to anyone who got though that whole mess.

I'm quite interested in sharing thoughts, so hopefully the rambling draft isn't too prohibitive to the underlying topics. Hopefully with this having a place to live, it'll be easier to get to focus my attention on catching up in the ACTUAL FFXVI thread and enjoying chatting about some of the story stuff that I want to talk about or share, because there's a bunch of awesome design language there as well as some spectacular characters.

EDIT: 6/28/23 Updated with lots of embedded links and some better details.


X

 

[X-SOLDIER]

So, time for me to pile in with few other musings that I'm taking note of that are more development-oriented as I'm working my way through the game on my own, because I am determined to force my way through every single part of this game if I'm going to write something like this about it, because while there is a lot to love, good GODS is a lot of this a huge mess and it used to be something else COMPLETELY.

The game was clearly being designed as something more of a Souls-like initially. There are all of the Fallen Obelisks that acts as Bonfires/Grace, and the first one even has a unique animation and dialogue for Clive interacting with it directly that was also teased when he activates the Training/Arcade Mode thing in the Hideaway, and an NPC remarks about it not glowing before at Martha's Rest. However those eventually got scrapped for just fast-travel points on the map, but there are still some lingering points of evidence that showcase that those were intended to also have added functionality to them (likely tied to how you power up your Eikon Abilities), and it makes sense for this to be the initial exploration given how FFXV didn't process level-ups until you made camp. This also explains why there's a health system that's extremely limited on the number of potions that you have access to, and that also eventually upgrades by expanding the bag in the same way that Estus Flasks get expanded, and why they're bound to the same directional arrow controls as Souls-like games do.

The primary thing is that your HP remains damaged and your Eikon Abilities have a cooldown that is persistent and doesn't reset when you fast travel without resting, exactly like Souls games... but both of those things DO reset to full if you go to the Hideaway just like with any Souls-like's hub world area. The HP damage & cooldowns were meant to be globally persistent, but they would reset at an Obelisk like any restoration waypoint in a Souls game, which is why the timing of those things is often extremely obnoxious. The issue is that this Souls-like design ALSO requires all of the enemies to exist in a persistently travelled zone to behave in a certain way, where their own health and combat status is lingering... which FFXVI doesn't do – it has Encounter zones. If you or an enemy moves outside of its designated encounter zone, its HP bar will grey out and then reset back to full. If that's the mechanic that the encounters are using, then your field-specific and combat-specific status shouldn't have the same cooldowns.

The combat encounters are all designed as zoned instances... but your Eikon abilities aren't made to work that way. That's why abilities like Flames of Rebirth are utterly MASSIVE and can hit enemies across multiple aggro zones even if you're completely outside of combat. It's also why the lock-on distance to enemies is so wildly inconsistent, because it's primarily made just to focus on enemies within a specific encounter zone that you've already triggered – whereas Souls-like lockons have to work at a VERY specific distance to an enemy regardless of whether or not they can detect you because there is no such thing as an encounter zone for standard enemies. but it's only true for sub-bosses when their HP bar gets displayed when you're in range of them. However, unlike with FFXV, this encounter zone in FFXVI isn't a wide range that lets you know when and where the border is, but a half-implemented middle ground that's sort of the worst of both designs where you can unknowingly reset any field enemy's HP if you end up moving too much during combat.

Speaking of FFXV, there's evidence that a lot of the basic game elements are lifted out of that because Clive has the accelerated sprint mechanic that Noctis does. It's even disabled within towns the same way, and Clive will automatically vault over small rocks and fences in order to maintain that momentum... except that Clive needed a jump button for the DMCV-style combat mechanics, and so pressing Dodge will make Clive slam to a halt in the field, because there is no dedicated Sprint button to activate that. You just have to force Clive to run for long enough and then it just happens automatically. Which would be fine except that there's no need for this at all when the zones are as small as they are and the game even gets you free access to Chocobos (unlike having them as a time-limited resource like in FFXV).

This starts to plague other elements of the UI as well, like how half the time you have a fetch quest that's putting an enormous UI marker on an NPC 30m away from you, and then when you get within 25m, it disappears there's a loud audio PING and it says that the target is nearby. Those are two competing design methodologies for how to convey information to the player being crammed together and misused. If you need to talk to 3 NPCs in an area, ONLY the zone should be specified and you should talk to all the NPCs, and then the game should use an active zone or do what FFVIIR does in time-critical areas and put up the temporary invisible wall to bump you back within the region where you need to be. Those are SUPPOSED to be ways to guide the player that change depending on the necessity of the urgency and understood specificity of the task being done. This gets even worse when it comes to the hunts.

The Hunts all list a specific region on a map with the name of the region printed on the sign... except that you have to memorize where those are because there's no way to look at the more detailed region-specific maps unless you're already loaded into that region. You also can't set a hunt as active in order to make a larger zone appear on the minimap for where to find that enemy... because those are mini-boss enemies and they're not using the standard encounter zones that are being repurposed elsewhere, but they're creating a scripted encounter zone – which is why you can't lock on to enemies from too far outside of zoned encounters otherwise it would trigger issues with how those fights initiate. So, while FFXVI will make sure to drag you by the nose with overly redundant information for just about everything that it does, the Hunts won't have ANY conveyance on the map at all – which directly opposes how its visual design is applied all throughout the rest of the game... which also happens in the game's collectables.

There are both white & blue crystals on the field that are easily noticeable at a distance, and that's where you can get collectable items... but don't worry about ever doing that, because they're all randomly generated from the same 15-20 items that will drop with every single enemy encounter, or it'll be 2-5gil. Those types of items are on the map to provide points of interest to encourage exploration, but they don't provide ANY real reward or benefit to doing that. By contrast, there are Chests that have almost NO visual indication whatsoever, are usually blocked behind a more difficult enemy encounter, which SHOULD be the things drawing your attention... except that half the time they have just 10x the useless common materials in them, but other times they have stronger pieces of equipment or missable items in them – which players can miss even if they ARE exploring all over the place because the UI is diametrically opposed to how it's implemented everywhere else.

On top of that the wildly inconsistent rewards looks like something that was a bit of a meme in Elden Ring, which was the Arteria Leaf being marked as a rare item on the field despite not being that uncommon nor useful. This actually has to do with semi-unique placeholders being used before the real items for those locations are finalized. This can be seen in the 1.00 PS5 on-disc version of Elden Ring where a lot of the game is still in a partially completed state and half the chests are missing items, and a number of the game's unique weapons are unobtainable, and replaced with generic items like this, but they're marked on the map as critical so that players can see the difference and go to investigate what they are in a large open world setting. Chests should be an even more prominent draw ESPECIALLY since they require the player to directly interact with them and they're not just automatically vacuumed in when you're in loose proximity, or in a massive distance from them if they're enemy drops.

This overall design issue becomes even more apparent in how the game has NO IDEA how it wants to balance level vs equipment. Leveling up has absolutely ZERO nuance to it whatsoever. Every level provides a stat boost of 2-3 and ~50HP, meaning that every 2 levels is roughly equivalent to the +5 upgrade to attack/defence that you get from improved weapons. You can tell that the pacing of the game isn't understood because there are times when the number of weapons that you have access to INSTANTLY means that you'll just flat out have no use for upgrading something, or you'll use a sword like the one you get from Garuda for maybe 5 mins, whereas the sword you get from Cid gets used for hours of game time. This again comes back to how Cid's Hideaway was designed to be a Souls-like Hub World that you constantly returned to, and there is even more evidence of this with the NPC dialogue.

Almost all of the characters in the hideaway have dialogue that changes between missions. The twins will comment on Clive's change in appearance, how he's sticking around, and even Gav & Jill have unique fully-voiced dialogue between every single mission – even if it makes ZERO logical sense for you to be trekking back & forth there from a story perspective. Meanwhile, other critical dialogue like the "ask about other things" option for the NPCs with shop functions only voices the first 2-3 words like it's an MMORPG with no budget for minor NPC voice acting. If you intentionally avoid doing story-specific missions like going to the Veil as soon as you meet Isabelle and instead go everywhere else possible, a majority of the external townsfolk even have unique lines of dialogue that 98% of players will never hear, while scripted dialogue for critical characters remains implemented as if it was just an MMORPG. On top of that, there's no QA done for critical pathing and dialogue for certain areas, so every time you check lore in the hideaway, you're subjected to listening to, "I never knew there were so many sues for dung." ad nauseam while countless others have lines you'll never hear.

This doesn't even have the population saturation that FFVIIR does that justifies missed dialogue of background NPCs in Midgar where there's a whole city full of people and no matter how many times you play through the game, the voices and lines you hear in the crowded streets will all feel new and different and will contextually change depending on what's happening. While many of FFXVI's towns have that type of attention to detail in them, there's no mechanic that will bring the player there out of sequence in order to experience them unless (like me), you're doing it PURELY for the purpose of attempting to get a sense of what the hell was going on with this game's development... which brings me back to the fact that with so few meaningful items, suddenly for a huge chunk of the game, none of the merchants have anything useful to sell you aside from hastily scrawled music scrolls that inexplicably cost a fucking fortune. This is because the lack of weapons and items in the game starts to point to other core issues with the combat system's upgrade path.

You're getting accessories that allow you to increase the damage of specific abilities or modify their cooldowns... except that that's what you SHOULD be improving with an Ability upgrade tree by buffing the skills that you want to be able to use more frequently in battle – especially when it comes to the timing specific ones like heatwave or Rook's Gambit, where an enemy not being QUITE close enough is the same as mis-timing an attack and will mean that rather than taking 18 seconds to recharge, the ability now takes 25 seconds, which is a full half a minute of combat not being able to counter attack rather than a third. Those still only improve the cooldowns by 2.7 seconds... but they're limited to 3 accessory slots... simply because the game has no other meaningful way to make Accessories do anything useful to add versatility into combat – which creates an even worse problem.

Not only does this mean that the "Mastery" of an ability isn't even mastery because it takes two Accessory slots to do that, but you have to grind an utterly inordinate amount of AP just to be able to rearrange the layout of those abilities. If you want to have Rook's Gambit on Square and Heatwave on Triangle, but use them both with Garuda's Eikon active so that you can emphasize countering to stagger... you're gonna have to Master Heatwave. Now, all of the Eikons ALSO change the elemental nature of the spells that you cast, and so the Mastering of an ability and assigning it to a different Eikon would make sense if it ALSO changed the elemental nature of the attack... except that there isn't any elemental weakness in FFXVI, so those visual differentiators are utterly meaningless and the changing element of your spells is just visual aesthetic that literally does NOTHING.

As such, this doesn't in ANY WAY reflect a mastery of abilities like Heatwave, so all it's doing is meaning that in the split-second of wanting to counter something with an ability that you have, you don't have to press a button to switch Eikons, then press and hold a different button to bring up the ability and then trigger it, but just have sets of abilities that make sense to you. THAT SHOULDN'T COST ANYTHING. That's the same as changing the controller layout which is likely why the 1.03 version of the game doubled the number of controller layouts that it had, and FINALLY gave one that just swapped R1 & Circle... although the fact that having three Eikons means that the Left trigger changes the Eikon and cycles them towards the Right is deeply annoying, but that's just more control scheme of suddenly changing from the Souls-like to the DMCV-style combat flow.

Worse still is that this means that as the game's ham-fisted controller gets less and less able to do other abilities, that isn't offset by the Mastery of the abilities, but rather by the implementation of accessories. If you like using Charged Magic, you're rapidly going to realize that it's impossible to hold down Triangle to keep magic charged when you're also rapidly needing to hold R2 to initiate an Eikon ability to respond to something... so the solution SHOULD be that Clive can automatically hold charge shot until it's pressed again – and that's in the game... but it's not an upgrade, it's a fucking Accessory. Even worse than that is that this and ALL of the other Accessories provided to help make the gameplay easier which are critical for a11y accommodation come at the cost of improving the rest of the combat gameplay itself, and end up needing you to sacrifice functionality to have better gameplay.

EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Assistance Accessories could and should all be things that you activate in a settings menu. There's even a visual indicator that they're enabled at the top of the UI, so it's impossible to fake a run with those things on, and there's no reason that you can't have them all in place. You should be able to have the bullet-time dodge, automatically controlling Torgal, automatically using potions, automatically charging magic to cast in place AND still be able to use Accessory slots to do things like Improve the Damage & Cooldown of Heatwave, or boost the EXP/AP that you receive from battle... but you can't. What this effectively means is that if you're struggling with the combat system's controls, your battles have to take LONGER because you can't use accessories to help mitigate that... because those slots are already taken up with the a11y options, and the other accessories SHOULD have been ability upgrades but aren't because grinding mastery of the system serves only to streamline the controller out of being an absolute mess... which brings us to the OTHER issue which is that big parts of the system are made by PC-centric devs.

All of FFXVI's menus have mouse cursors in them, which can often even be used by moving the left stick to interact as it you had a mouse. This highlights that despite being a console exclusive, FFXVI wasn't developed as a PS5-specific game, which is why it runs locked at such a low framerate and none of the game is optimized with the PS5's unique memory management from the SSD, and so there's no real performance improvement whether or not the game is installed into the onboard SSD or not. A game not being developed for console first in a way that's this apparent for a console-exclusive release means that they're considering keyboard & mouse design first, and that leads to bad a11y practices because it's not thinking about a controller-only or keyboard-only workflow through in the initial design stages. This is why you have things like the visual UI only being designed to match to a single controller style, where the visual button hierarchy is reversed with the R2 & L2 controlling the top-level menus, and then R1 & L1 controlling the menus below them – which is the opposite of how they're laid out on a controller. All of these exact same bad design practices were all over Overwatch 2's menus and inconsistently applied.

This all comes into play in how things like the Lore & History sections of the game are literally just Design workflow assets that are skinned and presented as gameplay features. The search functions in them are helpful if you're having roundtable conversations about different points in the game and who's doing what where with who... but there's no reason for those to exist as something in-world for Clive to look at... except that the ACTUAL amount of content in the game is almost PAINFULLY lacking. Comparing the FFXVI bestiary to the one that exists in FFXV shows just how miniscule the variety of enemies is, specifically because that's how it HAS to be to work with the way that the combat system is designed, and how it was put together at from something else entirely. I mean, this is a MAINLINE FINAL FANTASY title with a desert that doesn't have Cactuars in it, and an entire game without a Tonberry anywhere to be found at all.

On top of that there's Leviathan who is extremely odd as the Missing Eikon used to hide the fact that Phoenix doesn't count towards the total of 8 Eikons that somehow both Odin & Ultima both conveniently forgot about, ESPECIALLY since that is Ifrit's literal elemental counter. Not only that, but that there's literally still another Mother Crystal visible across the water by the original Imperial Capital City in the Blight, where two NPCs on the side of the road share dialogue of being an awe of the gigantic wave being frozen in time, with no mention of what it is, and there's a whole chunk of content that's just... not there in the game as-is. That's the only part of the story that's totally absent, and given the fact that it's centered EXPLICITLY around the concept of the Elemental Weakness to Fire, and it takes place North of the Empire & Rosaria where all of the Beasts at the start of the game start pouring in from... it seems like there's an older part of the gameplay that just didn't serve to being adapted into the changes that happened, and so some entire parts of the core game mechanics changed around them, and more and more half-baked versions of UI and game design started to wrap around a meticulously crafted world and setting.

Again, the more I get to just exist in the SPACES of FFXVI's world the more obvious it is that these regions are MEANT to function like the branches off of a Souls-like Hubworld and they have MASSIVE amounts of depth, love, care, and attention poured into them, but the components surrounding all of that are just an absolute goddamn mess.

Nothing highlights the little pieces of deeply discordant elements more than getting to the new hideaway and the very first sidequest being to go kill plants that you've killed hundreds of times, but THIS time and this time only they will inexplicably drop a type of tar that you need to acquire for use as sealant for the ferryman since the Blighted water is decaying his boat. The boat is not only the only way for you to rescue other Branded, but it's the the only remaining legacy of his father and so it's both thematically and personally poignant, and he even comments that despite that being necessary he never sees Clive taking the ferry. This is because Clive exclusively activates the otherwise inert Fallen Obelisks to be able to Fast Travel around the world, except all of those details were just quietly de-emphasized as they'd auto-unlock the second you find a new region. All that build up, only to have the game's UI have a big "You started a new quest" fanfare announcement to not only interrupt the flow of natural cinematic presentation, but to draw intentional importance to the fact that you've just started the side quest "Caulk & Bawl" which, while funny and would have made for a great laugh seeing it tracked that way in a menu, undercuts the ENTIRE tone of the moment in a way where I think that maybe nothing else in all of FFXVI so far has done such a good job of encapsulating so many elements of what an absolute patchwork mess of development this game is.


...but there's still plenty left for me to play, and I'm sure there's more deeply frustrating things I'll find as I keep going.

If anything this makes me appreciate the polish and deeply considered designs of FFXV's egregiously long and tumultuous development cycle meaning that at least it was clear around what it needed to eventually grow past those shortcomings into the Royal Edition of the game, and FFVIIR's total overhaul and move away from CC2's co-development focusing so heavily on the PS5-centric technologies and optimizations leading to some deadline struggles and less-than-stellar execution with lots of things being massively slimmed down from mid-Chapter-16 onwards, but making it obvious how those were necessary steps and cuts with INTERmission leading into the tech necessitated by Rebirth.

Also, just for reference in putting in hours where I'm not just playing but wandering and trying to understand games by being in them: I've spent 127 hours in Remake along with 28 in INTERmission, but an honestly nearly incalculable amount of time to analysis on the game from my computer. When it comes to FFXV, I've sunk in 228 hours plus 156 into XV Comrades. In Elden Ring I maxed out the timer in my primary playthrough so between that on the release version and 1.00 on-disc versions, I've got probably at least 1,500 hours in that game now. Final Fantasy XVI is a game where I am ONLY being drawn in by morbid curiosity, but I am basically THE target audience of who ought to be the most hooked into a new mainline Final Fantasy game.

I want to be extensively and deeply critical of where those flaws are present, but with a clear perspective that I genuinely LOVE things about this game and what it wants to be and why it falls short of that mark SO hard in ways that a lot of people might not notice and where hot take criticisms and clickbait outrage will otherwise prevent those problems from being highlighted as the genuine issues that they are. So, I think that this thread will probably keep serving as the tl;dr drafted notes of things I notice as I go through, so that I can properly turn them into an outline and make an article about the game that's level-headed but also speaks to what types of things that the series should learn going forward, and the lessons that it SHOULDN'T take away from this that it might do otherwise – because a FFXVII deserves to have the best foundational understanding of why the successes of the other games were what they are as well as when and where it missed the mark in various ways.



X

 

[ForceStealer]

The Hunts all list a specific region on a map with the name of the region printed on the sign... except that you have to memorize where those are because there's no way to look at the more detailed region-specific maps unless you're already loaded into that region.

Just as a small correction: you can look at the local maps from the world map in the menu by pressing the touchpad while a given Fallen stone is highlighted.
Your overall point stands as I repeatedly wish for either the ability to take the Hunt flyers with you to check later or at least the ability to look at the area maps directly from the Hunt Board menu. As it is you have to back out of the hunt board and then open the map, but hopefully I'll save you at least a little time of not having to actually go to an area to see the map

If you like using Charged Magic, you're rapidly going to realize that it's impossible to hold down Triangle to keep magic charged when you're also rapidly needing to hold R2 to initiate an Eikon ability to respond to something... so the solution SHOULD be that Clive can automatically hold charge shot until it's pressed again – and that's in the game... but it's not an upgrade, it's a fucking Accessory.

Control layout F supremacy!

 

[Lex]

Just as a small correction: you can look at the local maps from the world map in the menu by pressing the touchpad while a given Fallen stone is highlighted.
Your overall point stands as I repeatedly wish for either the ability to take the Hunt flyers with you to check later or at least the ability to look at the area maps directly from the Hunt Board menu. As it is you have to back out of the hunt board and then open the map, but hopefully I'll save you at least a little time of not having to actually go to an area to see the map



Control layout F supremacy!

I just screenshotted them lmao

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Just as a small correction: you can look at the local maps from the world map in the menu by pressing the touchpad while a given Fallen stone is highlighted.
Your overall point stands as I repeatedly wish for either the ability to take the Hunt flyers with you to check later or at least the ability to look at the area maps directly from the Hunt Board menu. As it is you have to back out of the hunt board and then open the map, but hopefully I'll save you at least a little time of not having to actually go to an area to see the map



Control layout F supremacy!

I discovered that rather recently just before checking back in this thread, but thank you for calling this out. My memory struggles still find the Hunter interface rather annoying though.

There are a number of other things that I've run into since then that I'm gonna go on about a bit.

The Sidequests in general are a bit of a mess. Most of the time after you get access to a Seal from one of the main Town Representatives (also sad that these don't update on Clive's character model), they take you back through the area that you just went through on the Main Quest... especially noticeable the first time you get to Martha's Rest, which is against how that type of progression is meant to go. Sidequests are things to do along the way, and it shouldn't be backtracking over and over. However, later on there are some things that point out that the story elements weren't all set in stone clearly.

The sidequest with Otto where you end up having a really REALLY impactful conversation about how his son got taken which is what caused Cid to defect is somehow just a Sidequest despite having some of the best scenes of any of the minor quests even surpassing a lot of the fetch quests like the gathering materials for Mid. However, post-Bahamut, the four missives that you receive for doing the three quests in "Things Fall Apart" (Down the Rabbit Hole, Why We Fight, & The Flames of War) are all marked in that UI as being Sidequests NOT main quests. So, there's some good evidence around what was made into the final version of the through-line of the story not being clearly set in stone. This approach again makes a LOT more sense if the game was initially more designed to play out with the Hideout as a Souls-like Hub World where you address things in more of a psuedo-linear fashion more like MMO quests.

While there are a LOT of points where the Map's Fast travel is disabled in order to force a linear progression, when you reach the Mid-Point of going through the Twins where Goetz is acting as your shop, you can actually access the entire map, but attempting to travel gives a popup that it will allow you to leave, but you'll lose all of your progress. That is... such a monumentally weird thing to leave in place, especially given that the entirety of the Bahamut fight doesn't rely on any of your equipment loadout whatsoever because it's all an Eikon battle, that. The map in general forcing you to navigate half of the time, or moving the camera to focus on where it's forcing you to navigate to, only to load with the focus placed on where you're at and not where you're going, because literally all it ACTUALLY needs is a single button press & hold confirmation to load the next area. It's just giving you the map as a familiar place for that and providing the option to browse a menu that's mostly full of things that you can't do anything with even in a REGULAR battle, let alone an Eikon battle where your level & equipment are wholly irrelevant.

This extends to the pause button working in battles to bring up the main menu, which is extremely strange and unnecessary. In Eikon Battles, it's got the list of your abilities, which makes no sense to have in the middle of combat, but especially because the UI has them there, and you barely have any abilities at all in that mode. This brings me back to the Game Controls because the UI brought something to mind the more Eikons I got, the more of a picture of what the game USED to be started to make sense.

The top left UI shows 3 Eikons, but the animation doesn't show one getting bigger on a preset order like it does at the bottom, instead the top one slides off and the others slide into place from below. That UI design is important because it only makes sense if there was a plan to have access to more than 3 Eikons – which makes sense if each Eikon changes access to the Elemental magic that Clive uses used to be a core mechanic in the game. Additionally, all of the Eikon Abilities have matching layouts and they all have similar functions... and the UI is designed to visually show a four button control scheme at the bottom, but only the top & left currently change, but each Eikon could have had all 4 abilities active:

∆: Middle Ability (enemy attack counter)
▢: Left Ability (knockback)
O: Right Ability (multi-hit damage)
X: Bottom Ability (Special Attack)

Assign R1 to the vastly unique Eikonic Feats.

The existing UI already has the icon for the Eikonic Feats in the top left, so it's unlikely it would have been intentionally reused in the UI until the bigger changes into the current combat style were implemented, allowing that to be remapped onto R1. It seems like FFXVI used to have a less-refined but more versatile range of combat that matches Clive LITERALLY having all of the abilities of each Eikon he absorbs, rather than just having a mix & match. This is gonna mean a slightly lower mastery since the technical complexity of how all of the Eikons fight is different. It also means that upgrading certain abilities to have a shorter cooldown or more damage would work in matching with the Eikons that you like to use primarily.

This would explain things like how Clive uses FFXV's dash mechanics but he doesn't have a button to control it... because he has the world's more utterly useless Jump button – because it's important to the changed combat mechanics, but nothing about the overworld traversal is at all designed to make use of that AT ALL, because it's not meant to have a shared purpose in and out of combat. That's why pressing Dodge out of Combat will make Clive slam to a halt in the overworld which serves literally no helpful design purpose. This would also have meant that Clive had access to a monumental number of abilities meaning that the longer cooldowns of the stronger ones wouldn't matter as much when you were roaming around later in the game, since you'd be able to have access to more of them – but again, that makes for muddier and more JRPG-like combat where you're hurling massive abilities into the enemy rather than going through repetitive loops of the same skill-executed lineup.

These would have still made sense even if you were still limited to 3 Eikons if the Obelisks let you reset which Eikons you used in a Zone, which would reset the cooldowns and enemies in the instance like any other Souls game, and still give you different approaches of combat, and eventually give a purpose to Mastering the skills, so that you could build crazy OP lineups with whatever elemental stacking you wanted. But again, that's a VERY RPG-centric approach to gameplay that's not at all what the game has, but it's what the world design, UI, and language around elemental magic points towards.

This brings things back to the Area-based encounters. Experience isn't given when each enemy is defeated, it's literally ONLY presented when the combat ends, or if you run far enough that it deactivates the aggro to cancel the encounter, at which point everything follows through. This back-end mechanism is what makes one of the most obnoxiously egregious gameplay designs into a huge problem, which is in the Eikon Battles – the game has NO idea what a cinematic is.

To the game, a Cinematic is a cutscene that takes place outside of a combat encounter. Any scene that occurs within a combat encounter is a part of combat – not matter how much or how little of that involves any player interaction. If you're going to execute a real cinematic combat sequence that has numerous cutscenes within that, those should all be isolated out from the player interactions. As an example, Asura's Wrath is basically a long and continuous string of QTEs & cutscenes, but if you're trying to power through a level to get a maxed out Sync ratio, you can skip all of the scenes, and it'll essentially jump you up into the proximity of the closest QTE sequence. FFXVI doesn't have that implemented AT ALL... but it's supposed to.

For example:

To get the Medal of Valor for beating Bahamut without taking damage, you have to clear the Ifrit Arisen vs. Bahamut fight while not getting hit. The fight's about 5 mins long with the unskippable cutscenes, so you could conceivably make about 12+ attempts an hour, right...? Wrong.

If you Game Over, the game will allow you to restart the fight at that point with full healing items – again, more evidence of the intended Soul-like mechanics. However, that death will prevent you from getting that Medal of Valor, because it's considered a Continue not a Restart. There is no mechanism that allows you to retry the fight, because the game grants you access to the Menu instead, and the game doesn't even create an Auto Save file to load from (although it creates TWO auto save files amidst the following cutscene and map navigation sequences before you're even able to get access to Clive again to make a manual save).

Instead, the only way to retry the fight is to load a save outside the door, Go through the Ifrit vs. Bahamut, Ifrit vs. Bahamut, Phoenix vs. Bahamut, & Phoenix+Ifrit vs. Bahamut fights and complete that whole battle sequence FIRST. If you run that quickly AND skip cutscenes that'll still take you ~15 mins, and then add that to hoping that your muscle memory for the next fight is still ok, because it's THOSE next 5 mins that matter. This means that if you're hurrying to get to the fight, you're going to max out at ~3 attempts an hour. And let's hope that you're not doing it from the Hideaway Replay stone, because you can't make midpoint saves and you're gonna have to play the ENTIRE GAME SEQUENCE to get a shot at it unless you saved to try and do it on your first playthough (where you shouldn't be doing no-hit runs, but it's also the version of the game that allows you to have the easiest time doing it thanks to assist items).

Now, this wouldn't be an issue if the cutscenes were ACTUALLY skippable. The Titan & Bahamut fights BOTH suffer from this, but the Titan Fight requires you to perfect the entire sequence rather than just the final phase – likely because the Phoenix vs. Bahamut fight is terribly implemented, with a hitbox that changes drastically depending on if he's flying towards Bahamut or alongside him, and all of which is almost impossible to read any telegraphing of the attacks, but if it weren't it's likely that the battle wouldn't end and then restart in the middle of things. The issue starts to show that the combat redesign started to take the pressure of timing events into the MAIN combat, which took them AWAY from the cinematic combat.

The WHOLE POINT of QTEs is so that you get to participate in the cutscene in time with what the character does... but the pivotal final blows and ESPECIALLY the hit that destroys the Heart of the Mothercrystals aren't something that the player does... they're something that the player watches Clive do, which is antithetical to that type of game design. What's apparent is that these cutscenes were designed to have more QTE events than they use, as there are sequences of punches that linger on hits that are meant to be button mashing.

At 13:25 Asura's Wrath uses timing and the directional buttons to dodge the incoming tentacle attacks so that they match the player's movement, and failing one of those shortcuts to the scene at 13:40. This is because any button prompts that have failure conditions need alternative versions of the cutscenes to be designed.

In FFXVI, the attack button mashing sequences can be left in place for literally as long as you like, and it's ONLY the single button Attack or Dodge with the countdown timer have failure conditions or alternate scenes of what happens. This is why the game has so few of them, because they're the only ones that are tied into an actual alteration of what plays out.

At 11:13 FFXVI gives you control of Ifrit for long enough to fire 3 shots before cutting back into a cinematic again, where you're SUPPOSED to dodge the incoming tentacles, but the game literally doesn't implement the QTE controls that Asura's Wrath does, so instead those are just scripted events that are impossible to fail now. The only potential failure is at 12:15 where Ifrit will get smacked down into that platform if he doesn't attack to land it instead.

(Also, let's just point out that this battle ends with them falling through a crack in the Earth in a Gandalf & Balrog style sequence, but somehow ends with them falling out of the sky. The game is just counting on the adrenaline rush and confusing movement to make you forget that it makes no fucking sense at all).

The Conclusion at 21:53 of the Titan Lost Fight is the same as

The Conclusion at 14:31 of Asura's Wrath: Cause & Effect

Asura's Wrath uses those Timing-Based single hits for un-failable QTEs, where the Timing gives a rating on how closely you matched it, but it will still have a default pass even if you mess up the timing. FFXVI doesn't have those, so it can't really implement anything other than just scripted scenes into unfailable button mashing like the end of the Bahamut Fight.

Even then, Asura's Wrath has some button mashing were it's unfailable, but others where you have to actually push against something or lose. The stakes can be higher, because its regular gameplay is muddy so it can get away with expecting precision during the cinematics to come with real consequences. FFXVI's more focused on specific presentation, so it simply can't do that, but even worse is that once that became clear, it doesn't even exchange that for a soft-reward system to still allow the player to "live" those events. The button presses ONLY operate to actually control something, like requiring 15 presses of attack on the mashing scene in order to progress to the next scene. The sole implementation is the bare-bones functional versions. THERE IS NO CINEMATIC DESIGN FUSED INTO THE GAMEPLAY.

This is why, during a combat sequence, there literally is no such thing as a cutscene, because the back end isn't designed to hand off back and forth like that for the same reason that enemies can't drop XP to you directly as they die, and why the game has to force itself to pause and tally up everything with a big announcement before it can start playing a cutscene that's skippable again, because that's tied directly into the mechanics of the zone-based combat system that the game had to move to to make the DMCV-style ARPG combat work, since the open-world multi-Eikon Elemental combat wasn't that tight.

Also, it's worth being extra critical of things like this, because we know that SE & CC2 had a brief partnership when Remake was first being developed, and CC2 also did the FFVII Motorcycle racing game. It's clear that SE wants to draw from that, but exactly like the Motorcycle sequences in FFVIIR – everything that borrows from what CC2 did clearly has ZERO experience in making it work. Phoenix vs Bahamut even outright takes Asura's Wrath's Lock-On system, but it doesn't work because the background doesn't show clear directional momentum, or give a sense of speed, the space between Phoenix & Bahamut over which the projectiles have to travel isn't discernable, and the telegraphing for the attacks or phase transitions can't be read quickly enough because Phoenix obscures Bahamut's model most of the time.

There are SO MANY PLACES where you can see all of these bare bones elements cobbled together and hidden by a totally different type of popular combat, visually stunning portrayals of an engaging story, that especially for a first time audience, it's harder to pick up on just how monumentally short the game falls on things like correct cinematic framing, translating motion, or basic rules of timing in how that's implemented. FFXVI is on rails INFINITELY more than any sequence of Asura's Wrath, but the combat segments having you doing something where it seems like there's player choice makes it SEEM like that's not the case.

This wouldn't be so bad if there weren't gaps in the details... but those are there too for other reasons that seem like rushed production.

...

The more I play the more I find that there is just... so much unrecorded dialogue for the main NPCs and where the options in the sub-menus is awkward to reach, which is matched only by the overwhelming amount of fully recorded dialogue of nameless NPCs where it makes no sense that any one would ever hear what they're saying unless you're going out of your way to knowingly try to hear what everyone says between each sequence shift just because. There's no part of the game that will EVER have you cross those paths. No sidequests, and grinding for levels doesn't do anything, so you have to do it SOLELY just to do it by ignoring the gameplay design.

The Treasure Chests are a goddamn mess. I have intentionally wandered around in the game a LOT even even I ended up hitting up an online guide to find out where the hell some of the chests with the Orchestrions were. The fact that the game added a whole Chapter replay arcade mode that allows you to pick up items because of how poorly marked they are for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON hits in on how the Hunts have no indications, but every quest has the visual marker to the proximity, pings when you cross the area of proximity, and then also adds in the visual marker again so that you don't accidentally wander for too long inside the already constrained area talking to other NPCs with recorded dialogue.

Phoenix's Chest has a glowing blue mark where Joshua seals Ultima away in his chest, and that can also be seen in Ifrit Arisen when they fuse together... except that the Phoenix from the incident at Phoenix Gate when Joshua first awoke, 13 years before that happened also has that same scar on its chest already... And that's a section of the game where Joshua & Clive both have different past models for their humans selves that basically get used once, you actively play an entire sequence as the Phoenix, Ifrit has two different models for the fight used in the Flashback where one is recolored which is all it would have taken to hide that is to remove the blue glow. It's a vastly more egregious issue than Tseng not shorter hair in a single cinematic-only flashback in Remake.

Clive, Jill, Cid, & Adult Joshua all have scabbards to carry their weapons. Even if Clive's enters his through noclipping most of the time, it's there. Goetz's axe is even strapped through the strap of his side bag. Wade & Byron, the NPCs who can join you in combat? Oh, their axes just float next to their bodies all the time when not in use. That's easier to hide with the enemy NPCs mostly using swords hung at belt level, but it's pretty egregious for psuedo-main characters that join you in battle for decent series of events on multiple occasions.

Like the dialogue issue before if you're new to the game, it's not a big deal but I dare ANYONE to offer up a single causal quote from Jill who you spend most of the game travelling with. Go back and play FFXV for 30 mins to remember what it feels like to play a FF game with limited travelling companions. Then come back and play FFXVI for an hour and tell me whether or not you can tell any difference between Clive being alone or Clive travelling with a party. Even the whole desert sequence with Bryon as the most aggressively over-chatty character in the entire game seems to be almost light on conversation when you're teamed up with him & his floating axe... but that's not the only issue that Byron really helps to emphasize.

Byron straight up gives Clive 2000 Gold Talents to help fund his operation, and in the later sidequest "Payback" we find out that a SINGLE GOLD TALENT is worth 10,000 GIL, so Clive's Uncle literally rolled up and dropped 20,000,000 GIL into his lap, which Clive just gives away to Gav & Otto to buy Luxury goods, despite the fact that in-game you're literally scrounging pennies off of the floor and selling insects to afford things still. Even worse is that by the time you get to the Crimson Chocobo and the porter service, they're charging millions of gil for transportation... which is reliable enough that the surrounding porter businesses are struggling... which means people are affording this. Even the debts that the Hideaway owes to Martha, Isabelle, & Charon are 5,000,000 Gil a piece, an they all push back on Clive trying to pay them back. It's not difficult to make it seem like 15,000,000 is a steep amount for the player to unrealistically have access to but when you're buying a sword for a couple thousand... it's shattering its own internal consistency.

The entirety of the gutting of the economic integrity of the story is to cover for the fact that the minimal crafting system makes purchasing Weapons & Armor utterly irrelevant, and it's only good for buying Accessories or Music Scrolls which are each ~20,000+ Gil, and don't really become easy to get until about midway through when the Hunts just start dropping massive monetary rewards on you for absolutely no conceivable reason whatsoever. Nothing about the game's progression or soft caps are well-designed at all, and NG+ literally just doubles the stats by taking the Level cap from 50 to 100 and essentially doubling the damage of your main weapon in an unchanging linear progression, because anything else will start to allow you to overpower your way through the combat – which it literally sacrificed the entire rest of the game for.

That's all totally losing hold of itself at the same point where the last Mothercrystal of Storm gets obliterated, and Otto describes the sky as looking bloody, as well as having the visual similarity to a kicked kidney after two days, a girl at the hideout looking up wonders if she'll ever see the Sun or the Moon again, and the gardeners in the hideaway fear for their plants surviving much longer without any sunlight... MEANWHILE – the skybox of the world is... just changed to being slightly overcast and you can LITERALLY see the sun between the clouds while standing next to those NPCs in the garden and the light rendering of the sunlight shifting under cloud cover is still happening on the ground. This is SUPPOSED to be something like Meteor in FFVII, or Drakengard when the final seal is broken... but it's just... NOT that at all even in the slightest.

3:46:32 for Drakengard 2's version and what FFXVI's Primogenesis is described as by NPC in the game.

Especially since I'm as deep into researching the history of all of these things being told as stories through the mediums of game design over the last 30 years as I am, and it's my job to pick up on software development corner-cutting like... holy shit, dude I am amazed that this game even WORKS at all, because it seems like every team's work on this is a sneeze in every direction from being an absolutely unmitigated disaster, and it's no surprise that it was locked at 30FPS and barely had any understanding of its controller schemes or other things.

This also makes me understand why Final Fantasy games actually NEED a really massive development cycle to make themselves into anything that's truly great, and just reinforce why FFVIIR pivoted SO HARD into essentially making a PS5 game work for PS4 for Remake, because that groundwork is and was absolutely essential for making the development of Rebirth & the final part possible at all. Even then the post-Chapter 16 rush-to-finish work in FFVIIR because of the set-in-stone PS5 launch just has SO MUCH in common with parts of FFXVI that it hurts. Like... you can FEEL how much the teams involved wanted to make something WAY better – but they made something that functions and dressed it up with excellent distractions for most people. I really just hope that the near-perfect reviews don't push the executives to make that window for a development cycle into an expectation for future FF titles, because HOLY SHIT THIS IS NOT GREAT.

The more of FFXVI that I play through, the more I wish I could see what this game would have been instead if it still had like 2 years more development time to ACTUALLY put everything together to match with the huge shifts in scope that they were doing and clearly massively behind on trying to adjust the entirety of their project to.



X

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Ok, so time to run through notes now that I've full completed the game.

By the hundredth time I'd opened a chest to find it full of a pile of sharpened & boody hides in need of soaking in chocobo brains & urine, I realized that I genuinely couldn't think of a single encounter that had given anything noteworthy as a reward, and the only chests that had anything worthwhile were the Orchestrion Rolls, which – even after getting them all, I couldn't tell you where they were. Additionally, I ended up selling these "Craftable" items that you can have literal THOUSANDS of, because the amount of crafting I've done in the game is still basically 0 and that's barely changed at all in NG+ FF Mode, because the only items that really matter are all the boss fight ones, or the Blacksmith sidequest. Related is that while the Blacksmith items are all upgraded for FF Mode, the Accessories that you get as rewards are the same as the ones you got before already, rather than an upgraded version – more things pointing at how essentially the entirety of this system is an afterthought.

Also, I have to say that the Accessory that upgrades Torgal's damage and then it getting a +1 Version felt like a joke, but that was still nothing next to the Accessory that allows your Charged magic to be 0.2 seconds faster. Like... I know that the Accessories were basically just ripped directly out of the AP Upgrades, but this is ridiculous. Even more is that there are all of the "The Will of <element> (Ability Name)" Accessories cover basically all of the skills... except that both Jill & Dion have unique rewards at the end of their quests, so the Accessories that upgrade their most powerful Eikon abilities are called "Bahamut's Mercy" & "Shiva's Kiss" making it seem like those were about the only two things designed as ACTUAL accessories as objects meant to be given to Clive.

This gets into the Item section of the Menu. It contains subsections of "Usable Items" "Craftable" "Rewards" & "Key Items" but nothing else. The "Valuables" get lumped into the "Craftable" section so that it doesn't look so overwhelmingly barren, but when it comes to selling items that's actually preventatively difficult and means that you might end up selling a craftable that there's only one of in the game and locking yourself out of progression. The "Sell All Valuables" shortcut exists, but with barely anything in your items, that seems ridiculously unnecessary, but especially when the game is just dumping the Magic Ash, Sharpened Teeth, & Bloody Hides on you in impossibly useless quantities. On top of that, aside from VERY early on, you'll never get Stoneskin or Strength tonics from anything in chests or on the ground, which means that the game is making them artificially WAY less common than they should be, but it's also not giving them ANY sense of how or why they exist in the real world. In a palace you're not finding money or potions in chests, but you're finding ashes and hundreds of teeth, which is this half-finished game design being discordantly fucked up and totally out of place with the world design.

Then as it gets to Bahamut, there start to be weird narrative inconsistencies. When coming up from the sewers, Clive uses the rope on a cargo lift to pull himself up a couple stories in a cutscene... except that he's travelling with Jill and Torgal, and unlike every other scene it's not shown how they follow him, but they just teleport up to the platform. This gets into how the game treats the party companions. Unlike with FFXV, they don't actually follow you through a lot of the pathing. Most of the time, they just teleport to your location behind camera, so they don't follow you through doorways or onto elevators because everything is animated JUST accommodating Clive. That's fine as a backup solution if an NPC gets stuck pathing, but seeing it as what's essentially the PRIMARY means of movement between environments and even being a way to not address story transitions is wholly disappointing.

In "Rekindling the Flame" even though Wade says that he'll remain to help rebuild and that you should go report what happened to Martha after defending the settlement... except that when you arrive the first thing that Martha says is that Wade told her about what happened with you fighting the Slime... which is explicitly what you were going to to and Wade hasn't left that location nor has Martha gone there. It's inconsistent to the scenario, which points to things like Oscar's storyline getting introduced and completely abandoned at this point. Even if Clive has explicitly told Oscar to go back to Eastside to help them rebuild, when "Rekindling the Flame II" starts, Oscar stays next to your room thanking you and promising to return until the end of the game because that questline wasn't completed.

By the time it gets the Kanver, the animation & cinematic composition quality is already taking a MASSIVE hit. If you watch the scene where Byron sees that Joshua is alive and runs to hug him crying with generic and awkwardly colliding animations, and then you go back to watch the "You cock." scene of Benedikta & Titan embracing, it's hard to remember that those sequences were made by the same teams.

There's continual issues with the Primogenesis Sky as when Clive promises to watch the moon with Jill on the beach and the sky is all meant to be obscured, there's LITERALLY a shot of Jill looking at Metia & the Moon clearly visible between the clouds.

As things get later and later into the game, the Sidequests that were SUPPOSED to be main quests become more and more obvious with the huge amount of story devoted to them that had previously been linked into the main quests. Martha's Rest, Lostwing, & Northreach all cover elements of Clive's role as "Cid" and seeing the earlier inconsistency with the Main Quest having missives being listed as side quests only makes it apparent how the workflow was being covered. By the time it hits the end of the game, it's not just the NPC dialogue that's relegated to the non-fully-voiced dialogue tree options, but there are even back-and-forth exchanges with Clive that makes it clear that these are just a functional planning workflow for building the quests and they're left in an increasingly incompleted state the longer the game goes. Even when Jote & Byron have Sidequests, this opens up the sub-option for the world state dialogue that's otherwise completely inaccessible suggesting that there are still LOADS of half-completed dialogue strings in these semi-key NPCs.

This is from a game, where early on, when Otto first arrives at the hideaway with injured bearers even before you know his game, there are 2-3 groups of background NPCs who move to see what's going on and have proximity dialogue reacting to the event, and Cid's dismissive dialogue in his Solar changes. The level of attention to contextual detail is just a complete goddamn mess, and only gets worse the further into the game you get. While Blackthorne & Zoltan have this MASSIVE quest around the challenge of building you the Ragnarok, and then they have a concept of being able to make something even BETTER with their combined skills... but the Gotterdammerung is literally just a silently created weapon that looks EXACTLY the same, and has zero emphasis on what's supposed to be THE crowning achievement not only of anything that Blackthorne's ever made, but that is also SUPPOSED to require Zoltan to be able to create. In the scene where you're leaving to Origin, Martha, Isabelle, & Quinten are all in the background... despite none of them ever having come to the Hideaway before, and none of them even speak to Clive directly. They're just overtly in the background but totally not involved despite that being a pretty important detail.

Even the Lore info unlock gets messed up where, as soon as Philippe leaves to protect Isabelle, his bio states that "he lead the defense of Northreach against thralls after leaving his post and reconciled with the Duke" before that second half of the storyline even takes place as a different sidequest at the end of the game. A similar issue happens with Jote's bio unlocking and listing her name before the scene where Joshua addresses her by name happens. On top of that, there's the Medicine Girl, Kihel who gets named in her bio despite the game LITERALLY never using her name, Dion not even knowing it, and there also being zero follow-up as to whether or not Terence ever meets her and if the two of them get out of Twinsides before Origin emerges and obliterates that entire area. Additionally, despite items later revealing that the big spiky dragons from the North that are also present in Ironholm & in Ash are called "Archeosaurs" the Bestiary entry is under the named entity Fafnir of the North. Those are things that don't slip through QA.

The biggest issue with the should-have-been-main-quests sidequests are that they're not anything like running background tasks for random people in the area or around the hideaway. As a comparison in FFVIIR, the sidequests are literally all just things that Cloud may or may not do while he happens to be in an area depending on who which people he's interacting with. They're genuinely sidequests. FFXVI has incompleted story that's relegated to the sidelines. This also makes the random time compression to force the story forward a whole 5 years feel exceedingly uneven, since that was half a decade of Clive devoting himself to being "Cid" that's a core part of the narrative. This time skip SHOULD have happened after Clive had gotten all of his Seals from the towns around Valasthea, so that post-transition Clive was in a position of leveraging his influence to keep things at the Hideaway running. Instead, the Seal of the Undying, Broken Anvil, & Crimson Chocobo feel massively out of place, despite them all being located in Dhalmekia and being able to have been implemented BEFORE Titan obliterates the Hideaway.

There are also several moments where the exact level of presecution of bearers isn't really consistent. Isabelle slept with a Bearer and they ran away as lovers to Northreach where the Veil took them in and treated them both well... except that this is the place in the Empire where just nearby the child treats Bearers like a disposable pet, and another noble literally just buys them to have them get mauled to death by dogs. The Ironbloods are chastized for treating their bearers like subhumans... but literally everywhere else in the world does that. When in Waloed where bearers are being fed to a beast in an arena Clive mentions that even in the Empire they don't treat their bearers this way... except that he LITERALLY EXPERIENCED EXACTLY THAT HAPPENING. There was clearly meant to be more nuance to the ways that Rosaria, The Empire, Dhalmekia, & Waloed treated bearers... but those nuances don't really get consistently applied, and even The Continent buys Bearers for some reason. This was also a core part of the follow-up with the lost history of the Bearers and the Executors covering that up, but again – those are things that just aren't completed, because those parts of the game are unfinished and the whole of the design isn't solidified.

There are even big plans like Theodore moving the bearers to an abandoned fishing villiage, but those lower down canyon areas all get visually filled with the Aetherfloods when Titan is defeated, and this puts things into a similar position to the issues that you have in Sanbreque with the Aetherfloods spreading from the crystal and even in the wake of its destruction that would have spread into local regions even before Ultima's trigger of Primogenesis would have spread destruction out across all of Valasthea, and that starts to impact more places like Martha's Rest or Lostwing, where those sidequests stick things in awkward paces of escalation that are discordant with the rest of the developments in the wolr – which is completely different to how cohesive things are in the early parts of the game. There are even details like how Midadol has a room in Cid's Solar with her stuff in it that's left unused in the original Hideaway. Her introduction and spending more time there feels like it was a key detail, which also points to a bigger issue in the early game segment.

In starting FF Mode, it allows you to skip everything prior to Phoenix Gate. The fact that this part of the game allows you to play as Clive with a different character model, you play as Joshua, and it has two Eikon battles make it seem like there's a really important part of the game there that never happened because it doesn't match the way the combat changed. Having more time to get acquainted with Rosaria seems like it was meant to have been a preliminary scenario to everything else in the game. Even Clive's secret island retreat and the story of running away with Jill are things that the later sidequests TELL about, but they don't SHOW, and this points at a larger issue in how the game scopes out its encounters.

You can always tell if there's a location that you're going to that you'll be able to return to again in the future based SOLELY on whether or not you can open up and view a local map of the area (Except for Clive's childhood hideaway, which points to likely when it was made in development). In FFVIIR, no matter what area you're in the minimap exists to show you where you're at spatially, so that you can understand where you're going. In FFXVI, the minimap only exists for non-scripted zones, which means anywhere that you can't travel back to just doesn't get one. Again, this is a loss of parity because of development crunch, it's not in any way an intentional gameplay design. What makes that worse is that there are a ton of places where if you'd been there before, you'd be able to feel more things about them later.

When you see the Black Shields' massacre at the Auldhyl Docks, it's hard to feel about it because you the PLAYER has never seen this place before but CLIVE is intimately familiar with this place from when he was a kid. On top of that, there are tons of slaughtered NPCs all over, like a man dead whose body is hanging off of the side of the docks. But as soon as you leave and meet with Wade at the Lazarus District, there are two of the men who come to bury them and there is no evidence of what happened. There is a METICULOUS amount of detail and design to that scenario, but the game literally just rushes you past all of it and doesn't have the impact, especially given the momentum that you have coming through Amber and not being welcomed – let alone when the Aetherflood consumed Amber later on, Clive has proximity dialogue for the town being consumed but there's nothing outside of a brief passing mention because it's too late in the game with things that were already getting skimmed through.

The other evidence that the whole interface for quests is just a development asset taken from the MMO structure is the presence of a dedicated button to "Prioritize Quest" when it's only really at the VERY end of the game that you can have a stack of incomplete quests that need prioritizing. The game just isn't fleshed out enough to justify that needing a dedicated shortcut control.

The pacing continues to have issues showing that the story planning and gameplay were never brought into alignment. Not only does Garuda's sword get made obsolete literally just after you use it for the first time, but when you get Shiva's sword (stats of 300) the quest unlocks for Ragnarok (stats of 325). This is before you go to Waloed where you'll find Masamune (310) and then unlock Odin's Everdark (315) or the Defender (320) which you'll literally never use because they're obsolete before you get them. However, the sword you get from Cid, Titan, & Bahamut all carry through as the strongest weapon for a significant portion of the game. It feels like before the combat system changed and the Eikons were all specific, Clive's sword was just going to change based upon which Eikon & element he was currently channelling. This would be why a critical gimmick to ALL of Odin's Eikon abilities all involve using his sword specifically. If that was still in place, then the activation of Zantatsuken would work by just pressing the button to trigger you Eikon Feat like all of the others, rather than needing you to press the Eikon Feat button, hold down the attack button, and then let go of the attack button to trigger it.

This would also track with why that weapon would be interconnected into the Blacksmithing upgrades in a single linear progression that replaces the one that came before, as that would have just ADDED the new form to the blade the same way that Clive was gaining abilities over time, not replacing them. Again, that's all related to things that aren't a part of the gameplay loop now but they make more sense if the weapon upgrades were just improving your existing sword and the visuals weren't a part of that. Especially because the hold attack button would have just been a charged elemental attack, rather than only wrapping the blade in Fire. Especially given the way that the final battle against Ultimalius goes through the linear progression of all of the Eikon abilities, this tracks with early end-to-end design that's still present in the game.

This brings back to the D-Pad having a really terrible functional design. Half of the time if you load a save, or if Torgal has left and joined the party, your default will be set to items. You shouldn't place expendable items into the same area as repetitive combat actions. The only time I ever used items was when attempting to command Torgal but it was on the wrong option. Those mistakes all cost you actual money (unless you get a game over to restart with full items, which only exists so that you can't get softlocked because the balance is poorly implemented). This gets into a larger issue which is that when you ARE travelling with your companions... Clive is the weakest member of the party.

Clive is the only member of the party who can take damage, except that Jill, Cid, & Joshua all suffer from using their Eikon powers. Clive is in danger during gameplay, but they literally NEVER are. As a result, they also don't have ANY spontaneous dialogue around combat status. They can tell Clive to look out when enemies are nearby or occasionally have a quick single line at the end of battle, but they only talk to Clive. Unlike FFXV, they don't have free dialogue between each other and they just don't feel like real people. Failing at this element is one of the main reasons that the DMCV combat just doesn't suit this type of an RPG narrative because it doesn't allow you to micromanage the people around you or feel connected to others... which is literally the central part of the story.

You have to feel the WANT to do things on your own and not risk those around you. You SHOULD be getting tons of healing items and trying to keep Joshua, Jill, & Cid safe when they use a powerful skill to save you. Clive should be CONSTANTLY driven to try to go out on his own and handle the burdens of everyone else by himself because Mythos makes his body uniquely more resilient and it seems like the most logical path to take in order to keep the people around him safe. That literally doesn't work unless you make the gameplay focus on that. This is exactly what FFXV does but in reverse, and while it wasn't well-received in its original version, that's what Chapter 13 was when Noctis gets left all alone with nothing but the Ring of the Lucii to protect himself. The gameplay makes you feel isolated and alone and need your friends around you, whereas in FFXVI, you're supposed to struggle to accept others around you. That's why the end-game quests involve PERMANENTLY bringing Joshua & Jill along with you, because that's supposed to be a commitment made by Clive to take responsibility for letting others come with him and help him rather than doing it all alone or just with Torgal who is safe with Eikons and using powers in a way like Clive does.

This is where it's especially annoying because the WORLD DESIGN of those things are still totally intact. When you travel to Ash, the castle is overrun by Orcs, but by the time you make it to Eistla, there are half-eaten meals all over and the town looks like the Christian rapture took place, because that's the intentional parallel for the whole area. There are little bits of narrative, like an inn with a hanging sign like the type of place Clive would have gone to get a seal... but it's totally empty. This starts to get to how towns are all zoned like FFXV where you can't sprint through them... except that this ALSO applies to anything that is a town even if and when it's totally abandoned and populated by monsters like the overworld, because they don't update their state dynamically to match the events in-world.

While the game has some sections with really hauntingly beautiful music, the fact that anywhere that dialogue happens gets the BGM hard muted forever remains really odd. Worse than that though is that the combat sequences for the boss fights don't have unique boss fight soundtracks. The Eikons are central to the game, and them & Ultima all ought to have had musical themes that defined them. Half the tracks in the Orchestrion are things I remember hearing but have ZERO ability to recall something unique in the game that they were tied to, and for a fucking Final Fantasy game that's a massive disappointment. The tracks that I like are overwhelmingly the ones from Waloed where I just got to wander in near total absence of anything other than just the surrounding atmosphere, and they didn't get reused later on to disconnect that memory of that one place and the BGM. It feels like the total silence in a lot of the towns may also have been that there just... wasn't a track completed for that place when there should have been. Compare that to FFVIIR's music that has numerous layers of the tracks that change depending on combat or where you are and it really emphasizes just how far this game is falling short.

Seeing Waloed with the massive crystal and lightning all around was amazing. Unfortunately, you can't appreciate that view for long, because all of the sidequests in that region don't unlock until AFTER you've already completed that quest, which is once again the game's design doing a criminal disservice to the world design. Like, I wanted to do nothing but wander this area and look at that but there's not a damn thing to do. At least if you fast travel out, there's a humorour lampshading line from Gav stating that the Enterprise is still out at sea and that you should have considered how you were getting back before coming to the Hideaway. That's about one of the only times where the discordant design felt like it had actually been acknowledged by the design team. But then the Odin Boss fight happens...

So, in the game, it's been clear that the Eikons deal 100x the amount of damage, so that the big numbers feel impressive. Except that this doesn't work here because while there are QTE sections of Eikon Odin & Eikon Ifrit fighting one another, the actual COMBAT section is with Clive vs Barnabas, so that's the health that's being used and so the massive strikes are dealing like 3000-4000 damage, which is less than your ultimate Eikon attacks deal. This starts to emphasize another game design issue which is that as you get more and more skills and learn to master the gameplay... Clive feels WEAKER as Ifrit.

While it was the peak of a huge crescendo of linking your powers with Phoenix in the Bahamut fight, and the whole combat sequence was Ifrit and/or Phoenix vs. Bahamut, it's the phase 2 of the fight against Ultima Risen/Ultimalius. When sandwiched between Clive having access to all his abilities that you've created into a custom loadout, the middle section feels... extremely weak especially because – you're not used to fighting that way. The game doesn't spend time training you to take on that challenge. You don't have the unique combos and counters that you're used to. This is the absolute opposite of what that should do. Asura's Wrath always focuses on making sure that the moments with interactions and combat where you get overpowered ALWAYS match to you feeling stronger or weaker based on the gameplay challenge and sense of power, and FFXVI fumbles this almost across the board.

As another comparison to Asura's Wrath and the Wyzen battle... I have to talk about the Behemoth battle and the world's slowest falling meteor where the presentation just murders the way that this is supposed to feel.

Time: 3:02

Time: 8:02

Like... the Behemoth's Meteor comes streaking down, and then just hangs out 30 ft in the air while Clive & Joshua talk. There's no clear cracking barrier or ward still up when Joshua fumbles. There's no QTE timed to catch it, but only to stop it after it's already been stopped and then remove it. It's things like this where the IDEA is in place, but the entire implementation just scuffs it.

The Interdimentional Rift is basically just a walking simulator for story exposition. This MIGHT have been a cool area but it's so dark that you can't see anything. Like with other non-minimap areas, this isn't a place that you get to explore and try to escape. It's a walking escalation simulator. This is the total opposite of being able to drink in the shattered mystery of a place like Farum Azula in Elden Ring where you can fully appreciate all of the visual design of the mysterious sadness of a forever broken and frozen in time floating city. The problem is that as a locked-in walking simulator that's ALSO non-combat highlights another issue.

There's no way to see which Eikon you're selected on. While that's NORMALLY not an issue as that re-enables as you leave a region that's instanced as a town, it's REALLY problematic during something that just pushes you directly into a boss fights areas where you can't make sure to be set to the correct Eikon to react to opening fights with the setup where you have ability counters that you want to use right from the start. Aside from Bahamut's fight the time I ended up getting hit while attempting perfects were either being exposed to a totally new huge attack, or when there was a long cutscene and it would jump back into gameplay and I'd have to check the bottom right of the screen to see which Eikon I was on to know which button to reach to and if I could dodge or directly counter an attack that fires off LITERALLY the second that that combat starts.

That's just bad game design because you're locked out of critical information for no reason, especially since during the Ifrit and cutscene sections the Eikon change button is literally unused. Even outside of combat, it doesn't change if you press the button. While Elden Ring has non-combat zones, you can change equipment and the only thing that breaks in those areas is that the control to two-hand a weapon doesn't work because that button has also got a direct combat function. Eikons should be available to change during non-combat sections. As I was mentioning earlier, this wouldn't have mattered in an older version with all four of the Eikon abilities all the time because they have matching purpose but different implementation, and the sword would likely have been a secondary visual indicator for which state you were in even during the cutscene sections.

Even worse is that when you defeat the Necron Ultima there the Mothercrystal just explodes. That didn't happen with Typhon, as Cid still needed to annihilate the Heart of the Mothercrystal. It feels like there was a whole segment that just got cut out, but ESPECIALLY because of what happens just before. There's a whole section where Goetz, Jill, Dion, Gav, and everybody else show up. This is the classic Final Fantasy "choose the party before continuing" section, and with all of the late game developments with Harpocrates & Dion as well as him being another Dominant joining the party, it makes sense that he would have wanted to accompany you directly, not in least part because Bahamut is the Eikon of Light. While Jill's item of Shiva's Kiss is given to you when she permanently joins the party, Dion's quest ends with Bahamut's Mercy which makes it fairly obvious that he was designed as another NPC meant to accompany Clive around the endgame before everything leads up to them needing to go to Origin together. They seemingly would have done the assault on Stormhyrr, making it even more impactful when it seems like Dion is going to stay behind only just jump back aboard the Enterprise to depart at the last minute.

Then it goes into the into the assault of Origin. It's pretty clear that all of the scenes of Bahamut attacking massive waves of defenders were meant to be the Eikon Phoenix-like combat sequences of locking on and blowing away flying targets matching the whole design of Megaflare and also feeling like the power up from when you had to fight AGAINST this but now you were able to control it, but with those being... very lackluster that's just one whole cutscene. This also gets into the fact that the game doesn't let you control the other NPCs even during THEIR critical story sections, like Shiva's assault on the Ironblood. So, the whole thing is a glorified cutscene, but once again – it still ends with the Combat Victory scene because there was MEANT to be a combat sequence there.

Then what happens once they make it in? Do you get to explore ANY of that massive city of the Fallen 16 Ultima? No. You wake up in a hallways, and Clive picks up Joshua where it's literally a forced on-rails forward walk to initiate the Ultima fight. You can't turn, you can't pan the camera, you can't appreciate the massive interior of the Dark Crystal that you just broken into, you can't really do anything. There's no massive fight to work your way in to the final showdown area. Clive just happened to get swatted out of the sky and fall into a floating platform the size of Midgar in EXACTLY the right spot at the center of everything (despite the cinematic clearly showing that that's not where he impacted). Also no explanation for when or why Joshua randomly takes off his shawl covering the sealed Ultima wound, but just a fade in and fade out to make those just happen. That entire final sequence is rushed and condensed even more than FFVIIR's Chapter 18 where there are still at least minor segments of gameplay between the various micro boss battles.

While the Phase 1 leading to the Phase 2 feels like an escalation, the collapse back into the Phase 3 doesn't carry the same feeling of resisting a god the way that Destroyer Asura punching Creator Chakravartin hard enough that they have to brawl in their weakened forms, because you feel like you have access to all your powers again, and it's not a struggle back into a crescendo. The Phase 3 Ultimalius boss fight hammering attack for all of the Eikon clashes was super satisfying, but especially Ultima's plan necessitating Clive to absorb ALL of the Eikons really makes Joshua's discovery in Waloed about Leviathan The Lost extremely discordant. I kept waiting for the need to counter an Eikon I didn't yet have... but for whatever reason that's just a non-factor at all, which flies in the face of the ENTIRE STORY but ESPECIALLY there being two Eikons of Fire. Then add in that the slow motion final punch is just... ridiculous because there SHOULD have been an attack prompt to Clive hurling his sword through Ultimalius' chest, but even more than that, Clive deals 999,999 damage.. which again just doesn't match when they're fighting at a human scale. It's all pushed over the top and once again is forcing the game UI into a cinematic context where it doesn't belong at all.

FFXVI covers this up with giving all of the emotional conclusions of its story, but when you got back into seeing the start of the game again... it's nothing AT ALL like this. Back at the start, all the sidequests are small & contextual. By the time you get to Garuda, the choreography and QTE interactions in the Eikon boss fight are still flawed, but they're decent and (as I mentioned with the original trailer) it even cuts out the damage numbers from the cinematic hits, which... it's somehow perfect that FFXVI manages to emphasize its most critical victory by showing off its most myopic flaw to its design.

Getting into the NG+ and it's just... all of the things that were broken are more broken. The game introduces you to crafting excitedly, but everything is uneven. It hypes up the Ultimate Weapon... but that's ACTUALLY a reward for going through and beating all of the Eikons in the game a second time. You get another 50 levels of flat, linear progression following the exact same flaws as before. The Last Elixir is no longer available in the shop, just... the game makes it seem like there's infinitely more to it than there is.

Like... good gods, I do love the story... but I love what it WANTED to be way more. The world design in the game has amazing work and effort poured into countless details, but the framework around it rams into that so awkwardly and they're almost never in alignment. You can feel that there are just literal acres of content that are incomplete. It's like Clive being caring about not trying to fighten away the Solver Chocobos while getting a feather for Gav, which is ignoring that the game constantly puts you in circumstances where you're forced to just murder Chocobos all over the place as once of the very few enemies you ever see just because they're a complete entity.

It feels like a game that's more flawed than pre-royale FFXV and more rushed than the post-Ch-16 sections of Remake, which is why I DESPERATELY hope that FFVII Rebirth manages to leverage the fact that all of the work on Remake was foundation for making that game being a critical part of its development cycle. Like, FFXVI feels like it should have had twice the game that actually exists and we're all a little worse off for it.

I think that the most painful part is that while it follows the complex commentary on human existence that the manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Rose of Versailles, Naruto, & Fire Punch set up as well as following in the footsteps of how games like DMCV & Asura's Wrath address those narratives and bringing those all together into a Final Fantasy game it falls short of hitting any meaningful beat more memorably than any of those titles. While FFXV felt like falling in love with a game that's basically just the "Greatest Hits of Final Fantasy" it feels like FFXVI ends up just being the cliffnotes version of those narratives, and the only thing it REALLY delivers on is in the design of its characters & environment where it wanted to tell that story, while focusing your attention on its parry & counter combat system to distract from the fact that no facet of that improves or contributes to anything about what it's trying to be as a Final Fantasy game.

The only thing I'm left with is still the feeling of wishing for a world where I got to see what this game looked like with two more years of development the same way I'm left wishing for the world where the FFXV team was allowed to complete its full set of DLC to finish what they ACTUALLY wanted to deliver. Right now it seems like Rebirth will be the very first time that POTENTIALLY we might be getting a truly complete package of a Final Fantasy mainline title that's not leaving important things on the cutting room floor – and it's taking the whole preliminary foundation of Remake and 2 BluRay discs to do that.


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[X-SOLDIER]

So, now that I've infodumped out all of my notes here while playing up to the point of completing a full run through the game, perfecting every boss fight, and starting out a FF Mode NG+ run knowing that there's nothing truly new in it, and now that I know all of what to address in the whole scope of the game:

I'm curious if anyone thinks if condensing these things down and making an article of a critical perspective of FFXVI might be a worthwhile/interesting endeavour (and also how long to wait before posting something like that).

If not, I'm glad ta leave things here.



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