Full spoilers for the entirety of the game follows.
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
So, I beat the game and couldnāt find any recent discussions about it here, so thought Iād make one. Iād love to hear other peopleās thoughts on the game (or on my thoughts). In no particular order:
-
The combat system was very cool! I wasnāt sure about it at first and I still admittedly miss controlling a party rather than an individual, but it sure is a fast paced and varied system. I switched my eikons up a few times, with the final set I found most useful being phoenix (ignition / flames of rebirth), bahamut (wicked wheel, gigaflare), and shiva (windup, diamond dust).
- I found that phoenixās āoā ability was the most useful most of the time but mostly used it for reaching flyers. I usually didnāt otherwise find I had time for o abilities.
- I found that most normal enemies were extremely easy, so it was best to build largely around staggering + heavy hitting the toughest enemies.
-
The ending was really sad. Though also a little confusing. It seems like Clive tried to heal Joshua, couldnāt, and sacrificed himself toā¦ I think completely destroy magic for good? Sounds like the blight would still be there, though presumably wouldnāt progress anymore?
- I like that the game used the red star again. I felt so bad when Jill realized Clive was gone.
- TBH, āconfusingā was kinda a recurring theme in the game for me. But at least some of that was surely intentional (Ultimaās monologues).
-
The game sure had a lot of really badass, dramatic fights! Ifrit really helped to make some fights feel massive in scope without having much āludonarrative dissonanceā (since early game, you couldnāt control Ifrit and it was supposed to be extremely taxing to fully prime). The Titan and Bahamut fights are perhaps some of the most epic Final Fantasy battles Iāve ever done (and Iāve played almost all of them)!
-
I thought it was a bit weird that the bulk of the game is based in a Fallen airship, yet you never actually restore the airship, even when you need to fly! When Origin rose, I was like āaha, time to finally restore the airship!ā, but nope. Felt like a tease.
- I also really wish the game had more lore on the Fallen. Theyāre such a prominent centerpiece of many maps, and yet the game barely delves into them at all. I kept expecting they were saving it for some big bombshell later, but nope, nothing.
-
One thing that confused me is that Ultima talked a lot about Clive needing to absorb the other Eikons, yet no Leviathan? I noticed early on that the game said there is one Eikon for each element and listed 8 elements, yet only 7 Eikons (plus Ifrit) were ever mentioned. āLeviathan the lostā even gets named dropped by Joshua and yet Ultima doesnāt even seem to notice the missing Eikon. Wonder if theyāre saving this for DLC? Either way, it feels poorly executed considering how central Clive absorbing Eikons is to the plot.
-
Oof, Waloed was depressing. I was so hyped to see Ash, after going so long without ever even seeing this whole 'nother continent. Only for it to be a graveyard of dead and Akashic.
-
Fuck Annabella (Cliveās mom). She was such a piece of shit. I kinda wonder if Ultima was influencing her from the start, or if it was only later? I suspect she betrayed Rosaria out of her own free will, considering how terribly she treats Clive from the start.
-
The treatment of Bearers was sickening. At first I was noticing parallels to American chattel slavery, but it quickly became more of a Nazi Germany kinda thing. It was a great design choice to make Clive a ābearerā so that youād experience the bigotry firsthand. I wanted to outright murder most NPCs I met because they were so horrible.
- Itās especially sad when you later find out why Bearers are treated bad. They were originally freaking blessed and people in power were just jealous/afraid, so had to scapegoat Bearers.
- I also felt so bad for Lāubor. He was the centerpiece of his village and yet the people who loved him turned on him so fast the instant they learned he was a Bearer. And they acted like it was some big betrayal, as if they couldnāt understand why a Bearer would want to not be a Bearer.
-
The map design is very meh. The game is pretty, but aside from the mothercrystals and Fallen ruins, everything feels so grounded that it may as well be our world during medieval ages. I want a fantasy world that feels fantastic! And aesthetics aside, most maps are fairly linear. They often have some branches (many used only for specific side quests), but felt like they didnāt give enough reasons to explore. The movable parts of the map feel narrow and restrictive.
- For whatever bizarre reason, you can often find larger enemies off the beaten path, but theyāre rarely worth the time. The XP/AP/gil they give is hilariously bad compared to just a pack of normal enemies that you might be able to beat in a single AoE spell.
-
Early game side quests are terrible, but they get great later in the game. Itās really weird. IDK why they made the early game quests so bad. It set me up to expect side quests to suck. And the game has a lot of side quests, so they probably could have trimmed a few to make the early game side quests suck less. In particular, the early game quests within the hideaway feel very forced and awkward.
-
Ultima was a decent villain. Very creepy (those eyes!). Iām not entirely sure I understand where he and his ācollectiveā came from, but am thinking from another planet, since his final form fights in a cosmic setting and Origin is described as a ship, but looks far more like a spaceship than anything else.
- Barnabas was also great. Super intimidating in ever scene. The battle youāre supposed to lose was well executed, as youāve seen a few of those āpress the attackā moments by then, but itās the first one that canāt be finished fast enough (I kinda wonder what happens if you cheated?).
-
I liked the twist that the crystals and magic were bad for the environment. Kinda wonder why no academics or something at least noticed that before, though. Isnāt the pattern of the blightās movement kinda obvious to its cause? Kinda feels like they missed an opportunity to draw analogies to climate change, where we know whatās causing it and simply refuse to do anything about it.
-
The contextual codex was a neat idea, but the execution felt lacking. It only seems to work for the main quest, despite the fact that side quests populate a huge number of codex entries. I also found that despite regularly checking it, I often would not see the new codex entries I expected to see (until I went to visit Harpocrates). New pages of existing entries were also written as if youād only read the newest page, with lots of repetition for minimal (if any) new information. I love lore, so codexes are super appealing to me. It was sometimes disappointing for new entries to not actually say anything new.
- It generally didnāt do a good enough job at explaining new things (e.g., at the very beginning of the game, characters are talking about how theyāre on a mission to kill a dominant and for so long Iām like āWTF is a dominantā). And it took a little while to understand the high level global politics because the game is slow to explain them.
-
Damn, the game is long. Took me about 60 hours, doing basically everything except the cronoliths (I tried those a couple of times and gave up ā too hard and not fun to me).
-
The game does fantastic at updating NPC dialogue. I noticed so many changes to dialogue throughout the events of the game, including side quests. Lots of games barely update dialogue and itās sad cause I want to know how characters are reacting to some big event.
- The hideaway really needed to be more compact. You spend soooo much time walking around to visit quest givers and hear updated dialogue.
- For whatever weird reason, some major NPC dialogue (shop keepers and such) isnāt fully voiced. I donāt get why. It felt incomplete. I mean, Iām glad that dialogue didnāt get outright cut, but would have preferred it being fully voiced.
Overall, it was a very fulfilling and fun story driven game with action packed combat. Iād give it a 9/10 (though I am a Final Fantasy fangirl, so am biased).
I thought it was one of the worse games Iāve spent time on in the last few years. Iāll repeat some of your points below for sure.
The pros for me were:
-Backdrops were gorgeous.
-Music was top-tier.
-Technically well-designed (I only run into 1-2 very minor bugs during my playthrough and had no performance issues).
The cons were basically everything else.
Story:
-The game story lacks cohesion. There are plot threads that get dropped randomly and never picked up again. Some examples here are: (a) the medicine girl is a recurring character that has no real purpose (really, anyone couldāve healed Dion at the end), (b) the Fallen are just kind of around but stop being developed after a certain point, Ā© so much of the game is spent on the plight of Bearers yet that gets completely side-lined in the final act, (d) Leviathan is missing for some reason, (e) there is a lack of characterization for the Eikons considering how important they are to the gameās premiseā¦they just kind of exist and thatās all you need to care about. These are just off the top of my head.
-There are other plot holes too. For example, when Jill is kidnapped Clive and Joshua just say āoh itās cool, we still feel Shiva so we know sheās alive.ā If thatās the case, why did Jill and Cid not feel the Phoenix the entire time Joshua was thought to be dead? The game also makes a big deal about how turning into Shiva is harming Jillās body and Cid is shown to be turning to stone because he primed Ramuh too many times. Yet when you see Jill naked, her body is totally pristine for some reason. Joshua spent years gathering info on Ultima yet has no further info to give once he joins up with Clive. Early-game Joshua also conveniently wears the same hooded outfit as Ultima for some reason thatās never explained.
-Overall, the story relies on too many overdone anime tropes instead of going for something original. A lot of the plot can be guessed before it happened (e.g., Cid dying and the hideout being destroyed in that one mission were not shockers at all). Plot points like Barnabas being too powerful make no sense because Clive just goes and beats him the third time despite not really being that much more powerful (yes, he got access to Shiva but the game doesnāt really communicate this being a big power level increase, certainly not to the point where he can completely turn the odds in his favor).
-The ending falls flat too. Itās basically a rehash of the ending to Mass Effect 3.
-The characters are pretty badly written. Cid is retroactively made into a master inventor in the latter half of the game despite it never being mentioned before. Jill doesnāt really do anything noteworthy either. Even the part where she is trying to prove herself, her only purpose ends up being making an ice arena for Clive to fight in. Any characterization doesnāt come until side quests that are literally right before the last boss.
Game Systems:
-I struggle to think of any system in the game that actually worked well. Too much of it felt very half-baked.
-Side quests were almost all terrible and killed the pacing of the game. I recall one moment where Clive says āwow we really need to hurryā (I think this was to save Jill) right as the game opens up like 10 new side quests for Clive to complete. SqEnix already established that some quests are considered urgent quests where you arenāt allowed to free roam, why wasnāt this one? The same issue happens right before the last mission where the game dumps a bunch of side quests on you, sort of killing the momentum of the game. Now, granted, some of those endgame side quests were much better than the early game ones because they actually took the time to characterize the people Cliveās been interacting with the entire game. I just canāt help but feel that they needed to be spaced out better.
-Similarly to the above, being able to teleport to the hideout at almost any point really kills the immersion of story missions. Oh, youāre running into the windstorm to fight Garuda? Thatās ok, take some time to teleport across the world to buy more potions.
-The maps themselves are pretty boring too. Sometimes quest objectives are 2 feet away from the quest start point. At some point, I ran through the desert map for like 30 seconds straight without encountering an enemy. The second part of Ash is just an empty field with no points of interest.
-Dungeons are almost all just straight hallways connected to giant rooms where you know the next batch of enemies will spawn. There is minimal opportunity for exploration.
-Stats donāt matter. The game only has 4 stats: damage, stagger, defense, and HP. Itās not clear how much of a practical upgrade a 225 damage weapon is over a 215 damage weapon in terms of killing speed so upgrades donāt even seem that impactful.
-Because of the lack of stats, the gear doesnāt matter because the stat upgrades they provide are so minor. There arenāt a ton of options to the point that I crafted some gear from a quest fairly early on and didnāt find an upgrade until like 10 hours later. Most of the accessories are pitifully weak (e.g., 10% damage to 1/6 of your skills that has a high cooldown).
-Related to the above, the loot also doesnāt matter. Most loot is crafting materials but there is almost nothing to craft so they just end up sitting there. The rest of the loot is stuff like 10 gil when Iām sitting on 400k or potions when Iām at full stock + full HP. Very rarely do you actually find a piece of gear in the wild and when you do, chances are that you already crafted something stronger if youāve been keeping up with your side quests.
-Party members donāt matter. They donāt do much damage, they donāt have health bars to micromanage, they canāt be equipped with gear, often times they donāt even talk. I couldnāt tell you how many times I forgot that Jill wasnāt following me on a quest. I donāt even know why you have the option to control Torgal because nothing he does feels impactful (for example, compare this to Astral Chain where your pet is an integral part of your combat). Iād rather they just let me add more items in the quick slots that Torgal takes up so that I donāt have to pause the game to use a Stoneskin Potion.
-Trash mobs donāt matter because you can just spam square to get through these fights without taking damage. Often times, I would just use the Phoenix ultimate skill and put down my controller while one-shotting the entire encounter. They give very little in terms of exp/skill points so you can just skip most of these. I ignored basically all open-world mobs and ended my playthrough at level 49 anyway.
-Elite/boss combat really boils down to spamming your Eikon abilities off cooldown because they do so much more damage than your auto attack combos (of which there are almost none). However, since these abilities have long cooldowns, you have very low lows between the high peaks while you wait for your abilities to come back. Most of these encounters play out the same way where you try to stagger the enemy as often as possible and then wail on them while they just sit there.
-Loadout diversity is poor too. Ramuh and Bahamut specials really donāt feel like they belong in an action game, meaning that Phoenix/Garuda/Titan is the optimal combination until you are well into the endgame. The game is also very stingy with skill points and there is not much to upgrade so you can ignore these for most of the game. Mastering abilities doesnāt matter when you donāt really have any other Eikons to mix/match to. By the time you have enough skill points to experiment with mixing up skills, youāre about 90-95% through the game. And at that point, you realize that most skills are just bad anyway so thereās no point in using them.
-Speaking of skills, thereās so much hidden info about them that makes it hard for players to actually make informed decisions. What does 3 star damage mean? What is the cooldown of skills? If I upgrade a skill to āincrease the number of hits,ā how many more hits am I getting? How many did I get at the base level?
-Overall, the game was just way too easy too. I donāt know why the hard mode is locked behind finishing the game once. Though to be honest, I thought it was such a slog that I probably wouldnāt have finished the game if I had to endure it on a harder difficulty. I think the combat needs a lot more depth to be engaging enough, no matter the difficulty.
Anyway, itās a competent game, just very lazily put together and poorly thought out. Not sure if their development was rushed or what.
Itās still better than FF15 thoughā¦
All fantastic observations that I agree with (though I did find most of these issues didnāt keep me from having fun).
Stats donāt matter. The game only has 4 stats: damage, stagger, defense, and HP.
I totally felt this, too. Youād often get this utterly miniscule stat increase. Like, around the end of the game, you have over 2000 HP and your two pieces of āarmourā that you get to pick would give a mere double digit amount of extra HP points. I assumed at first I must be misunderstanding because it makes no difference at all.
And the accessoriesā¦ Oof, so bad. Why the heck are so many a miniscule change to a single skill? Why are the devs afraid of accessories letting you specialize? I never even bothered to use a single eikon related accessory as a result and theyāre like 90% of them.
Related to the above, the loot also doesnāt matter. Most loot is crafting materials but there is almost nothing to craft so they just end up sitting there.
Yeah, same thing with exploration. All those glowing blue items feel disappointing. āYay, another 3 bloody hidesā, of which I get a dozen from beating a group of trash mobs. And for some bizarre reason, youāll also randomly find single digit amounts of gil. Ignoring that thereās nothing worth buying, why single digit? You probably can buy a single potion from all the gil youāll find when exploring.
I think they badly needed to give us more armour slots. It feels weird that your āarmourā is just a belt and bracelet. You canāt customize the visible armour at all, either (I personally didnāt care for how it looked and also thought it was a bit immersion breaking how much your clothing stands out).
being able to teleport to the hideout at almost any point really kills the immersion of story missions.
I wasnāt bothered by that personally. After all, itās entirely optional and does ensure you can stock up on items if you really need to (not that it was ever really necessary ā the game even refill potions if you die).
Cid is retroactively made into a master inventor in the latter half of the game despite it never being mentioned before.
Lol I thought that was weird too. The game was very clear from the start that Mid was the master inventor, but as soon as Mid started having issues, suddenly weāre told that Cid is the one who actually designed much of the mythril engine? And he conveniently made the Deus ex machina that we needed to make things work? Rather jarring. Felt like they wanted to have Mid show more affection towards her dad and werenāt able to come up with some better reason.
the medicine girl is a recurring character that has no real purpose
I kept wondering what was up with her, too. I mean, sheās even in Vivianās interactions chart despite being such a minor and irrelevant character. I wonder if she was cut content? Leviathan maybe?
so much of the game is spent on the plight of Bearers yet that gets completely side-lined in the final act,
For what itās worth, Clive getting rid of magic means no more bearers. Not sure how that would go for existing bearers (given how theyāre normally treated, I worry many would just be killed once they no longer can perform magic), but at least thereāll be no new ones to suffer the same fate?
Iād like to think that the triunity thing would have pushed for freeing bearers once things stabilize a little, too.
One other thing that was pretty mind-boggling to me re: accessories was the ones that increase healing. I had a green one from the early game that increased potion healing by 40%. I later realized that it only applied to the āpotionā item and not all potionsā¦because I got a purple item that increased the high potion healing by 25%. So (1) that was not clear at all and further goes to show how little thought went toward game clarity and (2) if you did the math, you actually get more total healing from running the green one over the purple. The only time itās worth it to use the higher level purple accessory is if youāre already using the other one (i.e., use both at the same time). I really donāt think anyone on the dev team did the math on this.
Also, one of the endgame legendary-tier accessories in the game literally increases all damage you deal by 5%. Thatās beyond boring. It might have been nice as an early-game drop but itās literally the best-in-slot endgame items.
Good point re: deus exā¦there happens to be a note in a childās doll that solves all your problems. I forgot about that but I think it was probably one of the single worst plot devices Iāve seen in recent years.
There are definitely ways the game could have made fun gear. For example, gear that makes a Phoenix skill do more damage after you use a Garuda skill. Stuff that helps you synergize your Eikon choices better.
As much as Stranger of Paradise gets memed, it would have been really amazing to see a similar gear/job system in FF16.
lol, I had the exact same reaction when I got that potion accessory. I never actually used either accessory, but when I got the second one, I was like āare you kidding me?ā. But lol, I never did the math and itās crazy that the green one is actually better (I guess you could use both, but out of all the accessories, I donāt think those are worth 2 slots).
The 5% damage boost item was so disappointing to me, too. 5% boosts make sense if weāre stacking boost after boost after boost. But you only have 3 accessory slots and you always want the beserker ring equipped no matter what, because itās hands down the best non-cheat accessory in the game. I personally also never removed the ring of timely assistance, because I found controlling Torgal to be too annoying. I accidentally wasted sooooo many potions before I decided āfuck this, Iām just gonna use the accessoryā. If they made using an item require holding the d pad for even a half second, it would have made a world of difference I think. I just accidentally switched to potion mode so many times trying to control Torgal. Anyway, point is, I basically only had one accessory slot and never felt like any of my choices for it felt very impactful.
There are definitely ways the game could have made fun gear.
I would have loved to see some accessories that change combat in significant ways, especially the basic melee combo, which feels far too dull. Or for a really basic thing they could have done, they could have simply made the many existing green accessories actually high impact. e.g., nobody is gonna use an accessory that increases lunge damage by a measly 5% (like, what the heck devs?), but, IDK, a hefty 5x multiplier on extreme lunge damage and then it might be enough to make it worth it. IDK if 5x is necessarily the right number, but some number such that thereās suddenly a very compelling to start trying to use all the more tricky techniques.
Similarly, I barely used the basic magic or charge magic. It didnāt do remotely enough damage. Accessories could have made that better. Heck, there even was a notable accessory that interested me, the channelerās whispers, which claimed it would automatically charge spells. But it felt too good to be true, so I searched it and it sounded like it would still require holding down triangle (??), so I never bothered trying it.
As much as Stranger of Paradise gets memed
Iāveā¦ actually never heard of that. Is it good? Huh, seems itās already on my Steam wishlist, so I must have noticed it before but forgot about it entirely.
I guess I can comment based on your sections:
-
The combat was okay, very similar to XV but at least made you actually vary your tools and the potion limit helped with a big flaw of XV. It was not difficult at all though, way too forgiving and that is with some enemies having nigh incomprehensible tells for their attacks where it felt like I had to just randomly dodge and hope for the best. I still couldnāt tell you how to time parries on purpose. Overall it was nice coming from GoW where I was just irritated the whole time with the combat to XVI where it just kind of let me breeze through. I probably needed that.
-
Clive definitely sacrificed himself to end magic, there was an after credits scene where you can tell the world recovered. I think from the aether the mothercrystals had pooled on the surface, it had just kind of osmosed and the world was able to stablize from the blight. The star was a major waste honestly, I couldnāt tell what the deal was with it until I saw the Metia codex entry. Even then I was hoping it was going to be connected to the Fallen somehow.
-
Titan fight was wayyyyyy too long
-
This felt like cut content. I bet they were going to do it and have more fallen stuff but reigned the scope back in. Kind of obvious when Bahamut primed after having his Eikon taken but didnāt go berserk like titan/garuda did. Felt like a macguffin to get them to Origin without having to tax Joshua by summoning Phoenix.
-
Felt like more cut content. I donāt think they are doing any DLC for this game, I remember reading to that effect somewhere, but it is weird to leave the Leviathan reference in and not do anything with it.
-
I wish Ash had more too it. It was kinda quick, even so it did the same theme they tried with the Empire in XVās chapter 13 way better when having you show up after the fact to a kingdom that got off screened.
-
I think she was just always a selfish piece of shit. Even after it became clear to her right before she died, she still stuck to being garbage right into the grave.
-
Some of the good story that expanded on this shouldnāt have been in side quests tbh, a really good opportunity to expand would have been the beginning of the 2nd act where they were in Ranādellah. Could have had a gameplay segment in that city where you could see how they were treated poorly even outside Sanbreque.
-
Map design is definitely taken from XIV, you can tell CBU3 took a lot of influence from YoshiP and his team here for better or worse.
-
It got to the point where I did everything up until right before the last battle. I was so tired, I just decided to finish the game when it just popped up with like 15 more side quests all at once. More of the important world building from those should have been ushered into the MSQ
-
The villains were definitely the strong point of this game. I do think Ultima came from another world that had been ravaged by blight. I think the implication is that the Fallen were Ultimaās people, which is why he controls all those fallen magitek golems per the codex.
-
I think they did a good job with this honestly, it wasnāt heavy handed and isnāt the first time a FF has had this theme specifically.
-
I agree here. it was nice to have but they also relied on it being there a bit too much to where I had to go look stuff up to understand little bits and pieces of terminology.
-
I ended at about 44ish hours I think, but I did skip the last round of side quests because I was burnt out.
-
The ambient dialogue wasnāt great at this though. Walking past the same NPCs at the hideaway and they are always having the same conversation EVERYTIME you pass them was grating.
I enjoyed XVI. Best FF mainline since X, but definitely not in the top 5 for me. At least it was so solid after XV was enough of a trainwreck to taint my opinions on the franchise.
I wish Ash had more too it. It was kinda quick, even so it did the same theme they tried with the Empire in XVās chapter 13 way better when having you show up after the fact to a kingdom that got off screened.
I noticed the similarity to FFXV, too. Though thankfully it was much better done, since it didnāt force so much linearity and didnāt feel nearly as rushed as FFXVās final chapters. I didnāt personally feel that Waloed felt quick, though I did do all the side quests and several of those return to Waloed.
Map design is definitely taken from XIV, you can tell CBU3 took a lot of influence from YoshiP and his team here for better or worse.
Definitely for worse in my book. I enjoyed FFXIVās dungeons, but their goal is to be streamlined for combat and not getting lost, since theyāre a multiplayer thing. For single player games, taking your time to explore and take in the sights is much more prominent. Felt like a lot of the dungeons didnāt offer anything there.
On that note, the game barely had interesting interiors. Most of the interiors were either the crystals (which were cool, though most of them were generic mines), generic castles, towns (I liked those), or very repetitive looking Fallen ruins. They couldnāt even be bothered making the Fallen ruins jaw dropping like, say, Horizonās cauldrons (which have a repetitive style but are still very aesthetically cool and regularly mix it up).
Felt like more cut content. I donāt think they are doing any DLC for this game, I remember reading to that effect somewhere, but it is weird to leave the Leviathan reference in and not do anything with it.
Yeah, itās so weird. I personally hope itās just that they wanted to wait and see before planning any DLC, but even then itās just weird that theyād even include Leviathan at all. It wouldnāt have been hard to just edit the references of how many elements/Eikons there are to remove Leviathan. And if they really wanted it to just be mysteriously lost, they should have at least had Ultima say something about it.
-