I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 16 for the last couple of weeks and feel really let down by the hype and reviews of this game.
While I enjoy the deviation of the combat the rest of the game feels very incomplete. The vocal animations are frequently off. The travel from area to area is just an overworld map to select travel from one small area to another. There are like 2 or 3 side quests at a time and a whole vendor that will send you to side quests in different areas, but his menu is always empty.
In general, the graphics are roughly the same as FFXIV. The animations and music seem ripped right out of 14 as well. And the combat and akin to the main series Kingdom Hearts games.
Overall I’m enjoying it, but these 7-9 out of 10 reviews that are calling it some massive achievement seem really undeserved.
I love FF, played them all and generally liked every one to varying degrees. I am about there with you overall on XVI. I liked my time with FFXVI well enough, but in my overall series hierarchy it is basically smack dab in the middle. I thought it was good but it didn’t blow me away like a lot of people are raving about. I certainly don’t regret playing it, but I also wouldn’t want to see this be the direction they take the series from now on.
I liked the characters a lot more than I expected. Story had pacing issues but overall it was good. Music was more atmospheric but generally quite well done, though thinking back to it now I can’t really recall any of the music.
Gameplay-wise though, it felt like it was lacking a lot of RPG elements. I don’t mind action combat at all, I am not a turn-based purist and I loved FF7R, but the combat in FFXVI seemed like a big step back. There really wasn’t any itemization, levels didn’t feel that impactful, and even unlocking nodes on the skilltree felt very low impact. About halfway through the game I had unlocked everything I would use until the end of the game, so skill points really ceased to matter. There were no resistances or elements, so even though the game makes a big deal about learning different magic-types (which are all 100% the same as each other), you can approach every single fight exactly the same. The big bombastic kaiju fights people loved were actually my least favourite part though. You were basically given a simplified version of the character you normally play, and they were all about 30% too long. They were a spectacle but weren’t actually all that fun or interesting to play.