Final Fantasy XVI

I take notes as I play the game for things that I think deserve a mention. If something was not mentioned, it is considered "fine" and not noteworthy in any sense.

Final Fantasy XVI

Since this is a main entry Final Fantasy game, the expectations is a lot higher than it would be than in many other games, so this game has a quite a lot of negatives, but it's because I expected a lot more out of this game.

The game I felt didn't get good until the second half which was sad because in terms of hours, it's twice the amount of time it took for FF13 to "get good".

Pros

• Dragoons
  Dragoons have always been cool. This game has quite a lot of cool dragoon designs.
  
  
• UI Design
  The UI in this game looks really nice and is very polished. The UX however isn't the best, but the design overall is so nice.
  
  
• Cid + Benedikta
  Cid is prob my favorite characters in the game and the story arc with Benedikta was great. I really liked Cid being Ramuh, that was so awesome actually.
  
  
• Skill resets
  I really liked that you could reset skills on demand, without any penalty.
  
  
• Lore explanation
  The game did a good job with explaining the lore behind the game while you're on the journey. Getting back to Vivian to explain what happened as well the Active Time Lore, which was a feature I didn't use much at all.
  
  
• Dzemekys Falls
  This place and moment in time I felt like was the best executed section of the whole game. It's also where I felt, now the game is getting better, but now we are beyond the half part of the game.
  
  
• Scenery
  A lot of the scenery in this game was really awesome which was empahsied with the cutscenes troughout the game.
  
  

Neutral

• Voice acting
  Some of the voice acting is great, but the voice for Clive and Cid seems to have way more grunty voice than fitted their appearences. Cid has the voice of a grunty Vin Diesel with the appearence of Nathan Drake.
  
  
• Graphics
  It doesn't look very good for a PS5 game from a technical standpoint. It looks like a PS4 game and in some places the graphics is blocky. The facial animations and capture is really good, but then you look at anything else and it looks dated. And it doesn't help that the game has a desaturated tone overall.
  
  
• Killing of a party member
  I feel like this has become such a cliché at this point in story-focused games where if there's a party member you really like, they are very likely gonna die. And many games just sucks at executing the emotional side of it to create a big impactual moment. I felt the death of Cid in this game was badly executed and I really wanted him in the second part of the game. If they would had killed Gav, it wouldn't be as impactful, sure but that I think would had been more fitting to the story.
  
  
• Combat
  For a action-jrpg game, I expected a lot more from the combat. Not only is the jump-button useless, you have no other party members to control and the actions you could do was also quite limited. So for me it became quite the button-masher game with very repetetive actions and combos.
  
  
• Music
  The music overall was quite mid for a Final Fantasy game, the prelude was great, but the song I really loved the Eikon Boss Fight theme, that was the best by far.
  
  
• PC-first
  The game had a few UX annoyinces since this is a PC-first game developed by a different team. Every time you ended a battle or went into the menu, it would default to the mouse cursor instead of D-pad navigation on the PS5.
  
  
• Dungeons
  Every dungeons or main quest line it had the same strucutre, every time you saw a big area, time for a boss, most of the time there was a door. There was never any surprises with the design. And it had the classic elevator fights which nowadays I think is quite uninspiring.
  
  
• I am Cid now?
  Like in Grandblue Fantasy I played recently, I can't say I'm a fan of that I'm now Cid after he passed away. Rather than remembering a person, it became a title to wear of being the "helper".
  
  

Cons

• Joshua
  It kinda really sucks that we only get to have him in our party at the end of the game. And it was spoiled in-game way too early, it was obvious that Joshua wasn't dead and that the guy in the cape was Joshua all along. It wasn't impactful as none of the scenes where Clive tries to hammer in you that Joshua is dead, just felt stupid because we knew he was alive. It could had been done so much better and it was tedious it was dragged out for so long.
  
  
• Limit Breaks
  Takes forever to get Limit breaks unlocked in this game. You get it once you're one third into the game, around 11-12 hours in and it's not even a great system. It's like FF9 Trance where you get your stats boosted for a moment, but that's about it, doesn't even have a finisher.
  
  
• Godzilla summon fights
  I felt this was such boring mini-games. It was also inconsistent as most battles wouldn't be the same so u kept having to learn something in next fight on the spot. It feels like this was inspired by the insane super-hero media in recent decade and it wasn't that fun to play.
  
  
• No party
  There's no party system in this game. The game is treated in the story as a party game which changes up over time but for the most part, this is just a action-adventure single-party game with guests. It's also causes the combat to suffer from repetition since you have no control at all over the other "party"-members other than the Dog.
  
  
• QTE
  This game, especially in the summon fights has a ton of quick time events being a huge mix of gameplay, cutscenes and QTE. For me, it doesn't add much other than annoyences whenever you accidentally miss one.
  
  
• World map
  It seemed very clear from the map that this was a continent, not the whole "World". Some parts of the game had a way more of a fluid transition between areas, but a lot was just travel points which wasn't at all. At least the first time you visit a place, you want that journey to get you there; such as ins in Final Fantasy X.
  
  
• Jump-button
  This game has a jump, but it's not a proper jump. It's barely there and it hinders the potentional of the combat gameplay. It's like they never wanted to have a jump button. And it's direction-locked, so when you started the jump, you can't change direction mid-air.
  
  
• Injection of modern language
  The characters saying things like "Fuck", "Whore", "Shit" is just very out of place for the setting and era. I would have expected more words like "Traitor", "Hell", "Damn", "For gods sake" etc.
  
  
• Inventory limitations
  This game had a very artificial limit on how many items you can carry. Especially with how many potions and high potions you could carry. Some items you could have 999 of, but then potions was like max 3 or 4, so a lot of time on the journey, the potions you picked up was almost always useless.
  
  
• Bad naming
  The naming of the places and empires etc. is where I start to think about other games. Example "Rosaia"? every time that was mentioned I was thinking of "Rozarrian" from Final Fantasy 12, and early on I thought it was a reference to Final Fntasy 12. Oh is it in the same setting?.. I couldn't really get into the deep lore because it was a lot of confusing wording like this.
  
  
• No Chocobo travel
  Even tho this isn't a open-world game, it has ton of Chocobo all around the place and there's open map areas. But no way to ride on them and no npc near a chocobo wants to talk.
  
  Turns out after I finished the game and did some research, the only way to unlock it was via a side-quest, which at that point in the game, I already had gotten so tired of the terrible side-quests as I was like "why couldn't we get to unlock chocobo to make the side-quests better?" as all the side-quests to that point felt like chores. It should had been a main story quest.
  
  
• Side-quests
  The side-quests just sucked. It got so boring with fetch quests which just felt like chores that I just quit caring doing any side-quests before we even got to the new homestead because it wasn't fun or awarding with a lot of just crafting items. Apparently by doing so I missed out on some of the great content that should had been part of the main story. It's ironic that the main story forced you to do some terrible side-quests that's just annoying fetch quests, but then later on in the game apparently, you have side-quests that was more interesting like the Torgal section (which I watched on youtube) and unlocking of Chocobo which I missed out on completely.
  
  
• JRPG depth
  This game even tho it's called a JRPG, has very little in terms of being a RPG nowadays and is way more a action-adventure game. The skill-tree is very basic, other action-adventure games even have better party integration. It just lacks any of the depth you often can see in a JRPG.
  
  

Final thoughts

My expectationg going into this game was very different from what the game actually was. My expectation was that it was going back to the more medieval RPG times. But instead was way more like a western action-adventure game but with a more JRPG storyline. It was a overall great game, but it had quite a few issues.