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 wasn’t a massive XIV fan at the outset, but there has definitely been a trend in the game design I didn’t like as it moved towards later expansions. They continually moved away from any kind of player agency/customization, so everything is super homogenized now (or at least when I last played). I stopped around the end of Shadowbringers, never actually got into Endwalker content.
They used to have cross-class skills and things like that, so it really felt like a FF job system where you would play different classes to unlock skills for your main. I think any FF player should be pretty comfortable with that. They have since simplified that, which I am sure is great for newer players but I don’t really like it. Now, if I am a level 80 warrior I am exactly the same as every other level 80 warrior, except for the number next to my item level. That kind of customization is a big part of both MMOs and FFs for me, usually.
Killer soundtrack though, Soken does good work.
They have definitely gone further down the path of homogenisation and simplification. I don’t actually mind customisation being sacrificed for better encounter balance, but many classes started to lose their identities as features and mechanics got scaled back, Dark Knight and Astrologian being two examples. And of course what they did to healers in general. Personally the removal of Hissatsu: Kaiten from Samurai was the last straw.
He does produce some bangers, but I’m such an unabashed Uematsu fanboy. I actually felt Soken did some of his best work remixing, building on and riffing off of Uematu’s themes and melodies, which is another reason I enjoyed the earlier expansions.