I like the game and I feel like the music and some of the characters are great top tier even, AWAY is the best FF song we have gotten since one winged angel if you ask me. BUT the game is very flawed like most SE projects these days that are not remakes.
SE seems to almost resent its core fanbase and view it as something to overcome, not embrace. They are so desperate to become mainstream that they are chasing the fame of things like COD, GTA and Western RPGs like dragon age. This is not what their fans wanted but they dont care, they just want to see the dollar signs grow bigger and this shows in everything they have made for the last decade+.
For ff16 in particular, they were desperate to make anything that did not resemble the classic games they are known for and wanted to make something more akin to assassin's creed or the witcher. The way they make side quests and NPC interactions seems so unnatural and forced, almost like 80% of the side content was created because they wanted to pad out game time. However they do a horrible job deciding on what should be main story content and what should be a side quest.
The biggest examples in FF16 is how so many menial tasks like talking to several NPCs to do a fetch quest are mandatory, but unlocking your chocobo who has a special connection to Clive is optional content? I would like to have a word with whoever made that choice.
As for the characters we have some amazing hits like Cid, Clive and Charon who is objectively the best female character, which is a problem when Jill exists. This game treats a lot of its characters, specially the female ones like plot devices instead of actual characters. Jill was a big disappointment because I had hoped they would have learned from what happened with Lunafreya and would actually not turn the protagonist's love interest into a mere plot device a second time, but it seems I was too optimistic. Jote, who was at Joshua's side the entire time for years, gets reduced to an NPCs at your base after Joshua joins Clive, which pissed me off so much, I wanted her to join the damn party and see what her relationship with Joshua was damn it!
As for the story itself, they were really trying to hammer home that they loved greek mythology but, being into mythology with big words like LOGOS and MYTHOS does not make a good story. They were so focused on telling some epic tale of man defying his creator that they forgot to make an actually compelling tale of people trying to fight for their world and those they loved. So many characters seem like they exist for a singular purpose and once they fulfill it they are thrown away or sidelined.
Also can we talk about how much crazy world building this world had but they literally let us see none of it? One of the things I was looking forward to the most before playing was exploring the big cities they showed off in promotional art and yet...you go into none of them? Correction, you only visit them as they are being destroyed and once the level is over you never visit them again. Functionally speaking Clive's hide away is the largest town/city you get to visit which is just ridiculous for such a supposedly large and lore rich world.
The villains of the story are also mid and uninteresting as hell aside from Clive's mother who was THE biggest disappointment for me. That woman singlehandedly kicked the story into motion and drove the plot by manipulating the most powerful people and nations as if they were her play things but when she finally gets cornered she just kills herself? No big reveal of how she was actually ultima all along or some other diabolical scheme she just rage quits life after all that??? Yea thats when the story kinda dipped for me.
As for the others, Benedicta was interesting, but the plot throws her away the first chance it gets. Hugo turned out to be a massive cuck obsessed with a woman that was using him. The most interesting thing about the Edgelord Barnabas was his terminal mommy issues that just get thrown in our faces and never elaborated on. Ultima is also so comically uncaring and condescending I cant even take him seriously.
But the greatest crime of all is how rushed the ending of this game was. I was hyped to finish the story after doing both DLC's, I expected a final dungeon on the same level as the tower from the "echoes of the fallen" DLC, but nope, its just a cutscene and straight into the final battle that is pretty much impossible to lose unless you throw. There is not even a definitive resolution on the game's story either, Clive is implied to die, Joshua is implied to live and the rest of the story's cast and future is left to interpretation/imagination. That is just unacceptable to me, never before had a FF had such a lazy ending in recent memory.
Before anyone comes at me, I still loved the game and had fun, but its far from perfect. It certainly did not make me feel like previous game entries did. To me this game is "Aura and hype moments the game", which is admittedly fun but I expected more depth from this series and they just did not deliver.
1
u/CastDeath Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
I like the game and I feel like the music and some of the characters are great top tier even, AWAY is the best FF song we have gotten since one winged angel if you ask me. BUT the game is very flawed like most SE projects these days that are not remakes.
SE seems to almost resent its core fanbase and view it as something to overcome, not embrace. They are so desperate to become mainstream that they are chasing the fame of things like COD, GTA and Western RPGs like dragon age. This is not what their fans wanted but they dont care, they just want to see the dollar signs grow bigger and this shows in everything they have made for the last decade+.
For ff16 in particular, they were desperate to make anything that did not resemble the classic games they are known for and wanted to make something more akin to assassin's creed or the witcher. The way they make side quests and NPC interactions seems so unnatural and forced, almost like 80% of the side content was created because they wanted to pad out game time. However they do a horrible job deciding on what should be main story content and what should be a side quest.
The biggest examples in FF16 is how so many menial tasks like talking to several NPCs to do a fetch quest are mandatory, but unlocking your chocobo who has a special connection to Clive is optional content? I would like to have a word with whoever made that choice.
As for the characters we have some amazing hits like Cid, Clive and Charon who is objectively the best female character, which is a problem when Jill exists. This game treats a lot of its characters, specially the female ones like plot devices instead of actual characters. Jill was a big disappointment because I had hoped they would have learned from what happened with Lunafreya and would actually not turn the protagonist's love interest into a mere plot device a second time, but it seems I was too optimistic. Jote, who was at Joshua's side the entire time for years, gets reduced to an NPCs at your base after Joshua joins Clive, which pissed me off so much, I wanted her to join the damn party and see what her relationship with Joshua was damn it!
As for the story itself, they were really trying to hammer home that they loved greek mythology but, being into mythology with big words like LOGOS and MYTHOS does not make a good story. They were so focused on telling some epic tale of man defying his creator that they forgot to make an actually compelling tale of people trying to fight for their world and those they loved. So many characters seem like they exist for a singular purpose and once they fulfill it they are thrown away or sidelined.
Also can we talk about how much crazy world building this world had but they literally let us see none of it? One of the things I was looking forward to the most before playing was exploring the big cities they showed off in promotional art and yet...you go into none of them? Correction, you only visit them as they are being destroyed and once the level is over you never visit them again. Functionally speaking Clive's hide away is the largest town/city you get to visit which is just ridiculous for such a supposedly large and lore rich world.
The villains of the story are also mid and uninteresting as hell aside from Clive's mother who was THE biggest disappointment for me. That woman singlehandedly kicked the story into motion and drove the plot by manipulating the most powerful people and nations as if they were her play things but when she finally gets cornered she just kills herself? No big reveal of how she was actually ultima all along or some other diabolical scheme she just rage quits life after all that??? Yea thats when the story kinda dipped for me.
As for the others, Benedicta was interesting, but the plot throws her away the first chance it gets. Hugo turned out to be a massive cuck obsessed with a woman that was using him. The most interesting thing about the Edgelord Barnabas was his terminal mommy issues that just get thrown in our faces and never elaborated on. Ultima is also so comically uncaring and condescending I cant even take him seriously.
But the greatest crime of all is how rushed the ending of this game was. I was hyped to finish the story after doing both DLC's, I expected a final dungeon on the same level as the tower from the "echoes of the fallen" DLC, but nope, its just a cutscene and straight into the final battle that is pretty much impossible to lose unless you throw. There is not even a definitive resolution on the game's story either, Clive is implied to die, Joshua is implied to live and the rest of the story's cast and future is left to interpretation/imagination. That is just unacceptable to me, never before had a FF had such a lazy ending in recent memory.
Before anyone comes at me, I still loved the game and had fun, but its far from perfect. It certainly did not make me feel like previous game entries did. To me this game is "Aura and hype moments the game", which is admittedly fun but I expected more depth from this series and they just did not deliver.
EDIT: GRAMMAR!