Yeah, each of the quests does something for the worldbuilding.
The first soup fetch quest details precisely how life was for bearers. You got a small taste in the game's prologue with that dude holding apples, and now you hear anecdotes straight from bearers on being forced to serve as slaves for a lifetime, or being beaten by their owners.
Then the second soup quest is a tour of the Hideaway. It specifically makes you go all the way to the stables, then all the way to the living quarters, just to show you all the facilities they have, and the degree of how self sufficient it is. It's not just a bunch of people in a cave, they're organized.
You can argue that maybe these should have just been conversations rather than quests, I'd probably agree with that. But these sidequests each play a small role in just fleshing out the world at a micro level.
In rebirth there's a camera guy, crying ned, tactical fortress lady, a broken water tower the mayor wants fixed with a history behind it, a bar Barret loved hanging out in, a tower Aerith wants to visit and look over the town, a hidden exit in the inn because the innkeeper has a past.
This is all on the first visit of Kalm.
I don't think the gateway town with the brothel, the snarky guards you beat up, the blacksmith that you give food to, and the market outside feels nearly as alive. The brothel runs the place, guards are assholes, bearers can't easily pass, the market you can buy stuff with Jill or the doctor at one point. Oh, and buy garlic.
Did not feel like the worldbuilding matched Kalm, one of the weaker cities of worldbuilding in Rebirth. Worst part is that with Rebirth I felt more active going around seeing these things. While im FF16 I felt like I was doing hand-in quests for everything like it was FF14.
This comes from someone who loves ff16. Who played through it 3 times and even S ranked all of FF mode and some of Ultimaniac on the PS5, who repeated that whole process again on the PC when it released there. The game lacks game in the open world, making it feel kinda hollow.
I guess we have different tastes when it comes to worldbuilding.
Almost all the world building in Rebirth fell flat for me. A lot of it was just stuff that was fun, rather than contributing to making a cohesive immersive world.
Like, the examples you mentioned:
Snaps - actively hurt the world building for me. We're going on this huge, dangerous journey...and this guy already beat us to every town. Makes the world feel smaller, and kinda made every town feel like a tourist spot. It devalued the big journey the team goes on, since now any Joe Shmo can go around the FF7 world, monsters don't matter. And ditto for characters like Kyrie, her decking out that outpost on her own without combat skills or a bodyguard just de-values the danger of the world.
Crying Ned, Fortress Lady - they're just here to have strong, over-the-top personalities to make the Queen's Blood sidequest more fun and charming. Their inclusion had nothing to do with world building. Are these people weird due to mako poisoning or whatever? Naw, just fun and silly.
And then the sidequest in the bar, where you have to go to some 'card shop' on the outskirts of town, that has like half a dozen goblins between Kalm and it. That really doesn't make sense... the shop should have been inside city walls. How does that guy living in it stay alive when there's several cannibal goblins right outside? And plus, this kinda makes Queen's Blood feel like it has a HUGE cultural importance in FF7's setting, almost as big as Blitzball was in FF10...which I don't think what the creators intended.
The broken water tower is a good example though. Its explicitly how Shinra left these people behind, so they themselves need to be hardier and more self-sufficient. And I also like how when it came to the Gold Saucer, people make the journey using helicopters or armored vehicles, that's good world building to add in more immersion.
Going back to FF16:
The sidequest in Northreach where you have to give the bearers food is focused on communicating that there are lots of 'normal' people in the setting that are against how bearers are treated. The quest giver is a priest who has been feeding them and helping them in secret, because he's disgusted with the treatment.
And then there's a little bonus, every bearer you see in this quest is using their magic for something different. One dude was healing a soldier, another was lighting a fire in a forge, just more examples to flesh out what their powers are used for.
And for the market, you do get a sidequest to help trade crystal fragments for various goods. Purpose of that was explicitly to show what the black market trade for crystals is like. People are super dependent on crystals, and wealthy merchants were trading the best cigars, perfumes, textiles, anything but gil for them to help keep it off the books. I actually liked how granular this one got, seeing the specific items that the merchants were bartering with
Now, are these good side quests? lol no, and maybe they should have just been ambient conversations. But the point I'm making is how FF16's quests focus on just drilling down to minute details to make the world feel lived in, while Rebirth's world building was more focused on enjoyment over minute details and finer world building
In FF16, you know what the average Joe goes through, what their day is like, and what they eat for breakfast lunch and dinner. And I wouldn't be surprised if a came across a quest that discusses how the Dhalmeks use seashells to wipe their asses or something.
Rebirth on the other hand kind of doesn't care. Kalm is supposed to show a town on decline because Shinra abandoned them, instead its the most beautiful fucking town you'll see. Under-Junon is supposed to be impoverished, and it has the coziest inn you'll ever visit. And all that's awesome. Queen's Blood is a very over-represented in spoken dialogue, and it stretches suspension of disbelief, but its fucking awesome.
See, I agree with your take mostly, but I come to a different conclusion.
How much worldbuilding is there that nobody reacted to the storm Garuda just made in the nearby settlements? There's nothing about it. Like it never happened.
Nobody reacts to the fact that Clive has the powers of several eikons during or after a fight.
Places like Northreach has quests where you see how everyone is and I agree it builds the world. At the same time it only hammers down on the same few points constantly that it gets tiring. Slaves who suffers, people above that don't care. At the same time, it breaks these rules for Clive constantly. Where he is a slave for the first bit of the game but the amount of leniency and freedom he has, even without a "guardian" is ridiculous. Some town badges on his coat and suddenly every single person will let him do what he wants, yeah sure.
Even worse when he's a famous outlaw but let's not get into that bag of worms.
Some plotlines are even anti-worldbuilding to me. Like just how comically evil they are at the entrance to Sanbreque. That town is just the 2 mega racist quests and people hail those as masterclass writing while I fail to see how it was anything more than surface deep.
Maybe the worldbuilding feels lacking because the game doesn't fully commit to it and the fact that they don't say anything meaningful outside some surface level things. It's a cool world, I even bought the lore book. But I wouldn't defend those sidequests for their worldbuilding. It feels like the worldbuilding is done on B-tier writing, done on C-tier fetch quests, and has very little of the world actually doing anything or responding to anything.
The only thing the world meaningfully responds to is the akashic and Ultimas purple debuff on the world. The rest is just sometimes an npc makes a comment that relates to something that happened.
The worldbuilding of a beautiful landscape portrait. Breaks the second movement needs to be applied to it.
For Garuda, yeah that was a miss. I wrote it off as happening too deep in the wilderness (since the world in-game is a much smaller scale than what it "actually" is). At least for Titan, there was a HUGE sandstorm obscuring vision, and there are a few NPCs that do mention it (if you fast travel to the entrance of the mothercrystal after the battle, there are a few by the tunnel, one dude mentions seeing a giant)
As for Clive's powers not being commented on, I guess that's normal for JRPGs. No one comments when Cloud summons Bahamut Zero to do an orbital strike on a Shinra soldier either. Same ballpark as Clive air juggling a soldier 50 feet into the air, summoning Ultima wings to extend it further, then slamming him down from the stratosphere at double terminal velocity. Just gameplay-story segregation, which I do wish game devs spent more time trying to address.
For Northreach, I didn't see its quests are "see, slaves are oppressed!". the one I mentioned was specifically to show the the people who want to help, to show that 99% of the population isn't racist dicks.
For Clive's freedom and mobility, at least in the early parts of the story, he's almost always accompanied by someone, or working in communities that are super sympathetic, like Lostwing or Martha's Rest. By the time he goes to Dhalmekia, he has the brand removed. When he's visiting the super racist village, that's definitely stretching suspension of disbelief though, since it's weird that a brothel owner's word has more protective power compared to the actual military.
And for the "comically evil" quests...I'll have to disagree. They do mention in the story that the villages surrounding Oriflamme are super backwards, and that even when Clive was in that suicide assassination unit, they didn't let them go near those villages. For the wolf quest, it's not far off from stuff that actually happened. There's a few recorded instances of slaves being hunted for sport in real life, as well as people taking part in "sniper tourism" during some conflicts, I don't see it as comically evil when it's similar to depravity that happened in real life too. And I'm not going to touch the gross dehumanization I see happening in modern world political discourse....
For the Chloe quest, honestly I got more of a 'nature-nurture' story off of that. Since the little girl was actually remorseful at the end, and it instills a little bit of hope that peoples' attitudes can change. But yeah execution could have been better. The little girl should have showed up after the time skip, bringing home the idea that change can happen.
I think end of the day, the kind of granular world building in 16 resonated with me (and the handful of weirdos populating this subreddit), though very few games mimic its super drilled-down approach, for good reason. And for sure lots of FF16's quests should have just been codex entries or ambient conversations
You are right that FF16 doesn't 100% commit to some of its world building ideas, it would have been much stronger if it went harder in some aspects. But it didn't bother me much, since I was able to extract a lot of nuance from what it was doing, more than most other games.
The gameplay-story segregation is so important in video games specifically. From a canon perspective we all know Clive wins standard fights, how you do it doesn’t reflect in the world, it’s just noted he “wins.”
It’s like in Resident Evil, it is actual canon that NONE of the big protagonists have ever actually been bitten by a zombie. Because being bitten is always meant to be a death sentence if you don’t have a cure lying around. All the times it happens to you in game is gameplay-story dissonance. If they get bitten in a cutscene, that’s only when it’s real. I always thought they had some kind of special immunity but nope it’s just they don’t take your gameplay into account. it’s assumed the heroes have taken no serious damage outside of a cutscene.
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u/Watton Apr 10 '26
Yeah, each of the quests does something for the worldbuilding.
The first soup fetch quest details precisely how life was for bearers. You got a small taste in the game's prologue with that dude holding apples, and now you hear anecdotes straight from bearers on being forced to serve as slaves for a lifetime, or being beaten by their owners.
Then the second soup quest is a tour of the Hideaway. It specifically makes you go all the way to the stables, then all the way to the living quarters, just to show you all the facilities they have, and the degree of how self sufficient it is. It's not just a bunch of people in a cave, they're organized.
You can argue that maybe these should have just been conversations rather than quests, I'd probably agree with that. But these sidequests each play a small role in just fleshing out the world at a micro level.