Final Fantasy XVI Full Game Impressions

Apart from the participants, few people remember this today, but I had the honor of being there at the birth of the Czech and Slovak FFF (Final Fantasy Fans) community more than twenty years ago, and even then I participated in the annual meetings. For me, Final Fantasy is more than just a series of games: it was a personality, an ideal that connected me with a group of the same enthusiasts who collect not only games from the series, but also soundtracks, figurines, jewelry and other valuables. The program from a live concert of Final Fantasy music, signed for me by Nobuo Uemaku himself, remains one of the most valuable in my collection. However, a few years ago I gave a lecture at Animefest about how disappointed I was with the fifteenth episode of the series and how I feared its decline. So you can imagine with what tension I waited for the last numbered volume of Final Fantasy, which in many ways is radically different from the previous ones.

While we were given a preview of the game, which we are very grateful for, unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to finish playing it before the release. Since the JRPG genre, and especially the Final Fantasy series, is defined by a strong story, I naturally decided to hold off on the review until I had read the entire story (and also tried out the new combat options in New Game Plus, as the developers themselves suggested). If you want to get an idea of ​​how far along I am at the time of writing these impressions, it’s about twenty hours, which, according to the in-game prompts or indicators, is about half of the main story. One of the things that (pleasantly) held me back were the side missions, which I decided to do all of – I’ll explain why in a moment.

Dark Game of Thrones

Final Fantasy XVI is a return to pure “high fantasy,” shamelessly mimicking the Game of Thrones series, from the overall darkness and blood, the political intrigue between multiple empires, to the strikingly similar map where you plan your next progress between missions. Judging from the preview before release, I was a little worried that the entire story would revolve around the protagonist’s desire for revenge, which is also a big cliche, but it was mostly recently in the somewhat “quirky” comedy Stranger from Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins. Luckily, it becomes clear pretty quickly in the game that there’s more to the story than just revenge – without giving too much away, the story is dominated by themes such as civilization’s reliance on magic (an allegory for modern technology) or even a bold theme of slavery.

The desire for maturity and seriousness in the story, its tone and individual events is one of the most significant differences between the new Final Fantasy and its previous installments. While, for example, Final Fantasy Tactics did not skimp on dark politics, here everything is taken to a new level thanks to more realistic graphics and animation, where some scenes are really very naturalistic – be it a passage where someone’s throat is cut or a scene where you find the murdered bodies of civilians in a destroyed village. The creators of the series mentioned in an interview that they were concerned about some of the decline in popularity of the series and therefore decided to move the latest installment closer to its aging and more demanding witnesses, as well as to a more seasoned modern audience.

Wonderful set

Since I’m talking about more realistic graphics – it’s quite difficult to put into words how photorealistic the graphics actually are in places. In particular, the inanimate environment around you looks absolutely photographic in places, for example, when you stand inside the castle, I’m ready to swear that the textures of the chips on the walls are not painted, but actually photographed. I was equally impressed, for example, by the landscape in the forest, which, moreover, in terms of vegetation types, is very reminiscent of Czech forests (fallen firs, etc.), so I really felt “at home” there. I think that the creators must have traveled somewhere to our climate zone of Europe, because too many details in nature and landscape perfectly match our local reality.

As for the technology itself, Final Fantasy XVI runs on an unspecified new internal engine, reportedly developed with the help of engineers and experts provided directly by Sony (the game has been entirely exclusive to the PlayStation platform for at least half a decade). (And while a PC version is expected to come out eventually, it’s possible that the console exclusivity will last even longer, or even forever.) The creators push the graphics to the max not only for the beautiful scenery, but also for the epic battles of giant monsters nicknamed “Eikoni” (these are the popular “summons,” of course), which often erupt in a flood of particles and lighting effects. Given the quality of the graphics, it’s unfortunately something of a miracle these days that the game even offers two modes – resolution and smooth. Playing in the latter, it manages to maintain 60 frames per second most of the time, but occasionally it drops to around 30. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen very often.

Wild action

While an ambitious plot and a megalomaniacal quest are long-standing hallmarks of the series, a completely new feature, at least in the main numbered entries, is a combat system that operates entirely in real time. As early as the fifteenth entry (or perhaps the remake of Final Fantasy VII) a step in this direction was taken, but still included some features that allow you to slow down or stop time, as well as issue instructions to other characters in your party. While Final Fantasy XVI also has a party of characters, in the sense that you often have a wolf named Thorgal and another supporting character or characters by your side, you always and exclusively control the main character, a magically gifted knight named Clive Rosfield. In doing so, he fights not only with all sorts of magic at range and at close range, but mainly with extremely acrobatic leaps across the battlefield.

It’s no coincidence that it looks (and feels) like Capcom’s Devil May Cry, as the team has recruited one of the series’ main combat designers for the new Final Fantasy. So forget about turn-based or tactical combat: this is a wild ballet that rewards your good reflexes over your tactical sense. But if you want to “just enjoy the story” and the wild combat system is too much for you, don’t worry: in addition to adjustable difficulty, you can also equip your character with special “pendants” at any time, which will make Clive automatically use combos, dodge on his own, or even self-heal. If you’re looking for a challenge, you can have a good time in literally every fight with every enemy if you throw away all the aforementioned crutches and set the “action difficulty.” Connoisseurs will still find it possible to replay it after each chapter to get more points, and New Game Plus even promises two special modes for more difficult battles during replays. It will be interesting to see if the game appeals to action fans as much as it does to (J)RPG fans.

Impressions so far

If I had to describe my feelings about the game in a very subjective way, I would admit that they are still quite complicated. On the one hand, I really like the desire for a more gritty and mature story, but at the same time I feel like it is compromised by classic “anime cliches” such as characters exiting a very serious argument/fight scene by acrobaticly jumping into a “fighting arena”. Likewise, I can be thrown off by the fantastic costumes of some characters, which sometimes contrast greatly with the truly realistic environment. Some of the dialogue is very mature and interesting, but others are full of other “anime cliches” and over-exaggerated screams. At first, I didn’t like Clive himself with his “I’ll fucking kill you” line. The more I play, the more the story deepens and the characters, including Clive, develop in increasingly interesting directions – in my opinion, the introduction of the female protagonist Jill on the scene – and her influence on Clive is also great. part of it.

As the game has become more and more interesting to the characters, world, and context around it over time, I’ve found myself wanting to complete all of the side missions. While they aren’t (at least not yet) the kind of narrative marvels that The Witcher 3 has, many of them do a nice job of deepening my understanding of the game’s world, politics, and characters. Side missions can also “let” their main characters get killed, so they contain a few unexpected twists. I may be a bit sensitive to these themes given current real-world events (Ukraine), but when Clive finds a slaughtered village in a side mission and stands over relatively realistically rendered bloodied corpses of civilians, it really threw me for a loop. As I’ve written before, I’m probably about halfway through this latest Final Fantasy world, and my impressions are getting better and better with each passing hour. I can already confidently say that this is an exceptionally good audiovisual game, with fun combat and an interesting story. To what extent all these advantages will be used in general, we will soon talk in the review.

Final Fantasy XVI launches Thursday, June 22 for PlayStation 5. Other platforms have yet to be confirmed.