AfroOPanda Final Fantasy XVI Review

The Good : - Boss fights (the real ones, not the semi boss) are generally grandiose, have a lot of interesting phases, attacks, visual spectacle and some difficulty. They nailed that part. - Worldbuilding and Story, they did a great job building a world that is believable, and offer plenty of ways to learn more about the different characters, factions, enemies, regions and concepts in this game. • There are multiple NPC's and menu that help you understand the state of World, ongoing politics, wars and battles, interactions between characters, which is great and engaging. ○ But some of them should be introduced sooner. You're in the dark for a good chunk of the game. - Eikon Powers • They offer a great variety of Powers throughout the game, which is the main thing that keeps the game alive and gives it a bit of freshness. It's cool to try to find what is the most optimized setup and find some good power combos. ○ I wish there was a bit more powers that are meshing together tough. - Chronoliths : • Basically a small arena that tests your mastery of a particular Eikon. I unfortunately only found one, but the one I did really showed how great the game could have been if they made it a bit more difficult and pushed the player to understand more the combinations and intricacies of the powers. - The Story can really shine in some parts, and I felt really engaged in the mysteries that this Game offers. - 3C : Clive feels extremely responsive and the abilities and attacks are fun to play with. - Characters : Some of the characters in the game are easy to attach to, Cid, Mid, Gav. Some other characters are a bit too stereotypical, but in general I liked hanging out with the crew that Clive is surrounded with and they are useful in combat. • I wished that our Wolf was a bit more useful though. I never really felt that his abilities were particularly impactful. - Cinematics : Some of the Cinematics are really well done, the visuals are amazing. - Biomes : There's a good amount of variety in the different regions you're going to, and the World is generally pretty (but a little bit uneven honestly). The Bad : - Even though the game is long but not THAT long (around 50-60hours), it feels much longer than it is. Some reasons : • Side Quests are just busy work, and there are way too many. The pacing of how they unlock also feels very weird. They give you something like 5-6 sidequests in batch that you feel like you have to do because a lot of them can disappear as you progress through the main story. At least 60% of them are very uninteresting but you feel compelled to do all of them for the 40% that have some interesting story development. • Too many hunts. Like the sidequest, you also usually unlock a batch of 5 in one shot after a story progression. I feel like they really bloated that part, and the ones that seem interesting (the S tier) are kinda gated because they're the only for which the game doesn't give you any information on where to find them. • Clive's movement speed is not fast enough for how large The Hideaway is. It's awful having to constantly run around it. It's faster to fast travel to The Hideaway while already AT The Hideaway if you are in the back half and need to get to the front half for a quest. • Too much mini boss reuse that are dragging out a lot of the fights ○ And since 95% of them are centered around the Stagger system, it gets old very fast. • The Chocobo is too slow and can't be used half of the time (especially frustrating to be dismounted every time you get close to a dialog or point of interest). It's too long to get on it too. • Too many fights in general. - The Opening : It's kind of a mix of the best and the worst. The story is really interesting and engaging at the start, but at the same time, the pacing of it is horrible. You keep switching from a 10minutes cinematics to a 2 minutes gameplay section and that felt frustrating to me. - Not really an open world, but not really linear either. • You generally just run around looking for hunts or traveling to waymarkers. It feels very MMO-esque. There's very little things to actually discover and explore, and when there actually is something, most of the time, Clive tells you : "Oh it looks interesting, but it's not the right time for it". Hinting to the fact that it is probably something for the New Game+ or endgame I don't know… • They try to lure you with things to loots, but most of the time it's a worthless stack of 10gils (a music roll sold by a vendor can cost 50.000 in comparison). - Difficulty : Non existent outside of Bosses (and even then…) • Enemies are generally braindead and are just there to be smashed. There's very little difficulty in the game in general. • You can literally sit in front of one enemy and it won't attack you for a good 10seconds (something like a Hyena or a grunt soldier). Outside of some caster that buff or heal some allies, enemies never really work together or offer any strategic difficulty. • FF7 Remake is SO much better on that front. - (very subjective) Some of the Story is very "soap opera" oriented and I had my fair share of eye rolling when you get the typical cringy japanese dialogs. - After playing Star Wars Survivor, the comparison between the dialogs, face animations, is really rough. Star Wars Survivor feels almost like watching a movie, where Final Fantasy dialogs and facial animations are very stiff and not as believable (except some parts in the main quest). I guess it's true for most J-RPG though. - Progression : The Progression in the game is very weak. Outside of the Powers you unlock. The items that you get or craft have generally very little impact. The gear is pretty much just "numbers go up", but you can't really even understand how it impact the damage calculation anyway. • They put so much effort into the different materials, gear reinforcements, blacksmith quests, all of that for it to not really matter in the end… • The biggest progression comes from some sidequests that give you extra potions slots. ○ I wish they gave more accessories slots! You unlock soooo many accessories but you can only equip 3, and some of them are just much better than others. And also progression comes from upgrading you powers at least.