Despite ff16 is great for new ff fans but disappointed by old ff fans, i respect the 16th installment in there own way. Not great but decent.

Can we have a Final Fantasy game whose story and lore does not revolve around the crystals? 8 and 10 did it, better give it another go

Reminds me of Hollywood when they find a half decent script, then go “yeah, no one will watch this unless we make it the 16th installment of a franchise”. This isnt final fantasy. Its an imposter that would have been forgotten easily by the gaming community if not for a nepotistic inheritance of a FF fanbase.

I agree with almost all of your points but I have to strongly disagree with your take on the music of FF16 man. It’s up there with the best video game music in history like the nier series. I think you just like pop and rock more which is just fine, but FF16’s music is fantastic for almost everyone else

The main story was really great, Clive is a badass main character and so are the villains (Benedikta, Barnabas, Kupka, his own mother Anabella). But the side quests a drag…

Totally disagree with most points here. I’m glad I can enjoy things. I’d hate to hate everything. Poor people.

I feel the comparisons to game of thrones were a bit exaggerated, final fantasy has always had darker themes without being gratuitous or nihilistic

Ff xvi is amazing and meeh

This game simultaneously feels cheap and expensive at the same time

On one hand you have jaw dropping cinematic Titanic clashes between Kaiju impressive particle effects impressive foliage and lighting

At the same time they’ve lazily clipped Clive’s sword to his model with a hoop sheath, and some of the textures and assets look like they were imported from the GameCube

it was good though ……

I bet this is the first final fantasy where not a single person who played it shed a tear. Not even some emotionally unstable gamer girl could get invested enough in this game to care that much.

The problem with the music is that the GAME was so meh, that those “meh” emotions are tied to all of the music. If you can think of just the Clive vs ifrit fight, find the flame is great. But, soooooo much of the game sucks the music just ties to “eh” emotions

The biggest turn offs for me were…
– The camera pans before each cut scene. Each cut scene starts with a view of the landscape and then pans down to behind the shoulder view. Every time. And then they end the cut scene the same exact way. I got so bored to this that I just started skipping cut scenes even on my first play through. 
– The pauses after a loot screen, “enemy vanquished”, “side quest accepted” or “side quest completed” messages. 
– The instanced world map that made the world feel more like the state of Mississippi than a full world.
– The part where you open a gate for by pressing X and then the game pauses until you hold R2 long enough.
– The part where each casual fight are exactly the same. 
– Each town were exactly the same (the main door is locked, so you have to talk to the person with a red quest – he/she gives you a forced side quest where you have to talk to other folks and eventually kill one monster for them – after you get the main door unlocked more fetch quests pop up)
– Each dungeon was just going from room to room and each room there were enemies that just waited for you to come, always asleep and then surprised when you go close enough to them.
– Each fight you unleash the powers of gods but normal enemies always throw their lives at you and think they can actually kill you. None of the enemies ever try to escape in horror.
– After each chapter you have to spend 10 minutes running from one end of the base to the other end multiple times and talk to the same NPCs each time while nobody has anything interesting to say.
– No exploration anywhere. No loot dopamine, no interesting interactions. Just follow the red quest marker in a narrow path until the game ends.

I had so much faith in Yoshida getting single player final fantasy back on track but alas.

Love the content but one thing I absolutely disagree with is that FF16 is ‘Final Fantasy all grown up’. We have FF6 and Tactics. Just because Square decided to make FF childish and lighthearted with FF10 until now doesn’t mean there weren’t mature FF stories

I also don’t respect plagiarism. All the developers did was copy Game of Thrones. That isn’t unique or original. Copying someone’s paper during a test makes you a cheater. Not someone worth respecting

FF fans after FF10 wouldn’t know that Final Fantasy used to have mature themes. It really has been targeting young players and players that don’t want anything mature in a story. It has a childish, lighthearted, whimsical feel to it that started with FF10

Only thing about the game, i actually liked was the music and the graphics (to some extend).
Everything else felt heart and soulless.
In the end it felt like an offline version of FF14 with worse gameplay and a worse script.
The side quests were just a terrible experience.
Battle system was getting stale after a few hours
No exploration or meaningful side content.
Gear crafting and level up was meaningless

I had a blast with 16. That being said it’s nowhere near as fun as the others. Not even 15 lol

I don’t see people mention so I’ll say this, dropping the whole slavery angle in the second makes the whole story feel hollow. Clive has the big ass scar on his face in the exact spot where “the mark” used to be and people just don’t really give a shit? I know Japanese people are known to be overly polite but this is just insane even for their standards. Don’t make a story about discrimination and prejudice if you’re not going to do it justice. It’s believable when they are just 2D sprites that have no perceptible face but once you get closer to them looking like actual people, the expectation of delivering a believable story is much higher. Like was it too hard to write a reality where everyone still thinks Clive is a slave?? I really don’t get it. Like you even make a point that the dominant’s have positons of power!! But Jill doesn’t??? I mean they threaten to kill some random people if she doesn’t help but how did she even get into this position? She’s like literally the goddess of ice. So why are Jill, Clive, Benedicta and Kupka all right there??

I dropped FF15 not even halfway through, yeah, it looked good, but it was terrible. I didn’t even bother buying FF16. I watched a let’s play of it..and I was glad I kept my money. After this game, I’ve fully sworn off the Final Fantasy series.

I actually liked this game a lot!

I’ll only complain about One thing, though I have many complaints with this game, but I’m sick of fantasy worlds, or any worlds, having the threat of encroaching “blight” or world sickness. It’s way overdone now and we need something new to create a sense of urgency and threat in stories.

Would you believe me if I said that I had more fun with XV than XVI?

Imo
Ff15 needed an additional 15-20 hours of content
-prequel content building relationship with lunafreya and the king and the bros
– All DLC in base game
– book content in game
– Fighting as a the king and the kingdom falling in the game

Ff16 needed at least 10 hours taken away from the game.
While some might not like it for what it is and it’s combat.
What ruined 16 the most for me is all the padding and tedious tasks given to you before starting a new cool arc and those sections overall tainted a pretty good story

I think as a final fantasy fan it’s always a good time to go through a mainline game to an extent. But also, you have to feel like this game hates you and hates and is embarrassed by itself.
It feels like it hates final fantasy itself. Chocobos are there, but you get only a sliver of the iconic theme, almost like checking a box out of obligation. The moogles get even less. Magic even less that. Nary a mention of “firaga or thundara” anywhere except for maybe 3 or 4 enemies, replaced with generic charged shots.
There’s dozens of examples, but suffice it to say that killing magic in this world is a huge fuck you to the franchise and its fans, a statement that it’s so much more grown up than previous entries, totally blind to how it failed in almost every way to emulate western dark fantasy.
We just got the worst of both worlds

FF should be , and once was a trend setter not follower plus im sure its just a coincidence one of our starting hero’s ? I’m guessing looks like a shaven headed Gerald of Rivea roided up

People becoming summons is an FF14 thing. This was also made by that team. It’s less novel, more lazy retread

I eat so much food but I can’t keep eating until I rest

Its embarrassing that some random french redditors made the best final fantasy game (Clair Obscur) and arguably the best rpg game of the last decade.

So this game isn’t worth it? I play for story but the combat looks so dreadful. I CANNOT play Xenogears because the combat basically plays itself, it’s unbelievably bad I don’t understand how it’s liked

This looks like you just switch between square and triangle and wait for cool downs

Clive – walking with PTSD – but with a bad storyline.

16 is boring and depressing – no ff magic whatsoever. The story lacks any charm. Gameplay is easy and ‘for everyone’. Yoshi Pee knows what to do with Final Fantasy according to Square Enix.

Only 3,5 million copies sold in 2025. They expected so much more. Square Enix doesn’t get it. Dumbasses!

Vote with your wallet. Don’t buy trash.

It’s not that the music is bad… it’s just that there are no menorable moments to use it for…

31:56. I rewound that like 8 times. Hilarious and true.

The game for me was the very definition of “death by 1000 cuts”.

There was no one major flaw, but there were so many tiny inconveniences that just made the overall experience very forgettable.

Also, great video

I remember being excited after playing the demo, but then the actual game comes out and fixes every single conflict stablished by it in the first few chapters, the quests are oblivion tier generic, the combat is braindead easy and everything else streamlined. I stoped playing after the AWFUL titan fight.

Both this video and this comment section have really illustrated to me just how much the average fan lacks basic media literacy

Final Fantasy 16 is the worst Monster Hunter crossover ever. What a dog turd of a game.

I personally loved FFXVI, but like any other game, it has issues

I did have to use the ring of timely focus 😅

My biggest complaint with ff16 is that it didn’t release on anything but ps5 for a while. By the time it got to pc the story was already revealed to be underwhelming.

Though the second biggest complaint is that the pc edition was tuned solely for ps5 and shuts off half the ram and only works on a single gpu not a dual one.

Final Fantasy 16 basically suffered from every modern open world game trope w/ a final fantasy skin thrown on top. I enjoyed the game, BUT I miss the days of 6,7,8,9,10, hell even 12 which is not my favorite. But it doesn’t even feel like FF anymore and it’s sad. Look at Expedition 33, that game felt more like an old school RPG, and that is my game of the year easy. One of the best I’ve played in the last 10-15 years. Square needs to get back to it’s roots, but I doubt that will happen.

i love this game to death

the timeskip would’ve been perfect to develop clive and jill, have our first look at them post timeskip show they’re in an actual relationship. but since they went for the “i’m not worthy of her/him” approach, they both sat on their hands for five years

XVI feels like it’s trying to tell a clumsy, soulless copy of Xenoblade 3’s story, a story about something being wrong with the world’s rules, that needs to be confronted or otherwise dealt with, but fails by settling on that wrong thing being “magic & summons”. Every new Final Fantasy seems to make it clear how right Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga were to break away from SquareEnix, forming Monolith Soft and taking the heart and soul and talent of Final Fantasy with ’em.

“The much praised power of the PS5” always felt like an excuse for greedy developers (such as today’s Square Enix) to get lazy with their development and wasteful with their spending.

To help you with the soft musics, I loved ff16 musics, these are my favorites I hope these can help:
Writ in Water
Into the Mire- Stillwind
Idylls of the Empire
Histore – The Holy Empire of Sanbraque
Forevermore
Our Terms
Twilight
Press On

And to finish of…. My Star

This game sucked, sorry. The story was sorta okay, but terribly paced with irrelevant side quests. Reasonably good world building, terrible boring gameplay, discards all of what made FF so amazing. Really a final fantasy game with no customizable party and fleshed out party members and meaningful personal stories that intertwine in cool and unexpected ways? Even if they wanted to do this dumb action combat, getting rid of having a party was just a terrible decision. I hope FF17 goes wildly in the opposite direction and we get turn based combat and a lot of more conventional 90s and 2000s JRPG characteristics, and maybe a move to HD 2D like Octopath TRaveler and DQ3 remake.

Wanted to Investigate and discover the Quality and Narrative for this game. I am a series X player and it’s coming soon to Xbox ecosystem. I’m concerned if it fails to sell on Xbox then Square Enix will fire staff and close the shop. Games are expensive to develop and such losses impact the corporate level..

No game is perfect, I enjoyed it a lot.

FFXVI was a massive disappointment for me. Was boring, repetitive, no customization, no status effects, no elements, no party, cookie cutter chapters, crappy filler quests masquerading as main story quests, and simply no fun.

the irony that 15 now looks more like a final fantasy game just for haveing all the elements 16 excluded. when 15 came out it was hated as much as 13. now? pretty much in the same boat as 8 and 12 seen as underrated favorites by those that like them..

I know this is a year old now, but i jusy played and finished the game. This is spot on analysis. Most beautiful game ive ever played, but also the most dull. Quest acceptabce music and choco mouting music pulled straight from XIV….

What a tremendous amount of work for a video man, the script, the amount of content, sooo cool.

2:55 that’s how it used to be. Final Fantasy was the gold standard, the flag bearer, of its genre. Everyone wanted to emulate its formula. Today… it tries to emulate whatever is successful. Fans don’t want FF to be DMC-like. They want FF to be FF-like. Today, Expedition 33 has taken the flag from FF as the best of its genre. Shame on Square Enix.

I think most of yall are just plain wrong. FFXVI story and gameplay is the best one in the series. I’m a 33 year-old who has been playing finalfantasy since the ps1 when I was a kid. Of corse with the nostalgia goggles, the top spot is reserved for FFIX, my second ever FF game (I Started with FFVII), but FFXVI has everything you could wish for in a video game: Epic music, incredible kaiju fights, a loving romance, engaging combat, cohesion to the main themes. The only critique I have is with how the ending is just faking its own ambiguity to seem more deep, which fails at.

this is the game with sad ending. the protagonist die in the end.. leaving jill alone..

It just too many dumb decision from writer , imagine instead of Clive have ability to absord eikon its one of the main antagonist that can do that collecting all dominant to awake ultima.. imagine instead of bearer that been enslaved its those that cant cast magic is (we could call them “rejected by the crystal”).. imagine instead of clive that kill phoenix its actually king barnabas/odin that did. Imagine if Anabelle is secretly a dominant thats explain why she soo confidence antagonizing everybody. imagine instaed of “the blight”, every town we visit we find out their rulers/people use crystal for horrible things and thats what motivated us to destroy the crystal…. what if there actually 4 new dominant including ifrit refer to child of light come to save the world fighting the old dominant that corrupt….. Gosh i can go on and on with this ” what if” that prove that FF16 have such a dumb direction in writings.

I think you can have a great story where the hero doesn’t realize he’s guilty and seeks to punish others for what’s really his own crime (Oedipus Rex and the movies The Machinist and Memento come to mind) OR a great story where the hero knows he’s guilty (Crime and Punishment, Macbeth, many others). The problem in FF XVI is that this story just fizzles out less than halfway through and feels like a copout: it turns out Joshua survived, and this revelation seems to instantly relieve Clive of his guilt and restore their relationship to what it was. We never explore the possibility that some latent resentment toward Joshua led Clive to try to murder him; the whole thing just suddenly blows over and has no further relevance.

“When fans predicted Final Fantasy XVI would reach new heights, I didn’t think they meant new heights in boring the arse off me.” Lol touché. They should put that one on the back of the box

I just wanna remind everyone that FF16 is the WORST selling Mainline Final Fantasy game in the franchise.

FF1-6 (Pixel Remasters Included) OUTSOLD FF16, FF7-10 OUTSOLD FF16, FF12 the underrated Black sheep of the franchise OUTSOLD FF16, the entire FF13 trilogy OUTSOLD FF16.

Goes to show that the overall fan base just didn’t like or care about FF16. If FF16 is so good why doesn’t it get the fanfare it “deserves”.

Sales means everything according to the Fanboys and the receipts are IN, FF16 was a financial FAILURE.

Such a shame at least we had Metaphor to fall back on.

the story is so bad 🗿🙏

34:15 the game only lets you have 3 party characters. They wanted bahamut to have a fitting conclusion. And honestly at that point if Jill went to the final battle I don’t think Clive would have been able to focus.

dion should have had more time with clive and josh. would have been wholesome to see him find some family with since he was step brother

Yet another final fantasy 16 hater who is incapable of recognizing peak 🤦‍♂️

People become summons is a novel ideal? Interesting.

I’m strangely reminded of Final Fantasy 10 all of a sudden.

Came to watch this after watching FF7 rebirth video. I absolutely 100% agree what you say at the end. When Ff players praise mediocrity, that is FF nowadays. So true and amazing critique. I had less issues with the story, which was the best part of the game, even tho very flawed. Gameplay parts like the limited beastiary, non existent rpg elements, fun but easy battle system, pointless traversal in the world.
Game is so mediocre it is baffles me.

I sometimes wonder what people see that makes remake trilogy or XVI deserving of game of the year talk. Nice to see people who speak what the games truly are!

It was such a slog. After the second time skip, I gave up.

i really wanted to like the game but when i was done, i was done

Trash game with trash history, disgusting secondary missions, trash characters, trash push one boton and look the fireworks gameplay, worst music ever, etc, etc.

I hope you played Rebirth. That changed my opinion that AAA modern titles were doomed to superficial gameplay and graphics.

I got it day one, finished all side quests, but it’s a dissapoinment. Didn’t even bothered with dlc. Played most of ff games, this just feels wrong. I agree with your video. Thanks for all of this.

I agree with all of this. XVI is completely forgettable.

The game absolutely nails the big, spectacular moments, but utterly drops the ball on smaller, more quiet ones. I’m not a long term fan of the series, I’ve only played FFXV, FFVII Remake, Type-0 and Stranger of Paradise, but all of those games (except Type-0) for all their flaws had characters I cared about to some extent or another, and worlds that felt interesting and worth exploring. Even Stranger of Paradise.

i just wish it played like ff7 re

I believe there is more to the story than we are told directly and I like that very much. So the basis of the story is alright, but it lacks in the way its told, the world feels EMPTY. in every way. Like an unfinished game. It feels that there are like 10-15 people in the world that are alive. No side-stories, no individualty and story to side-characters, no story for the places of the world that is being told, no towns, no sidequests, no role-play-elements, next to no weapons, no items and the bullshit decision they made in ff7 as well: let you play first round only on normal which is TOO FUCKING EASY!!! And then force you to play it a second time on hard mode to get the trophies just to stretch the game. Its AWFUL! 
It`s like they took a long time to get the main plot points of the story in order, than invested a huge budget into the graphics and fight scenes and then patched up the rest because there was no time and no money anymore. An unfinished game in every respect.

ATB and immersive storytelling with interesting characters were all forgotten, replaced by simplistic action combat, non-existing RPG mechanics and terrible writing and storytelling. I am baffled how this series releases worse game with each mainline entry since 10, each game being worse than the last. The one thing I will forever remember in 16 is the awful beach naked scene which is supposed to be inspiring and somewhat romantic, but has the emotional weight and chemistry of a jug of water being poured down the drain.

I fucking hated the game and the ending, Yoshi Pee, the man that killed Final Fantasy

FFXVII will be a copy of Squid Game

just finished the game and i feel robbed of my time

It has plot, it has character, it has story, meh dialogue, meh music, and max spectacle…The game was awesome through it all. It really is a great fucking game…it’s just not a great final fantasy. It did have elements of social commentary tho…did anyone catch it? cuz it aged like fine wine…

game is really easy yes, if you can’t tell between buy and sell…that’s a skill issue. yes, you are dumb…do something about it it’s all you can do.
Characters feel like everyone is being played by a kristen stewart from different dimensions…while this game deviated hard from FF. The Story, sidequests, hunts, are all so fucking good.
It’s not a Final Fantasy, but it used some of it’s identity to really pluck your strings.

I liked ff16, but I was expecting to be able to visit the big cities! I kept wondering how big they were going to be and all the things to explore in them, only for each one of them to be destroyed in a story mission…

Loved FF7, enjoyed FF8, loved FF9, disliked FF10, could not finish FF15, first one I could not finish or even play to the halfway point. Tried the FF16 demo, no thanks. Tried playing the FF7 remake too, nah. They stopped making good games at FF9 IMO.

this game was a bit of a let down i hope they go another direction with 17 and onward

The magical fantasy racism was done better in FF13, where advanced technology could put make the non-powered human authorities a formidable threat.

If I can be honest, this should have been a spinoff instead of a numbered entry. The MMOs shouldn’t have been numbered either. In the meantime, I think FF Type 0 was underrated.

18:14 When I first played FF7 as a kid there was no way to just listen to whatever song you wanted whenever. You’d get the music from an area stuck in your head and do whatever you could to go back. I remember getting wall market and Corneos mansion stuck in my head near late game and being so bummed I couldn’t head back there to hear the music, absorb the vibes and see what everyone there had to say. Let me tell you, when I randomly dug up the Midgar key in Bone village I was losing my mind. I had already gone back to midgar at many points within the game to see if I could go through the door. I had no Idea that Tifas ultimate weapon was waiting for me there either. Every aspect of that experience was something I’d discovered purely through trial and error and love of the game. That feeling of being rewarded for diligent love of a games world is something modern games have had difficulty replicating. It’s no wonder to me that speed running has become so popular, running your character into a random wall hoping for something to happen is what these older games were like alot of the time. That feeling when something finally does happen is indescribable.

How could one accidentally sell Ragnarok?

The wrong director.mmo have nothing to do with single player games

Barnabas being a worthy opponent was… very odd. He thrashes you with an unstoppable attack, and then an hour later you see him again and he says “You’ve grown so much since we last fought!”
But nothing happened between the last fight and this one. It’s like they skipped the training montage or something.

I enjoyed the main story and the boss fights were all epic; but I missed the much more involved exploration and expansive dungeons of 15 and 7 Rebirth. Linear dungeons aren’t always bad, if they are done in a way that is much more dynamic and immersive, such as what FF7 remake and Rebirth pulled off in parts. The dungeons/action chapters in 16 were just kind of dull and undynamic in environment design and stuff. Exploration of field areas was a bit better, but then those intermediate chapters usually got bogged down with way too many mandatory “side quests”, and dragged on. Seriously, I got so sick of that douche Lubou, and his smarmy aladdin looking face. And every time the plot moved forward it then had to screech to a halt to have you go back to your secret base and talk to all the same side characters again to get them up to speed. The side quests kind of drove me crazy too; I think they actually were pretty well written and did a good job at world building, I can’t really say I hated any, but as the game went on they just got to be too long. Some of the quests it’s like you have a couple of scripted battles and then have to sit through three different dialogues that last like 20 minutes total. Just speed it up! I miss the days when RPGs were silent or used voice acting sparingly; making EVERY SINGLE LINE in the game voiced just slows everything down to a crawl and makes the whole story as long as like three seasons of a tv show combined. Honestly think it would have vastly improved the side quests for them to be non voiced, or if I’d just manually read the dialogue and advanced it myself.

Damn, chocobo jousting would have been such a fun mini game, and if this was the ps1/ps2 era we definitely would have had that.

I feel like Final Fantasy games since at least 10, haven’t really let you explore enough (though 12 did have a touch more of that for a brief moment). I didn’t mind that you couldn’t go in to every single door, or talk to every single NPC, because that kind of thing can feel over whelming, and it would have been a waste of developer time to add it all (likely, we’ll see a lot of more of shallow, LLM written shovel content in coming games, and I’m dreading that…). What I did appreciate about this particular entry, especially when compared with 13 (let’s not talk about 15 – I can’t even figure out how to get in to that monstrosity) – is that at least there are side quests, and branching paths – and there are quite a lot of them, especially late game. I don’t know that I agree with these takes that say 16 is out of step with the direction that Final Fantasy has been going, if anything, it’s has embedded within it, a course correction.

I had more fun in like a dragon infinite wealth.

I love this video, my thoughts exactly.

I loved nektar, you’re being mean.

This game was ass and I’m sad I wasted my time completing it. Halfway through I skipped all dialog that wasn’t the main story.
And then the main story never went anywhere. Branded branded branded > will will will > end.
Boring combat. Boring characters. Hell, Odin was supposed to break Clive’s will and then did absolutely nothing to do that except talk really slowly repeating the same shit over and over.
I’m going to buy FFX I think. Relieve the good times. (My favorite is FF9 but haven’t played 10 in decades.)

I really feel like if they weren’t going for GoT, they were definitely going for the FFXII narrative with the evil empire taking over the home country. I kept thinking as I was playing that even the world building there was bad though. FFXII at least had a diverse cast of main characters with vastly different motivations and who didn’t always get along because of the differences in different countries and cultures within the game. The only real conflict between people in XVI is non-bearers vs bearers and that just feels so empty and superficial.

Sadly it took me 40 mins of mind numbingly tedious rambling to finally give up on this video. If ff 16 that tedious and boring to you honestly it seems tailor made for you having listening to 40 mins of you talking. Please do us all a favor and skip buying next final fantasy so YouTube won’t have suggest me utter garbage like that. The whole time I was listening to this dude yap about how he miss old final fantasy and how it don’t feel like it’s the old games anymore only to bring up how final fantasy shouldn’t do a twist like old games did at 39 min mark. Doomed if they do doomed if they don’t. If they actually made the main character aware of what he did from the beginning you would’ve moan and whine about how there’s no buildup by bringing some final fantasy 9 storybeat or something. There’s no pleasing people like you honestly. While the criticisms about open worlds these days begin big and empty is actually true rest of this is tier one garbage

About 1 hour into this game, I knew I lost $80. Square is a garbage heap

i put 35 hours into the game and i refuse to give it more time
the combat is so shallow
god of war 2018 is more of an rpg than FINAL FANTASY

it was an ok game, it just wasn’t a final fantasy game.

I don’t want everything to have the same feel and vibe. I like that it’s not “like” many other Final Fantasies. I love change. Everytime I pick up this game here and there the battles excite me and I love the design. The Leviathan battle, all the Eikon battles were epic. I don’t need a bumbling fool or forced strange character for comic relief. I love Remake and Rebirth and I love 16. I’m so glad I have different feeling games to go to when the mood strikes. Change man, gotta love it.

This game is really a massive series of missed opportunities that I can only chalk up to lack of talent and bad resource management. Its one of those premises that is extremely self-evident: you have two brothers and two walks of life you want to show, and each one represents an aspect of the same core power. Do a dual protagonist game that cuts between Clive’s anti-magic anarchic every-man rebels and Joshua’s entrenched political machinations trying to fix the world from the inside. Now you have antagonists that Clive cares about directly because they hurt his family and antagonists Joshua cares about directly because he was actually at the table when the intrigue was happening. This also cuts out most of the filler because you don’t need 70 garbage side quests when you have two tightly written chapters to swap between instead, and you don’t have poorly explained fights that are only in your way because they have to be. The final fight is a natural conflict between Clive’s dark destructive Ifrit power and Joshua’s redemptive Pheonix power instead of the weird Naruto aliens, strip those out completely they are entirely unnecessary.

This game honestly writes itself and its baffling it was done so poorly. Either way, Octopath 2 is the true Final Fantasy 16 in my mind.

Brilliant. So glad I came across this channel. You covered everything I dislike about this game. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I hear all the praise this game got.

The only response to this video needed: final fantasy 7 rebirth.

extremely late but i think that the bearers being persecuted and the dominants not is inspired from how attack on titan does it with how normal eldians are persecuted just for having the ability to become titans, whilst shifters are not because they can turn into war machines at will, howeever and a big however here it doesnt make sense simply because no eldian from aot can willingly turn into a titan, they need to be forced to using the serum, since in ff16 every bearer can weild magic by default it just makes the whole thing stupid when the bearers could just get together and attack the oppressors whereas no eldian can do that. also dont forget that shifers in aot arent treated as celebrities like dominants are for the most part here, they are just treated as normal citizens or honorary eldians as they are called

Great video.
Here are some truth pills for you all:
1. FF7R is the true realization of Final Fantasy combat in real-time and is a brilliant translation of what turn-based ATB feels like into real-time. If you don’t like it because you “can’t avoid damage” or you “get stunlocked” then you don’t get it at all.
2. YoshiP is one of the most overrated game directors of all time and FF14 has been in a rancid state of mediocrity for far longer than anyone had the balls to admit.

Yoshi-P and his team are talentless hacks.

Ultima for me is the weakest part of this game and you really hit the nail with the reference to the White Walkers. They really could’ve just went with Barnabas being a very cunning foreigner who successfully infiltrated the main island/continent for easy colonization to steal the mother crystal resources. But nah we got a weird ass alien.

houses sucks i agree we cant get in

pixel world map? LMAO no bro nope

Your breakdown of this game is so correct and refreshing, I played this to the point you cut Titan’s hands off in that basement scene, I stopped because I actually fell asleep as it happened and realised, this game hasn’t grabbed me 40 hours in and I couldn’t give a shit about it.

Final Fantasy is my favorite ever game series and I’m happy to accept it’s now dead, or become something horribly worse.

I still have the joy of the many of the previous games to be thankful for.

I agree so much with this. I think biggest tradgedy of this game ultimatly is that it’s just not fun. I completed the Quests out of a feeling of “well that’s what you usually do” rather than “these are fun and exicting bonus stories”, that Battle system while flashy and dynamic was incredibly limited and one dimensional. The Story, well you said pretty much everything and the characters failed to leave an impact even the ones that seemed to have the natural charisma to do so were either not written well despite having a lot of screentime (Jill is by far the worst offender of this) or left behind for the sake of ultima fitting into the whole story (looking primarily at Barnabas here) and even the big epic clashed failed to leave an impact on me as this games big moments all wanted to be the biggest one of them in the end non of them felt to me like much more than a demonstration of how well we can do partical effects on the PS5 by now.

idk if it is mentioned but on pcs what can just about run this game you have to turn graphics down what makes a lot of places and towns dull and even more boring

It was a mess of a game, glad it failed to hit long term sales targets and will get SE to rethink things for the next ones.

Oh man, I loved this. I was wondering if I was stupid for not like this, But no, I don’t think I am. This game is lack luster.

I read the scene of clive and ifrit as clive knew he killed joshua, but he didn’t want to accept it, so he blamed the hooded figure to free his mind, until he was forced to accept it.

Great video

I dunno. The bearer and dominant thing made sense to me. You hate bearers. Dominants are bearers. But the masses *can* subjugate non-dominant bearers. There always felt like there was this under current that if dominants couldn’t, Y’know, flatten cities, they would be subjugated just the same. They were celebrated because they were powerful.

u forgot to mention the awful cutscene to gameplay ratio.

following TV trends was a mistake, Normalfags watch TV and they’ve always had shit taste, the FF crowd watches and reads anime, fantasy, sci-fi. Realism is a tabboo word for many of them, and sadly western fantasy sci-fi (with exception of a few notable franchizes) often have a really hard time divorsing from realism and GOT was the worst example of this

Jill should have been an actual party member.

All I’m gonna say is I’m happy 16 didn’t have any mini games or I would’ve gone insane. Tbh, also I poured about 400 hours into this game so that should tell you what I think about the game

They Could have called this game anything else besides FF and it would have be just fine.

The focus is clearly on social-media-clickable spectacle and memes. They are trying to play the business meta, and design everything around what they think will make their numbers go up, instead of asking themselves what makes a game fun. It is the fate of all publicly traded companies.

Clive was the best part of the whole rotten world and they kill him at the ends for no reason.

I Wanted to Play as jill

Also, back up thought, why are you apologizing for not liking the game? Just say you don’t like it, and own it.

I really wanted to like it, but it sucked. Not as much as 13, but it sucked. I even played 12 for the first time recently. It sucks in its own way, which is a shame because i loved FF Tactics and Vagrant Story

There is a lot of dark story telling in Final Fantasy as is.

Tellah’s death. Galuf’s death. Leo’s death. Aerith’s death. Tidus’s death? Tidus being revealed to be just a dream is quite dark. Yuna’s love interest wasn’t even a real person. That is dark.

The problem is that it is doing so in a way that doesn’t reflect its own style. It doesn’t feel authentic. It is okay to borrow from the Witcher and Game of Thrones, but it is best to make it blended enough with establish Final Fantasy motifs such as the death of a loved one or a close friend that it impact the story. That doesn’t really happen here, because you never have them in your party. You never had a true relationship with Cid. Clive did, but Clive is an active protagonist, not a silent one and so you don’t. Clive does. You don’t. And you don’t even have him in your party in which his utility meant something to you like with Galuf or Aerith.

“We take one step forward and two steps back.” I feel you brother…. I am also disappointed with what has become the status quo for modern day games and storytelling. Fancy, realistic graphics and worlds and less and less “fun” which was what the point of games, yes even rpg games, was back in the 80s – 90s. Although I loved XVI as a story, what disappointed me the most was the push towards graphics and grittier storytelling. The blandness of the towns and cities was also very apparent and made me not want to look at anything at times.

OST is always a big deal for me, and this game definitely is a let down on that department.
Honestly, only No Risk No Reward, Sixteen Bells, Sever and Twilight picked my attention.

5:04 This is such a disingenuous thing to say. Final fantasy has had mature themes incorporated into its narrative literally since Final Fantasy II. Final fantasy IV had people being executed by the red wings and Final Fantasy VI showed Celeste trying to kill herself. Just because they haven’t always had the graphical fidelity to show it doesn’t mean XVI is square ENIX trying to show FF has “grown up”

i really enjoyed this game a lot so i don’t agree with a lot of your criticism (i respect it tho) but the title of this vid cracks me up

shiva is so hot

I have a hard time believing most bearers would be enslaved by magicless mankind. They have every advantage over their would-be captors, and with enough time, regular humans would become subservient to them. Bearers can wield all the same tools as their non-magic brethren, and then some.

This is exactly what happened in From the New World (or Shin Sekai Yori), where psychics ran rampant and wiped out large portions of the populace after losing control of their powers. Eventually, the majority of the world regressed into a feudal system ruled by the psychics in power, establishing laws to better prevent further rampages, and then enslave magicless humans. I won’t say much more, in case anyone wants to watch the anime or read the novels it’s based on, but the point is, those with powers would eventually overwhelm those without, enough to one day overthrow and usurp them in every facet of society. It’s the harsh reality of that scenario, and FF16 doesn’t do enough to convince me bearers would be an oppressed class. The writers followed this logic only with the Dominants, who were in high positions of political power thanks in large part to the Eikons they obtained at birth.

I feel like everybody keeps ignoring the complete lack of game mechanics of this game

FF overall is overrated and hasn’t consistently surpassed its peers over the years, aside from a few standout features that built its reputation: visuals, summons, and narrative style.

Stopped the video at this point 19:46. Bravo!
I waited for the game on PC. Avoided spoilers like my life depended on it.
All the nagging at the back of my head that I felt when playing, well told in this video.
Anyway, carrying on watching.

Ending this with „You Raise me up”hits so powerful – this is the ending Final Fantasy game deserves🥹

Orion85 destroys XVI with facts and logic

You strayed, stfu.

My problem with the story wasn’t that they were trying to go for Game of Thrones, it’s that as always with tons of Japanese stories, right before the ending they completely chicken out of the “political” plot and pivots into the usual single evil entity that is behind everything. I mean there’s even the “kill god” meme. A lot of media coming from Japan solves their last act problems with just “kill god”.

I said it before with Attack on Titan and I said it then with Final Fantasy 16. Both would’ve been a billion times better if they focused on the sociopolitical aspects instead of funneling their story into 1 bad guy and calling it a day.

FF is dead now. totally dead. hell SMT/Persona synonymous with JRPGS now. square enix lost miserably. hell ATLUS has Metaphor:Re Fantazio coming on 10/11/24 and no one even mentions FF anymore.

Spot on every issue FF now having, SE should watch this video, everything thing that made FF special were lost, hence that’s why many true fans said FF has no soul anymore

Witcher 3 bored the ass off me. It was such a trash slog to get through. And I turn all music off in every game I play, I find it annoying, especially if it is for foreign language

the narrative of this game genuinely sux hard, it is so full of filler and its not even good and the side quests are terrible. Yoshi-P should never direct a mainline game ever again.

I didn’t like this game the first time I played it but when I went back on my second playthrough for the platinum I can say it’s a good game. Other than 15 I haven’t liked anything the franchise has churned out since 9.

God Im so glad I found this, what catharsis! This game was just an unfinished mess, they didn’t know what they wanted to do with the pieces they setup. We just go places, and do stuff, the story is just an excuse to get you from one set piece to the next.

I love FF7 (Remake was okay also) FF8, FF10 is probably my favorite. FF15 was a disappointment, the combat was too repetitive, the world too lifeless. I tried to like this new one, but I just can’t. Maybe someone likes this kind of single character action game, but this isn’t Final Fantasy anymore. The game has put Chocobos in it, as if to remind you that hey, this is Final Fantasy. FF16 is a disappointment. It’s actually funny that FF15 is (at least for me) a better Final Fantasy because you can play with different characters anyway. Although it already had the same problem as this one, boring but spectacular combat, lifeless static world.

I don’t know where Square is going from here, but I don’t want FF games like this.

love how this guy sees a few pixels and goes full ” that drawing od a man pointing “, while with litterally the best shader-work+3dmodels+animations+art directionhe goes ” nah …. so boring … i would have done it better ” xD … opposite opinion on the difficulty, I find this game too difficult, and without the ring of evasion I would have refunded it,as I just couldn’t access the content i paid for.

After 16, I am expecting a pinball game for 17.

In general there will never be an RPG as good as Chrono Trigger.

I liked ff16, if it wasnt for the way villains were handled i prolly would have given this game a 10/10, hooked me from start to finish. The problems you outlined are apparent but i still loved playing this game.

This is the first Final Fantasy that bored me so much that I couldn’t finish it 😅

“just a big slice of fuck you” lol perfect

Black Myth Wukong is what i first imagined how FFXVI combat would be, good, smooth and fast but guess i was wrong

but still… the story is awful and wont save this game from its own downfall

I enjoyed the story the most at the beginning of the game, where it was smaller and more personal

But then it grew too big, way too quickly and I didn’t find most of it interesting at all

To me all FFs past FFX are irrelevant. They burned me so bad with their mediocrity that I have come to accept that I’m ok with FFX being the last FF for me personally. At least the Dragon Quest series is maintaining their high level of quality.

The fact that I heard FFX and XI music throughout this, means you have taste.

this is the review of a man who pretends to want to like someting yet it becomes apparent in the first 15 minutes that he wanted to hate it from the get go.

I remember when I killed a bomb with fire magic and my heart immediately sank. Such a waste of potential.

Great Video again coming back after months.

I think a great video idea is “what makes a mainline final fantasy gaming??”..

and going back through the history of the series from 1 to X and drawing on some core concepts that makes a mainline game.

personally, I don’t think a mainline game can just be a one character solo game. I think a key concept of final fantasy mainline games …maybe even the key concept is

A story about various people from a variety of backgrounds coming together to Proform a task (saving the world) that they couldn’t on their own.

enemies become friends
friends become enemies
they grow as the story progress
and the world changes around them in reactions to their acts

Sakaguchi basically laied out the blueprint of a mainline final fantasy game with 9.
9 is the quintessential final fantasy mainline game

As a kid who grew up playing ff1-12, i used to dream about how epic ff would be in the future. Turns out elden ring is what i wanted it to be…. Elden ring did what i wished ff would have done.

Square Enix have never put out a “great” final fantasy. It’s unfortunate but true, even when they’ve built on existing great lore, they’ve just managed to something great worse.

Something I don’t get when people talk about XVI is that it’s “Final Fantasy…but mature”. XII starts with a wedding that ends with a dead husband and false flag leading to the subjugation of a country. X has a corrupt religion that uses fear to control the masses. VIII has child soldiers, IV and IX both have political leaders corrupted to the point where they justify killing (or allowing to die) their citizens. I know VII is dark but I’ve never played it.
Final Fantasy has always covered dark topics, players just didn’t want to see it.

The truth: MMOs are an inherently bad game genre, and FFXVI is merely an MMO with no online component.

Clive and all the other characters are boring. The world looks AI generated by a generic MMO simulator. I yawned a lot , but during the “plot twists” I actually fell asleep.

I agree that 16s storytelling becomes boring and feels padded. Too much is also in “datalogs” (i mean it is but also it isn’t… its more that i don’t want to read that much)

Too much character building was in sidequests, and even then there wasn’t much interesting there (as far as execution)

I had the exact same thoughts that too much of the game is a drag and some of the fights are sooo long that i was just like, “i don’t think i can play this game a second time”

Nah, you selling your gear, skill issue my dude. “Game too easy” but complains he can’t read. It literally shows what you own in the game. You were just not paying attention.

“Game is too easy” then says, “i only died because i forgot a pot”. Okay, so why did you need a pot? You got hit. You didn’t heal yourself? Guess it wasnt that easy then, huh. Now, if you say that because torgal and pots share the same D pad and that you accidentally used them thinking you were using torgal or that you were on torgal and couldn’t heal (still would be slight skill issue)

I like that you mention minigames and show FF7 snowboarding as “fun” (that minigame wasnt even fun) and the ironic twist is that Rebirths biggest fault is the minigames. Sirry, i don’t play FF for its minigames. I hate it every time. Hate it in 7. Hate it in 8. 10, too. Honestly, i was ok with justice monsters 5 in 15. In fact, 15s are COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. I will just never complain about minigames. Also 16 kinda does have them…. id consider them the eikon battles

I, too, was looking forward to Soken’s music, coming from years of 14…. like you, i was severely disappointed. 16s OST is forgettable. It’s good while playing the game, but i won’t really choose to listen to it.

Unfortunately, i can’t really take those that say “FF hasnt been good since 10”. That’s just… not true. 13s storytelling was fine (as much as people complain, you did NOT need the datalogs), 13-2 was also fine (didn’t play LR). 15 is also very much fine, too. The issue with 15 was that you actually needed to play the game (explore, hang out, do quests) to get the story. Yeah, you “need” the DLC (and Noctis chapter in DOTF). 15s issue is its too short (without dlc) 14 has a lot of similar issues to 16 but it’s usually not that bad.. (Dawntrail is the same complaints but not as bad as 16). While 15 had a lot of shitty sidequests, it at least makes you get exposed to banter which makes you bond. 16 doesn’t even have THAT.

I agree with the cid complaint, but kupka did eventually go after Clive specifically… using jill and his home

Also, it isn’t out of nowhere that Clive was naked.

Jill was definitely a missed opportunity. She is interesting but also forgettable. Some said jill had development. Tbh, barely.

Hmm…i wouldn’t have used Yuna (though she is the true MC). I would’ve chose Serah tbh. No mistake though, i like Yuna.

The only thing that forced me to continue 16 was seeing Barnabas… even Dion. It takes way to long to even get much of anything about Barnabas…. man, bro even had that black blue going on, too. I felt for Dion. It was nice that he is a male character who has a male lover, but we don’t see too much out of that. That’s good and bad

I mean, 16 just being that get rid of magic thing would just be another FF15 (as that is the other timeline, and honestly was interesting even if executed poorly) and the Last Remnant, even, which has the same director… and the villian being related, was also 15. I would’ve liked barnabas to have been the main villian. Getting all those powers to fight him would be infamous second son all over again tho.

As far as time, 5 years later won’t necessarily be that different. And i know the game doesnt change it for you, bc i also notice no clothing changes, but then again, you have 2 clothing glamour options for Clive, Jill, and Torgal. Tbh, that shows they DO have a clothing change as it makes sense to use those after the skip and torgal a little bit later after the skip. Its weird like… you wonder why the game doesnt do that, but then at the same time, its nice it gives the player the option without needing to do a first clear (which 7 rebirth requires)

The Eikon battles weren’t enough because they were too long and overstayed their welcome.

Was i the only one who was unimpressed with the demo?? I felt it was boring from the start. The characters, the combat, the aesthetic.

Also, based on what ive seen in the last 20+ years, pre-FF12 was not better than current FF. The reason why it really hit people is in the past, FF was ahead of most devs. It was graphically impressive and one of the only story driven games (loz being another). Now other devs have caught up. Story is NORMALCY now and many have better graphics than FF. Sorry, but that’s mostly what 10 had. it was graphically impressive at the time. 7 and 8 was, too. Because honestly, 7’s story was not that “great” either, it was just executed well and the game is rather short. Imo 8 has better storytelling than 7. Make no mistake, i love 7 and it the storytelling is way better in the remakes (i don’t see much of it as pad as some of the pad people complained about WERE actually in og), it just makes the mistakes with the endings (mostly rebirth).

Dear god. The game is awesome. You don’t like it? It’s all right, but you don’t have to make a one hour video explaining to us why you didn’t like it. Just move on…

i was actually quite invested in the politics and power struggles of the war. even read all those context sensitive lore bits because i was genuinely interested. all that flew out the window when Ultima became the focus. just another typical know it all god. i agree with Barnabas having much more potential.

and while i also would have prefered a more damaged relationship between Clive and Joshua, i also cant say their loyalty and love for one another didnt make me tear up, especially at the end. as the oldest of four children, i tend to relate a whole lot to big brother figures in fiction, but thats highly subjective of course.

The next FF game, FF17, should be a cart racer. As longer as it has moogles, chococobos, and cactaur it’s still Final Fantasy.

the moment they reveal joshua still alive i was just like “yep this is garbage”

Did you play Dragon Quest 11? Because many of the things you miss in FF16 are in there.

Man, this channel is severely underrated. You’re the first one I’ve seen who really *gets it* in regards to modern Final Fantasy.

The way you describe it, this game has a lot of good ideas given zero time to fully cook.

Excellent review I felt the same. It had so much potential but none of it was fully realized. It felt like a demo that never ended.

This was one of the worst games I have ever played to completion. A pile of boring characters, mumbling through tedious scenes.

While I congratulate you on your poetic wording it doesn’t distract from how moderately jaded and entitled you are. Also you don’t lose all agency as a creator if you add the disclaimer that you’re experience may vary, this is speculation on my part but I’m sure you would lessen the negativity if you hadn’t already extruded this work, that and as a grown adult you need to consider that your intuition just aren’t as sharp as you think. No offense

It was fine until you said the soundtrack wasn’t good.

BASED AF

i tryed to enjoy ff16 but i couldn´t…….in my mind trough out the campaign, i would joke around calling it “game of the fantasy thrones 16”
in my opinion it was all just forced facade of final fantasy and i didn`t like it neither do i support it.

THANK YOU: the point about how little you cared couldn’t be better stated. This is exactly what their games after FFX seem to really have in common with me.

It’s always escaped me as words but it’s this actually striking level of bad story where you don’t have to introspect or look back at your notes to see you didn’t care about the story. It’s just so shockingly and consciously there to me. They even managed to do this to FF7!!

Square Enix is just a Japanese Disney. They laid off all of the professional story tellers and they’re left with nothing but corny people left. They *can’t* make a good story anymore and they likely can’t restructure into a company that can. They’re done man.

Final Fantasy is dead, Square is dead… just like Bethesda and Blizzard. Remember what they used to be and enjoy the great games they made cuz they are gone. What matters isn’t the name on the box, it’s the names of the people who made it. Follow visionary directors or great writers of games and media, not the companies they work for. Square didn’t make Final Fantasy great. SAKAGUCHI, UEMATSU, NOJIMA AND KITASE… they made Final Fantasy great… they are not the only ones of course so many talented artists and programmers’ and writers, it’s the people that made Final Fantasy the greatest series ever made, and while they were there it was. Those people left a long time ago and without them Square might as well be Ubisoft. If you love Final Fantasy FUCK SQUARE, look for the names who made Final Fantasy what it used to be and support their new projects…

I feel like the low-fantasy atmosphere was more off-putting than the other aspects when you still have Bahamut, magic, and everything else. No Moogles, Cactaur… The chocobo look like horses instead of meteor casting magic birds or fun like Boco from ff5. 39:23 The fact this game as a “Final Fantasy” made you feel this way means that everything has already gone wrong with the story.

20:53 press x to stay conscious is the mini game in ff16

I hate that, when Jill was gonna avenge herself, Clive is a liability, because everything she does is to protect him. And this makes she kinda lame, because she don’t fight her fight, it’s clive that’s hitting the sword against her enemies, she only supports creating the fight scenario and delivers the final blow. When Clive is fighting himself/Ifrit, she is simply not present, and don’t participate in any sense.
If i made this history, Clive would go full killing spree being influenced by Ifrit and Shiva would be the only one strong enough to hold him, because of her psychological and physical prowess and understanding about the situation, saying things like “i miss him too”, or “I know how entoxicating Eikon power is, i was a killer too, but you have to control it” while beating the shit outta him and freezing his flames till he is tamed.
And when it’s her time to shine, Clive would take front in the invasion to spare her strength, and when they find the villain, he could intimidate threathing to hurt civilians, making she go full berserk kaiju batling the monster while freezing the lava and impeding it from killing more people while Clive is fleeing with the civilians. And then, after she kills everybody, she is still enraged and now Clive is the one to stop her, not with Ifrit, but with him defending the people from her attacks, remembering her why they are fighting. She starts to feel shame, then Clive just says “I’m proud of you.”

The game was okay. Maybe a 7.5. Not terrible, but also not great at all. And definitely a bare bones Final Fantasy game. This falls into the exact same category as BG3 for me. I liked BG3, good game, but not a good BG at all in my mind. There’s so much of that these days. Games pretending to be something they’re not, walking around in skin suits trying to capture the essence of giants that came before them. And this isn’t a knock against innovation and trying new stuff, because Wrath of the Righteous captured the spirit of the old BG games far more effectively, so it’s not like it cannot happen. There are other JRPGs out there that are so much better than FF16. Hell, Tales of Arise told a very similar story to this game and felt a hell of a lot more like FF while also being very much a Tales game.

The FF16 game world felt small (like so many RPGs these days), the combat (while decent for what it was) did not fit in a FF game. And I don’t mean an action combat system (since FF remake’s was decent) but the type of Devil My Cry combat specifically. Wrong game for it. And the contrived ways in which you only roll with Clive. I don’t mind if you just control Clive, but there were so many times when the ‘party’ split up because the writers wanted Clive to be alone and be Video Game Dude. You had a small, tight-knit little FF party around halfway through and they kept just having Clive go off alone. It was fucking stupid. Not to mention the ‘RPG mechanics’ just shouldn’t even have been in there at all. If you’re going to do this action thing than either go deeper down the FF7 Remake route (which still felt like an RPG), or go full action without any vestigial RPG nonsense. They could have removed all the upgrading weapons, leveling up, and just kept with the Icon upgrades and been fine.

Ugh. Sorry for the rant. Just sick of slop.

Your problems with final fantasy games since 10 are the same as mine, the stories, characters, environments just don’t have that magic… they feel empty and void of anything … feel like a waste of time

I can play ff6-10 over and over again and never get tired of any of those games.

I disagree with a lot of your points, I think FF16 was great and I enjoyed playing it a lot

It’s so refreshing seeing more people talk about this. So many times have I been gaslight into thinking the game is excellent and I have bad taste

Calling it now: Final Fantasy 17 will be a souls like game akin to Elden Ring since Square Enix loves chasing trends and not defining them

My friend said this game is just another Sony first party cinematic game

Im really enjoying listening to your critiques – they’re so thoughtful and well constructred. Thanks for sharing!

Props for the come to butthead reference

Nahhhhh brohhh 😂

The world’s obsession with Cid: it’s simple, the little we saw of him pushed him way forward above every character, at times even Clive. We likely would not have had the same liking for him had he stuck around for 100% of the game.

I didn’t like 15 or 16. I need a lively party to control with waifus. Square just doesn’t make games that intrigue me like they used to. Even remake & rebirth bogged down my enjoyment with mini games, elevators, & walking segments that killed my momentum. Modern games are just not as fun anymore

I felt insane when the demo released and everyone gave it glowing reviews and so much hype. I hated the demo, it was boring, bland, and felt like plastic.

I very much enjoyed FF16. I liked the story, the combat, the voice actors, the open world, and the game’s design.
This is a game I will enjoy replaying.
So, I don’t agree with this assessment, and I will be unsubscribing.

18:26 side quests

Ngl the last few FF games have really dropped the ball on female main protags. The one I best enjoyed was probably Aranea from 15 but she just doesn’t get enough screen time >×>

26:45 oh damn they got organization 13 / plot ghosts in 16 too! 🤦🏽 this ip officially washed up, i dropped this franchise after the train wreck that is ff7r :/

I absolutely agree with you on everything mentioned here! I absolutely despise time skips in most instances in stories: not only was there a 13 year skip after the Prologue, but also a SECOND time skip of 5 years, that’s 18 years that NOTHING happens in the world of 16 until Clive teleports on the nonsensical map and things start “happening”!!

I felt nothing for the main characters and their plights, and I don’t even remember the side characters where you do unimaginably boring fetch quests for them! None of the interesting plots and potential scenarios were EVER resolved or delved into more, so it just made the whole world so empty and forgettable.

What would have been neat and a cool twist is if ALL the Dominants were recruited over the course of the story and by the end of the game they all united in defeating a common, more threatening enemy: that being Ultima! Just imagine the dynamic relationships of each character if they had more screen time and interaction with each other! Oh, and an actual party to customize and level up of course! Ultima could have not even existed in the story and it would have still been an engaging story with human characters.

I wanted to add this in: The list you mentioned @49:40 were reversed by SE and made in the oopposite order in which it should have been made! They thought of these epic battles between cosmic beings first, then thought of everything else after… They never learned their mistakes from 15!

YoshiP is a hack who hates RPGs and Soken is a generic pop writer whose only distinctive works come from Uematsu derivations.

14 is mid, the best parts of which are directly ripped from better FF games, and the ones who like it are babies with no greater investment in the history of Final Fantasy, or low-discernment gamers who are easily distracted by jangling keys.

I wish they’d do a turn based game. I loved final fantasy 4 to 9, I never really enjoyed much after that. When they made ff9 the producers said it was the last of its type – I think they knew something we didn’t.

So i just watched this and your FF7 Rebirth videos. Hitting subscribe now.

One of the few complaints i did have is as you said : vast, empty worlds , and you can’t even fuller explore them. FF 16 and 7 rebirth

The bigger mistake of this story is: starts as a Game of Thrones, ends like a Naruto, with superpowers.
But the gameplay made all this 100 times worst…my god any element of it is painfull…

i knew this game was lazy low effort when ultimas final form was a recolor of ifrit with wings.
how.
lazy.
no other ff last boss had a palette swap of the MCs shtick.

Guys, why do everybody focus on the story ? This is a VIDEOGAME. The first thing it needs to do right is the game aspect. Then, if the game is good, the story. This is a final fantasy, it is supposed to be an RPG. And this game is NOT an RPG. IT is a shallow action game with number to make people think it is an RPG. The story is irrelevant as the game is poop. I’d rather see it in a series format than play it.

Do you have a small list of the most memorable side quests? I’m done doing busywork in RPGs. Thanks in advance!

Half of this video is genuine, interesting criticism and half is old man yelling at cloud.

I couldn’t finish the game. The combat felt a bit drab and maybe I didn’t get far enough into the game, but Clive as a main character was so boring and uninteresting.

The flashback scenes were of him as a broody teen which was fine cause he still had an innocence. Then the tragedy of him killing his brother and… 13 year jump… 13 years!? Holy hell, he’ll be a completely different person after all that time- Oh he’s just as broody and depressed as he was as a teen. No history to dig into, no mystery, just the same guy just more sad. Could you imagine if when we meet him as an adult we see him smiling and laughing with his companions? Like he is with a group of expendable soldiers who have bonded over their shared trauma? He seems to have moved past his demons (or at least learned to suppress them). But no, they leave no room for curiosity. What happened to him over those THIRTEEN YEARS? He’s just a slave that whole time. He didn’t make a single friend after being enslaved, no confidant, and not once succumbed to anger after turning into Ifrit again accidentally.

I wish we could have played as young Clive through the game and witness his coming of age story, learning about the world. He was interesting, and we could experience the world as he did with new wondering eyes.

Again, I didn’t finish the game. I stopped shortly after Cid died and there was another time jump. No time can be wasted dealing with loss shortly after. We have to wait to deal with it. I wanted more than a moment to process it.

Also, maybe it was the editing, but it felt like the game was gaslighting me into thinking that Clive wasn’t Ifrit. I guessed it immediately when he showed up at the end of the young Clive scene but everyone kept talking like it was someone else and I felt so confused.

Anyway, sorry for the rant.

How does a video about reviewing a video game made me emotional during the end of it man…

@18:50 that face coupled with seething rage, as i keep pondering to myself, why everyone in these games seems to inundate the hero of reality with menial quests and objectives…. I quit TotK for this very reason…. That, and the sense of exploration had run it’s course…. Culminating in the emptiness of it all….

The person who voices the final boss of this game also voices the final boss of Xenoblade Chronecles 3 and the locations you fight both characters in are floating orbs called Orgin.

I’ll say it then: Soken’s music is mostly generic and pop-y except where he rips off Uematsu and a few meme tracks he seems to have lucked into like Ravana, Heart of Sabik, and freaking La Hee.

At this point anything from the original final fantasy all the way to even 15 had substance… Ff16 is just DMC but overinflated in action, that and how boring it is.

The voice acting was pretty good, that’s it that’s the positive 😂

Very bad numbered FF game. I not hated it, but for me it’s not better than 13 or 15.

I have no interest in reinstalling and purchasing any of the DLC. I wish I could get back my $100 and 60 hours I put into this game. I haven’t been bored with a game as much as this one in a while

This was a nice video.

Clive wasn’t trying to destroy magic, that was never a plot point, the entire plot of the game revolved around the blight, the world ending magic draining plague that was killing all life on Valisthea, Cid says early on that the problem isnt aether its the fact it’s being drained en masse from the land by the mothercrystals, magic was never the issue, the mothercrystals sucking all the magic away was, because they were feeding that aether into ultima, who was planning on sucking the land dry, getting in his new body and fucking off to another planet to do it all again, I’m sorry you’re very eloquent with how you put things but it feels like you either were distracted while playing or didnt care enough to listen to what was being said

I think we’ve gotten older and Final Fantasy has not been willing to take risks with such budgets on the line. Far easier to reach for spectacle and mass appeal. And nostalgia baiting. Remember Cid? Remember Chocobos? We’ve reused the names so many times in so many situations they’ve nearly ceased to have meaning.

I stopped really caring too much about FF over other franchises after FF4. I kinda enjoyed 9, 10, and 12. Since then I haven’t even felt like touching them, and only enjoyed chuckling at them with my ex gf while she played the more recent stuff. What the heck is a lessee? how’s that different than a farsee? No idea. Shame considering how integral the first couple final fantasy games were.

We’ve advanced so far graphically but story telling has progressed far slower.

While 16 wasn’t bad , it definitely left me wanting as a fan of the seires.

Perhaps in time when FF17 comes out , we can be able to look back at FF16 not in disappointment but in gratitude for giving its best aspects and lessons for FF17 to learn.
And maybe raise it up to more than it can be.

I really enjoyed the first few chapters. So sad that I couldn’t even finish the game cause it felt so meaningless. Honestly I think some fans could easily mod this game to have interesting weapon/armor mechanics, and status ailments. I would play that.

For me, the beginning of the game honestly did a better job getting me invested in Cid, than it did in Clive. And by the time I finished, I could definitely say that Clive was the protagonist, but it still felt like Cid had a bigger impact. And I think that means that my emotional peak, the moment in time I was most invested, was Cid’s death. After that, I just kind of felt like, yeah, these Eikon fights are cool, and the combat is fun, at times, but there isn’t a character in this game I felt as much for as Cid, and without that, the story isn’t resonating. I just don’t care as much. And Barnabas was someone I was really intrigued by, and then Ultima was introduced, and that killed basically every expectation I had for him, because I knew he couldn’t be the main antagonist. He could have impact, he could be a cool Eikon fight, but without the weight of being Clive’s final fight, his story just, really didn’t matter to me. So yeah, I definitely get the feeling of wanting more from it. The story was intriguing at the beginning, and the characters had enough depth to them to keep me at least semi-invested in them, but when it feels like the centerpiece of the world dies half way in, and you’re kind of just running around not doing anything, even though you’re doing everything, that just doesn’t equate to a satisfying experience for me. Sorry if none of that makes sense, but I finally finished the game, found this video, and wanted to ramble

Even with all the roadblocks; its still the best FF story in decades

Your opinions are trash. FF16 is the next best FF after Rebirth

(SquareSoft) FF1-8 = Good/Epic Stories
FF9-13 = Stories for … mostly girls
FF14 = more mmoRP than mmorpg
FF15 = Only the music was good
FF16 = THAT’S NOT FINAL FANTASY ANYMORE!!

Veterans know what happened :/

Haven’t watched yet. This is a comment to keep myself accountable since I LOVE this game no matter how flawed it is. I am interested in hearing a different opinion though and I promise I’m not gonna get salty lol

They should had a Kefka-like villain who learns that Eikons can be absorbed from dominants and desires to become the ultimate god-like Eikon. Then they could have killed off Joshua in order to motivate Clive and Jill to pursue this baddie. Then the twist at the end would be that absorbing too many Eikons ends up corrupting Clive and before he becomes too far gone he asks Jill to destroy him so that the Eikons can be reborn into new vessels to restore balance. Or an alternate ending where Jill has to be the one to sacrifice herself in order to contain this villain by expending all of her aether to create an ice prison. Final Fantasy games don’t need to get overly complicated as they already pull from the same template for most story beats, it should be super easy to create slight variations at this point.

I agree with many of your criticisms but it’s interesting how many of them aren’t present in FF7Remake and especially (on a ‘current’ console) FF7Rebirth, especially with its open world. It’s clear one game was allowed more budget or time than the other – not because FF7’s story was inherently ‘better’ all those years ago, but just how budgets and planning were allocated.
This doesn’t excuse any of 16’s story issues, though.

I don’t know why SquareEnix can’t create a world full of life.
I thought that with the power of the PS5 they would do more but that’s not the case.
Even Xenoblade running on a crappy system the world feels 100x better than this or even FF7 Rebirth

This game was clearly made for the MMO kids. What a disappointment.

Honestly I believe a lot of ideas were discarded because this is a mainline game because of outside interference

I think Clive is a strong bad ass character and he may well be one of my favorite male characters in Final Fantasy, HELL!! He debatably might even be the most strongest, but, the game just didn’t have that Final Fantasy feel to it.
I did like some of the characters in it though.

I am going to say that almost everything that is made nowadays doesn’t have that same passion that all the things of the past did.

A lot of people feel that way too.
What has happened to everything in these modern times??

It’s like that South Park episode called “You’re getting old” where Stan and some others feel like everything in that current time to him and others sounded and looked like 💩 lmao 😂.

You’re one of the few analysis videos I’ve seen that commented on the wierdness of the Bearer lore, but I think the problem runs much deeper than that. It’s literally the worst thing in the game. In a game that feels the need to document every mundane detail of lore, they never really take the time to explain why the bearers are not only oppressed, but utterly reviled to the point where the idea that they are human doesn’t even cross people’s minds. People kill/torture them for mild amusement. People abandon their bearer children, friends and loved ones without a second thought. Yet there is no clear given reason why. As wrong as it may be, there has to be some clearly defined reason in people’s minds that would allow them to act this way.
But what is that reason? It’s not overtly religious (except for the Iron Kingdom, who everyone else sees as zealous savages). Its not a matter of different cultures or races. They dont seem to be afraid of bearers. There is no historical reason that people cite. There are no physical or mental abnormalities with bearers other than being able to use magic. So where does this comical level of hatred come from? And why is this hatred universal between all the cultures in the game?
It’s hard for me to care when writing so contrived and manipulative. It feels like Dhar Mann video at times. And here is why its the worst thing in the game. The majority of the game’s plot is dedicated to this garbage. Something possessed them to make this horrible trope the focal point of the story. I want to go on an adventure, not run around in circles with repetetive, shallow atrocity porn which is completely devoid of nuance or even basic explanation. In FFX, you understood why Yevonites hated the Al Bhed. They were wrong, but the reasons were explained and given context.
It wouldn’t be hard to fix this issue in FFXVI. Just say that 1000 years ago, magic users ruled the world with brutality. When they were overthrown they were enslaved so it would never happen again. That would be such an easy way to add nuance and believable reason why bearers would be treated this way. Then your villains could be just a little less 1 dimensional. Maybe you could even have bearer villains, that want total bearer domination like in the old days. Wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t that be nuanced? Wouldn’t that be fertile ground for morally challenging situations and discussions. Nope. Instead we get “rich kid feeds bearers to a wolf for no reason,” so the player can know that “prejudice bad.” Thanks game. I wasn’t invested the first 20 times you showed bearers being abused for no reason, but now I finally get it.
*Edit:* I know that towards the end of the game you go on a quest where you find some documents that give hints to the origin of why bearers are oppressed, but this is treated as some kind of bomb shell secret in the game’s world. Listen, FFXVI. Some plot elements need to be kept secret, because they make nice surprises. A key pillar for how the game’s society works should *not* be a secret within the world. What is wrong with you?

My issue with ff16 is simply the fact that its hyper focused on the combat and has little variety in gameplay. The combat is good enough to be fun but we have a Chocobo and only get to use it to travel faster, no races or anything.

By the sound of this video you just wish it was more like the older games when its not trying to be that.

This was my first FF game and I loved it. “theres no location to put a smile on your face” I love going back to the hideout or going to Marthas Rest for example. There is a kid at the hideout thats always talking to a different animal and its little details like that which made me feel happy and like Clive and Cid really were fighting for something.

The music is also your personal taste clashing with a game you didn’t really like. I love the founders footsteps, Good bones, Lovely, Dark, and Deep, and Forevermore, etc.

This game made me go and check more of the franchise out and so far they all feel unique and have something of value. I played FF6, 10, and just finished 7 Remake.

After playing these games, Ff16 is far from the best FF game, id say FF7 remake struck the balance between action and rpg better and has more variety in gameplay. That said, it’s my favorite.

I respect your opinion but honestly I very much disagree in a lot of aspects. The game could’ve been even better than it already was and have some form of gameplay variety with mini-games and being able to use the other party members would’ve been great. Aside from that, this game was a wonderful time for me

interactive film with braindead button mashing gameplay, this game was a travesty and massively underperformed in sales. There was nothing RPG about this game, levels and stats meant nothing, no sense of growing or getting stronger, every fight just feels the same from start to finish. FF needs to go back to its roots.

Ff16 side quests is too much

The ultimate sword in the game is an example of the game. To get the first part you go through missions the whole game and to make it the final weapon you beat some s class minibosses but they make the sword and instead of cg highlighting that you got a rare blade you don’t even get a pat on the back from the black Smith. You get the sword and if you’re not paying attending it’s a nothing event

I 100% agree. There was a point in the middle where I was enjoying the game but it kind of died from me at the ship fight. Final fantasy 15 and 16 have been a low point for me in the franchise 😢

While the game looks amazing the characters feel wooden. They move in cut sceens like they piviot on a hinge. The I love you scene at the end was painfully bad 😅

Excellent analysis. I wanted really badly for XVI to be good, to reignite the series’ fire after the dreadful XV. But with Rebirth now out and chock full of problematic storytelling, the pattern of XV, Remake, XVI, and Rebirth suggests that the Final Fantasy teams just aren’t capable anymore of the caliber of writing that made the older games amazing, and it likely means that we aren’t going to see an improvement in whatever the next big FF game is.

@45:00 sorry but don’t say things like “as a writer”, if you haven’t written anything even somewhat famous. People who haven’t done that really have no business judging what professionals do UNLESS those professionals are selling out and putting political ideology into their stories which is not what happened in FF16.

Dude really thinks a pixel map would have been good in this game. 🤦🏻

Orion85, you’re really going to blame the fact that you sold Ragnarok on the game’s menu system? That tells me everything I need to know of you as a reviewer.

There is a reason for the treatment of the Branded. It is because they waged war many years ago and lost. This lead to the signing of the Continental Accords with codifies their discrimination and slavery into law. Newborns are required to be tested for their Bearer abilities upon birth and then are Branded. This is why the parents cannot hide their children’s Bearer status. We know this from reading the Thousand Tome information and from reading a book that is in one of the Waleod village homes. The writers of this game have an answer for pretty much everything. We just need to take the time to find them. It doesn’t explain everything directly, which is a good aspect of story telling.

Other questions such as why don’t the Dominants take control are answered as well.

Seeing FF7 Rebirth focus HARD on open world, mini-game filled areas with funny writing and quirky moments gives me hope that 16 will just be an ugly roadbump that we laugh at after playing stories the older games again.

It’s easy dark souls with zero charm. I played the demo and hated it! The OST is awful, too.

I think you kind of miss the point of Bearers and Eikon’s. The reason why they are Eikkon’s are beloved is because they are seen as power blessings and not something one is born with. Meanwhile to make sure the royalty stay in power they create the idea that bearers are not worthy. And I think there is something interesting there.

“Let’s not celebrate mediocrity for the sake of tribalism” You nailed it

I like the Eikon fights, especially Bahamut, but the rest of the combat feels so weak and repetitive, I dont like getting in fights. My hands start to hurt after a while. I like Devil May Cry, but those games already exist, I dont need them in Final Fantasy.

No more than any ff after X.

You have all the power vote with your wallet say what you don’t like they do not care about anything else than money.

I’m still firmly in the camp, there hasnt been a good single player FF game in over 20 years. Though my heart still holds the FF standard as high, after this many years and this many games, I guess the FF standard at this point is mediocre games that look very pretty.

you know you are going to listen to some pseudo-intellectual bad faith trash when a person speaks with monotonone wannabe-poetic voice and claims they are a “writer” lol

@45:00 they should have removed ALL the sidequests and used that time to flesh out characters more. I agree with this

I think if they made combat harder it would have worked in the way Elden Ring works despite how bleak the world is

Usung fire to kill bombs made no sense to me either.

7 Remake wasnt it, but your 16 take is spot on. I enjoyed the music and spectacle and the main story. The side missions and the side plot and characterization is very weak in this game

After the catastrophic disappointments which were FF7R and FF16 which also fractured the fandom I think I’m done with Final Fantasy, nothing good has come from it for decades now, it has been quite the journey since FF7 back in the 90s, all the way across 8, 9, 10, 12 and a little bit of 14, time to move on to greener pastures and find another JRPG to enjoy.

We need to stop thinking that things like “female empowerment” are meta-politic. No, that’s a marxist term that has no place in such a reasonable review. A character is a character, not a representation of a demography (which is what the critique is implying). We’ve been adoctrinated for so long that we mistake concepts such as that one as “common sense” when they’re not.
They did a diservice to Jill because she is presented as a character only to be revealed as an add-on to another character (Clive). That’s a problem by itself, not because of the character’s sex or any other reason. That, by the way, was how Yuna and other character where written. They were not a manifest, they were characters the same as Cloud, Squall, Bartz, etc.

I was SO excited for this game. Thinkjg they were building on the ff7 remake conbat system and party system. They did so well with the remake.

God was i disappointed. This is like their attempt at a prestige sony first party action adventure game. Their attempt at god of war.

And they did it worse than sony by a mile! Not only was that a bad idea, they did it poorly.

And the edgy game of thrones crap, it doesnt work. Game of thrones wasnt good cause sex and gore lol. Thats all final fantasy 16 took from its success. Factions, adult content, the end.

i will say– i genuinely enjoyed ff16. not one of my favorites in the series, but not nearly one of my least favorites (*looks at ff13 and ff15). the title of this video alone is hilarious though.

I hate that they took this pile of shit Game of Thrones as an inspiration. I absolutely despise this disgusting series

This game shouldve been a spin off, not a main FF title

I miss the real Final Fantasy 😢

Naoki Yoshida complained about dudes using “JRPG” as a derogatory, still made a game for the same people who do just that. He should just stay in his MMO bubble.

19:00 woah buddy, some of play intellectual MMO’s not made by Yoshi P. *cough* FFXI *cough*

Excellent review. I noticed all this stuff on my play through and ended up not finishing the game. I dont understand why there was so much die hard defending of this game?

Well said. Every point is valid. I hated how it had no RPG elements. The choices you get to make have no inpact on the outcome. Feels bland

It’s a sad reality that the last final fantasy i actually enjoyed was 10.

God, it’s just so indulgent. So many games these days are, these big, cinematic movie-games, so focused on spectacle and drama. I mean, I enjoy games with alot of talking and dialogue, but I want it to be WHILE the game is going on–I’m so sick of games that grind to a halt every 5 minutes for another conversation. I think part of the problem is that there isn’t a time limit, so writers just keep writing; more characters, more scenes, more exposition. And while there’s nothing wrong with an in-game database you can look at for more details, game makers use that capability as an excuse to not have to weave lore and back-story and character development into actual conversation. Older games somehow used less dialogue to convey more meaningful stories and lovable characters that people remember decades later, but alot of modern games are so bloated with simple drama and spectacle to be superficially appealing that the actual stories feel like afterthoughts. Ultimately, these dramatic and flashy titles will just be forgetten and replaced by the next batch of dramatic and flashy titles. Basically, it seems like alot of game devs are channeling Zach Snyder, not Steven Spielberg.

Wow, the games ending hits me way harder with the song you put in here. Makes me think of Clive or Joshua (maybe Dion as well) being regarded by their friends as someone who inspired them.

It’s especially brilliant because of the potential double meaning for the lyrics, “You raised me up to more than I can be.” I’ll admit, I raised my expectations of this game higher than it was able to live up to.

The strengths of FFXVI were high enough for me to love the game, yet the weaknesses and low points stood out so much it really did sour the overall experience. Overall, I do agree with your overall sentiment.

I’d love to get a shortened playmode that cuts all of the dull content into a 20-25 hour experience to re-live the best parts and fix some of the pacing.

All the “Go woke go broke” crowd can now stfu seeing that their all white game turned out to be another cringe midfest. 🤪🤪

I loved ff16 idk why ppl hate it some much I hate turn based fight 7 remake did it the best in my opinion

It’s not really a game. It’s a FMV video with some quick time events and boring fetch quests.

10-2, 12, 13, 13-2, 13-3 15, 16

yoshi pee only saved ffxiv by making it a wow clone, that doesnt make him a genius.

Shivas theme was the best

Ff7 9&10 had best story

You made some good points but also tried so hard to give a “deep” message with phrases out of self-reflective essays that it felt cringe.

You don’t replay the Demo in NG+….

I respect that you want to give a fair review and play this game, I just can’t do that seeing how dull and how boring the game is just from trailers and gamewalkthrough. It says something when every single game made this year have a much higher standard than Final Fantasy XVI: Baldur gate, Alan Wake, Genshin Impact, Lies of P… I’m not agaisnt action game since it could benefits the artstyle of modern Final Fantasy more than turn-based (though games like Baldur Gate and Honkai Star Rail prove that it can still pull off great turn based game with modern graphic), but removing party members while also down playing their role in the game’s story is a bad move. Not to mention the empty and boring world in contrast with the world bursting with life like Elden Ring.

I though ff7 remake was the sweetspot for modernising ff combat. If they had combined that combat system with this world it would have been the best ff ever.

Yea 16 sucks. I finally can believe the series is truly dead. 13, 13-2, lightning returns, 15, and now 16 are too many bad games in a row.

All I can say is, personally this game gave an experience filled with the same wonderment I had in childhood, It was by no means perfect and I agree with many points, but something inexplicable about it just resonated with me. If this and many other titles haven’t done that for you in a long time, or whatever it is you feel is your benchmark for a worthy FF, then sometimes it’s better to let go, and healthier too. If this franchise really means that much to you, out of place of true understanding, as I’ve undergone the same with a different franchise, then let it go, and either find the next best thing or create the next best thing for yourself. I’m not saying to just forget everything FF meant to you, or to simply scrap your memories or your feelings, for although it might not be good to dwell on the past, simply forgetting doesn’t mean moving on and being happier for it. As Clive said: “It is the past that defines us, so that we may strive towards a better tomorrow”

The fact that you played FFX music throughout this entire video tells me all i need to know about your love for story, the series and your disappointment with 16 😂

My new favorite YouTube channel🎉❤

DLC just dropped

Came just to approve of the video title lol

Hi mate, I think I’m a lot more positive on the game than you, but I really liked your reasoning behind your criticism. I thought FF mode was a lot better and should have been made available from the start. Also, if you choose to jump back in, in ff mode you start after the Ifrit/Phoenix battle.

Great video.

After the turn around in XIV, I was hyped for Yoshi-P being given a single player FF. But boy did 16 disappoint me massively. Pretty much rank it at the bottom of my FF tier list. Upsetting too cause I was such a huge fan of 14.

Finally…someone that gets it. Thank you!

final fantasy keep alienating its fan base. if they continue this path FF30 will be panchinko

I thought ff16 was amazing, not medicore, it had its issues yea, but still ff to me

….Playable loading screens….
SquEnix thought they fooled us.

I hope FF7: Rebirth is better.

This was the only FF game i ever finished that made me feel absolutely nothing, other than im glad i dont have to play anymore.

ff16 has shon us that there s only one matsuno, & that not even his fan can deliver

FF16 is a masterpiece

I immediately Uninstalled the game after I finished it. It was a god damned chore. An offline MMO.

What new graphics offer is a more granular level of detail, not just in visuals, but in interactions, scope, and scale. The problem that arises is there’s an insane level of work required to create the assets to be put in these graphically intensive games, not to mention the higher performance cost. The lack of bustling cities to explore really rears it’s ugly head when the game’s visuals are so well realized. The abstraction provided by concepts and visual styles such as overworlds, turn based fights, dialogue boxes, top down city dioramas. These elements enhance the presentation not by “looking better”, but obfuscating the granular details, and painting with large strokes allows your own mind to patch in the details. Creating a world within your mind, rather than what’s solely realized on the screen. Gameplay, interactions, freedom, design, all need to be improved, not just graphics. If not improved, at least kept the same, which these games also fail to do. I’m someone who is enthusiastic about impressive visuals, too. It’s just a problem that they come with. It truly is a challenging problem to solve, but when fancy graphics are used, you take on those problems. Failing like this game and other modern games is just inexcusable. Understandable, sure, but still cannot be excused or looked past.

When the part about Jill came up and he described it as
“She was like a sister then became lovers they slept together” im so tired of the whole step sister lets bang trope. Its weird.

i take everything at face value. i thoroughly loved FF16 (theres personal sentiment to it, hint its not my first FF, has to do w my mom passing away earlier this year)

I take most games at face value and enjoy them for what they are. Unless the game really sucks. Gaming for 36 years has me just enjoying the new memories, stories, and experiences

I do have a feeling FF17 will take FF back to a turn based affair. After all Squareenix has been jumping genre and format since 10/10-2.
Ff11 going MMO
FF12 being a pseudo MMO imitation
13 being very by the book and moving down straight hallways (lake bresha is still a gorgeous spectacle, one of my favs)
14- garbo to phenominal MMO
15- action RPG (loved ff15, Niflheim wasnt wrong btw)
16- action w RPG-lite elements
17- if my quackulations and statistits 😅 are correct….TURN BASED JRPG

It’s been like 4 months since this game came out, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that a writer somewhere thought it was a great idea to have Clive need to rescue a captive/kidnapped Jill three times in the story.

Damn, watching this game’s framerate is like an oldschool movie projector…

I’ve just come to the realization that final fantasy will never be what it was. And that’s okay. Other games have taken up the torch. I will always cherish ff7 and ffx as a kid. And I’m grateful square gave us those games. But I think it is time we realize the team (which has been there for decades) have simply run out of ideas and true craftsmanship. never has a company desperately needed new faces and new leaders

The outfits of the characters aren’t even as good as previous. The character designs are boring compared to what they used to be. I used coke back to the games for the character designs and clothes. FF12 is my favorite because of it. The colors overall are also bland or just void of it. I loved how beautiful the world used to be.

There was a lot to take from your video, thank you. I liked the game and was glad to be able to finish it but you raise some good points about what it could have been in term of potential.

Demo ultimately sold me on trying out full game despite my apprehensions on the games new direction. Unfortunately the games narrative never clicked for me outside the prologue because the story skips so many important story moments for main characters (Clives slave history etc). Clive being the only playable character makes combat so stale and the ekon fights dragged on for too long. The longer I played final fantasy 16 the more it made me appreciate final fantasy 13 smaller cast of characters. Was nice seeing them play off each other and team building with my favorite characters.

beside all of that. What made me turn off the first time was seeing nothing unique in the appearance of the character pool, they’re so generic MMORPG looking that every base character… even the look of his armor.. secondly idk why but Square Enix lately never crafted the vfx like any other game use all generated particle so it feels like indie game using game engine… and clustering all the screen, you can’t see what is happening on the screen

The combat is absolutely fun and definitely could have been expanded further with more combos but the mix and match Eikonic abilities were refreshing to play around with and respec. What FF needs is a fucking good story, thats it. Every game since XII has had potential to be amazing with solid characters and then they just shit themselves and botch it.

I disagree with a lot of the critiques. Idk what ppl were expecting.
The last straw was calling the soundtrack forgettable. Sad for you you disliked it, but man that’s a shame for you you didn’t enjoy the OST at least.

10 years later : Final Fantasy XVI, the misunderstood masterpiece.

I feel it’s tragic that no ff is turn based anymore. If you turn into an action game don’t be surprised if you lose you lose some og fans

I feel like one of the biggest things missing from modern final fantasy games is the constant feeling of learning world shattering things about the world.

Ff7 was amazing in part because every major area in the game would massively change the tone and throw some new piece of information about the world at me. Midgard was a grimy city that embodied the ideas of pollution and unrestricted greed. We go to the wild Vegas-esque gold saucer, which just had this generally happy vibe. Then we start to see the less developed areas, the villages and towns that are places shinra abandoned once they weren’t profitable enough anymore. And then out of left field, sephoroth was actually near dead the whole time, we’ve been following clones under his control and pieces of his mother (an ancient shape shifting alien btw) the whole time, Seph is actually off regenerating his body, there’s the whole backstory of the ancients, the black and white materia… It turns out Cloud’s identity is a delusion… Then the weapons come into play… There was just so much whacky shit pulled out of a hat and it all worked really well.

Ff8 you’re a mercenary schoolboy fighting to stop a sorceress and the country she seized power in. And then at some point there’s aliens in the moon, you go to outer space to fight a sealed away sorceress, and the game ends with some completely unknown 3rd sorceress being revealed as behind it all, and she collapses time.

The more recent final fantasies in contrast don’t really have interesting worlds – they just have really realistic ones, based more off of real history and real cultures than the more whimsical and unpredictable worlds of the older games. You get the reveal that you’re ifrit, and you get the reveal that it’s all been part of ultima’s plan, and otherwise the world and characters all feel… Predictable, and like I’ve heard these stories before.

The older games literally felt like the writers had a grab bag of tropes or ideas, pulled a few out, and said “alright, we’ve got ecoterrorism, capitalism, John Carpenter’s “The Thing”, and ego death. Now we gotta make a world and a story around those.” The new ones feel, like you pointed out, like the writers just said “we need to use whatever process George R R Martin uses”

You know, I’m not sad about this game not being the greatest piece of playable media to date, because how can we expect that even from the greatest actors or minds? It’s easy to judge from the sidelines, certain how we could’ve forecasted or devised better, but ultimately so often the best intentions and all the precedent and budget in the world won’t ensure perfection. Gamers can occur as entitled, and I think that’s in part because I personally think videogaming itself is either overhyped or always seemingly on the verge of a new horizon that never really arrives, but certainly also because of the frequent lies and false promises. I’ve always shied away from overly criticizing a vision except when it occurs as noticeably phoned in or perhaps self-indulgent, and frankly I think in this case it was certainly neither, perhaps if anything ultimate too safely or just a stab at an avenue that just didn’t entirely land for me.

Real great review. It really bothered me by the end of the game how much dislike I had for it considering how every detail of the game should of made it a 10/10. It just lacked bringing it all together. Hopefully SE take on all the feedback as truly believe it does have the correct team behind it to deliver something far better in the future

Also, you need meaningful loot 😂

Legend of heroes has dethroned final fantasy as my favorite jrpg series. It’s sad but ff16 was very disappointing.

Godtier

Did players not like the story of 12?

When FF16 was good it was GOOD.

But man it was bogged down with some of the dumbest lamest side quests I’ve ever seen and had horrid pacing.

My ng+ run where I just sped through story was so much more enjoyable than my first run where I did everything. And in such a cool world in an FF game idk how you can make bad side quests THAT bad.

God tier bosses tho

I can confidently say that ff 16 is my most dissapointing purchase this year. Nearing the end I was exhausted by the side quests and combat. Even the boss battles couldn’t catch my interest anymore. And don’t get me started on the basicall useless items and gears are, it made rewards meaningless. Oh and one more thing, even though I absolutely hate the “party system”, I was kinda hoping to have dion near the end. Imagine my dissapointment that he doesn’t even get into my party even once. By the time I finish this game I become to feel that ff 16 is my most hated final fantasy game, hell even ff 13 is more enjoyable to me.

I think FFXVI is good, but its not great, it isnt groundbreakint. Ultimarely once i got to the last mission, a new game i was waiting to come to ps5 dropped and i spent 2-3 weeks gladly igoring this game. I only back because i felt the need to finish the game. So many fetch quests that it really drags down the game.

FF16… It made me appreciate FF7R SO MUCH MORE!

Its a good video but all the subtle set up of being a “true” FF fan, and you know better, and what you deserve sure sounds like entitled gatekeep-y nonsense.

For all it’s problems it’s still more fun than starfield. I wish ff had kept to its origins like dragon quest but there is a general attitude among gamers that turn based games are boring. Devs are scared that consumers won’t buy them. With the success of baldurs gate I hope this might change although there will inevitably be many inferior imitators that will turn people off again. A good game is a good game and one that will be successful irrespective of mechanics

9:42 That IS what happens tho. People love superheroes in that universe but hate mutants. I think that juxtaposition is what makes the hatred extra ironic

I’ve finished the game just yesterday, and the fact is I bought it on release. It took me four months to finish it. I feel like the game wasn’t made for me unfortunatelly. I couldn’t care less for 99% of what was going on while playing, the game looks so dark and so bland at times, and even it even feels like the characters lack meaningful interractions. So many feel just as bland as the world. A lot of what I experienced I feel I could describe as “it could’ve worked in FFXIV, but they would have given it way more time to develop”. I have so many thoughts it’s hard to put them into one description, but I guess for the most part I feel just indifferent to the game after the 50+h I spent in it so far.

I miss having a party and being able to make different characters leader and use their abilities. Hopefully they revisit that again.

Crazy how so many recent RPG’s lack roles to play. To be fair, many jrpg’s are like that, including the earliest FF games.

Also, i was beyond annoyed at the bigotry themes within this game. They should have stuck with classism themes common in stories set in feudal settings.

It looks like the only PS5 game I would be interested in if I had one, I will pick it up when it is released on PC.

Such an embarassing disappointment of a game. It’s outrageous. It could have been so great.

A ffxvi hate train? No thanks. Easily my goty.

tbh, i disagree with most of your complaints and points, but good video nonetheless. The thing that undermined the game is imho, the focus of graphical fidelity, that resulted in drastic cuts in scope – the remnants of what was in earlier builds can be seen all over the game. Making a more modest graphically game, but releasing it also on PS4 would have worked much better for Squenix.

No world map? No wonder FF7 took place in the intro city…

unrelated but can anyone tell me what piece of music was playing at around 35:00?

This was basically how I felt about Final Fantasy 15, once I played FF13 I noticed the quality of the games taking a nose dive, once I played 15 I knew I was done with the series which is really sad for me because I used to be a huge FF fan, I love the older games but these newer ones since 13 have lost their magic and its been getting worse. Once 16 came out I tried the demo and I immediately saw the same/similar problems I had with 15 and knew this was going to be the first FF game I was skipping.

Love Yoshi P and Soken long and healthy life to those two gentlemen but saying that I can also say that XVI was not their strongest work.
it being sony exclusive just makes the situation worse.

I gotta say, no one needs an hour long video to know why new renditions of ff feel off. It’s because it is an action game bearing the ff name.

Long time ff fan- played them from the beginning. 12 was the last one I enjoyed… 15 was alright, but I certainly didn’t fall in “love” with it like the others. It just doesn’t feel like ff anymore imho

I completely resonate with the sentiments expressed in this video. As a dedicated Final Fantasy enthusiast for the past 25 years (I even have Kefka’s Tower tattooed across my upper body as a testament to my love for the series), I found myself going through the same mixed emotions while playing FF16. The journey often felt painstakingly tedious, leaving me devoid of any meaningful connection to the story. The pacing in this game is totally off, and there were countless moments where I found myself wondering what the hell have they been thinking?! I want to thank you for this brilliantly written critique. Your insights and observations were a true delight to watch and listen to and captured very well what many of us fans felt while playing! 😘

DMC director is a stupid f0ck