I stream full games here and at https://www.twitch.tv/rexsterling
My Full FF16 Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHSx4EjM5qxQcLyiX0bDFMfwSLcT3vPc1
I’m about 35 hours into the game now and my opinions are still evolving. What do you think of Final Fantasy 16?

Masterpiece or Mid? Cid doesn’t appreciate you talking about his daughter that way.

I’m glad you enjoying the game so far. Let’s ride until the end

Solid review my man, honestly I found myself frustrated playing through the first 3rd or so. The Combat is top tier, but I was definitely wanting much more from the side mechanics and your review helped me realize that. I think I need to go back to it with your mindset of focusing on enjoying what the game is focused on. Cheers!

Pretty much agreed. It’s a very well-made game. But while I’d like to think I’m willing to give a lot of leeway to the Final Fantasy series, it proved to me that I do want one to be an RPG. FF7 Rebirth really highlighted how much better things are with party mechanics.
And WHY does every boss just drop all the materials for the next weapon that you then have to go get it crafted? Just drop the sword at that point.

I’ve said this in my video recently for FF16, but to me I define the game as flawed greatness. The thing with it’s development is actually that it was the smoothest dev of any mainline FF in the past 15 years. The reason why they chose to focus on narrative and action here so much was because of the negative reception of those very same aspects from FF15. Yoshi-P had stated multiple times how they didn’t want to have a narrative that was disjointed like the launch version of 15, and the combat in that game was also awkward to play so they made sure to get a person who knows how to create action combat games for 16. A lot of the dev decisions for 16 was a direct response to criticisms from 15, however, they ended up creating mistakes of their own as a result of trying to focus too hard in perfecting those aspects of the game, as well as their design philosophy coming from FF14 that it ended up spreading the rest of the game thin. It’s also worth mentioning that another reason why the other apects of the game like questing, and rpg elements are very underbaked is also because of just how expensive the Eikon fights really were. Almost every boss fight is top tier and some of the craziest I’ve experienced in any game, but you would have to think, those fights are damn expensive to produce, and there are a handful of them.

The Side Quests get really good in the end because the side quests operate on an interconnected thread.

The last two sidequests from the same quest givers in a thread are always great and emotionally impactful but unfortunately you have to play earlier quests from the quest givers to get to those last quests in their threads.

If you do ALL the side quests you get a great final quest with Jill