I’m still not a big fan of the ending, the main villain, how some characters were handled, the lack of rewarding exploration and rpg mechanics, the MMO style fetch quests that added very little beside stopping the pacing to a halt, Clive’s standard sword moveset being so limited, Ifrits moveset being even more limited, and the use of a mechanic as unengaging as cooldowns in a fast paced hack n slash game.
No amounts of skilled play will get the cooldowns back any faster, getting rewarded for waiting just isn’t very exciting, the moveset being limited to only 6 abilities at a time doesn’t help either.
I can admit it is a well made game that succeeded at a lot of things it tried to do, even if i wasn’t particularly a fan of them. I liked most of the characters and the boss fights were some of the most hype thing ever, some real Asura’s Wrath energy there. I’d say better than XIII and XV as in its a complete game , but the complete game itself it’s aggressively middle of the road both as an action game and an rpg. Despite all that i do believe this is a very high quality game that a lot of people would enjoy.

An extremely well written video, my friend. As someone who also created a video on FF16 and explained my thoughts on how I feel about it a year later, I think this video does an even more thorough job of really dissecting what makes this game both great and why its flaws standout. You probably already know from my clips how obsessed I am with combat, and I truly believe this is one of Square Enix’s best and most creative combat systems they’ve ever created. I think it lends itself very well to the action game formula, even if it isn’t necessarily the best in its genre. Of course, the story is also incredibly profound in a way where noticing certain things in multiple playthroughs is a common occurrence.

I don’t want to make this comment too long as I’ve also put these thoughts in my own video as well, but FF16 is a very special game in the sense that it really understands the heart of the series despite going in a very bold and more mature direction. CS3, more than any division, isn’t a stranger to what makes FF so captivating narratively.

And although it may not land for some, I highly respect their bold direction in a more mature world. To me, FF16 is a great example of what Final Fantasy represents in its themes, characters, gameplay, presentation. FF16 is what the classic pixel games would have been like today, clearly inspired by not only GoT, but of the classic pixel era FF titles. I always admired CS3 and their respect for the very foundation of this series, and that passion really shined through in FF16.

My phone is hdr haha

It’s rare for me to see someone actually verbalize so well what I felt about this amazing game. In the earlier days after FF16’s release there were so many terrible takes that I’ve pretty much tuned out of review content for FF16. Thank you so much for making this video.

Spoken like a true fan! My sentiments exactly; Final Fantasy XVI is truly something special. Surface-dwellers won’t comprehend. But, those who have the patience to go in-depth, can walk away experiencing a rare gem of an epic tale along with one of the most innovative combat systems up to date.

Devil may cry. You may like it.

Final Fantasy XVI is my favorite game of all time! ❤💯🔥

1:31:08 “Iconoclasm is a piece that doesn’t feel like it’s part of the same game as the main battle music” that’s because it isn’t it’s a remix of eScape from FFXIV which is a theme associated with Omega. This is like the third/fourth remix of this track Masyoshi Sokken is composer for both 16 and 14 and his work is legendary. A lot of the music for XVI was probably written while he was battling cancer along with making music for XIV “To The Edge” is a legendary track as a result (btw don’t look up who this theme is associated with it’s a big spoiler for XIV.) BTW I hope you will keep playing FFXIV it’s one of those stories that gets better the more you play it.

No

As someone who enjoyed the combat in classic Capcom titles like DMC and Onimusha, games which I back then wasn’t very confident about but ended up unexpectadly enjoying, the combat in FF16 was great fun.

I played all the mainline games and a some spinof, for me ff16 was really good, the story for was mile better than the “remake”/rebirth ones.

FF16 : Devil May Clive

Great vid. End montage really cements in my head your meta analogy- Clive as square, Joshua as fans (?) and ultima as execs and shareholders. Brilliant. Thanks

Absolutely loved 16, but they dropped the ball on lack of minigames, optional content and challenging difficulty imo. I would love to see another game similar to FF13-2. That game had a massive amount of unique content, exploration, collectables and challenges. I would like to see something like that with a revamped combat system that’s more akin to 7 Rebirth.

I think you might have misunderstood why Dion attacked the city. He went berserk from Ultima’s influence, which I’m pretty sure is implied by Olivier’s eyes going blue as he taunts him. Regardless he was not in control and him attacking the city is completely against his ethos which he establishes many times before hand, it’s the reason he started the coupe against the crown. He wants to protect his people and ultima taking control of him to harm them makes the entire saga so tragic for Dion

Ngl FF16 was one of the most forgettable entries in the series for me. Was shocked cause I love FF14 and the teams work on that but FF16 was a huge let down

Admittedly it is a great game but it is completely going away from what final fantasy was i still go back to ff7,8 and 9 once I completed 16 I dont think ill play it again same as ff7 remake and rebirth they aren’t games I could really play multiple times and fully enjoy it

I shared your sentiments on XV
I absolutely loved Rebirth, haven’t loved and FF as much since X.
I was disappointed by XVI but I still enjoyed it, I don’t find it memorable tho. I find the game repetitive over time.

No more final fantasy after 10

I respect your opinion 🙂 I could not disagree more about ff16 though.
What I will say is I was very grateful that we got our first openly gay final fantasy character at last 😊

Its their fault for making it ps5 exclusive for the first year.

Ultima always referred to himself with “we”. Until he merged, he used “I” and “mine” instead of ours.

I loved 16!!! And 7 remake part 1 and 2!!

the final; final fantasy needs Sakaguchi, Matsuno, Nomura, Uematsu and Kitase in the writing room. literal dream team, I hope Im not missing any of the head guys.

I’m only 40 mins in and I feel like you’re trying your hardest to not say Devil May Cry lol. Great video so far!

Final Fantasy used to give me a true sense of whimsy and magic when playing the older games. It was truly exciting learning the magic systems and the characters and the worlds the games were set in.

I felt none of that with 16. None. Square was content with blowing us away with spectacle. But no substance whatsoever. Lots of people say they didn’t like the game but don’t always feel like elaborating because honestly there’s so much missing from this game that it can’t be explained in a few words. So people who do like the game just believe that people chose to hate this game for no reason. There definitely were reasons that people did not enjoy their time playing Final Fantasy 16. Lots of reasons. Don’t just dismiss them as haters. A lot of us did know what we were getting into before purchasing the game, but we trusted that there would be some semblance of that classic magic of Final Fantasy. We gave it a shot and found it to be sorely lacking.

I think FF16 was very fine. It has some of my favorite character action combat in nearly any game, it’s my favorite since Nier Automata. I primarily play mashy character action games like Devil May Cry, God of War and Bayonetta, I think FF16 is among the best of those. It’s a shame to me that so many people dismissed it outright

Nice video man!
15 was my first. I had picked it up but took years to actually play. I put in a solid 30-40hrs in 2018 which started my love of them.
Then I got FF7 remake on release but never played it for about 6 months, but once I started it, that was it. My love was born burning hot for FF.
At this point I have platinum for FF7, FF7 Remake, almost have Rebirths plat, got plat for crisis core and one away for 16😂
At this point I have Basically every game after 7 😂

Your comparisons of the combat systems between XVI and VII isnt really fair.

You have greater freedoms to make Cloud a healer and Aerith a damage dealer, especially because their offensive abilities vary widely. Which means you fundamentally change the difficulty of the game while placing restrictions on yourself to experience a totally unique version of FF VII. Not to mention the characterization dynamic that bleeds into the characters themselves and story implications when Cloud, whips out a giant sword in a cutscene only to never use it in favor of casting Cura for 80 hours.

Where as in FFXVI you can choose how fast paced you want Clive to behave, but at the end of the day youre still going to be dodging attacks in a similar fashion and waiting on cooldowns in a similar fashion. You really only control how twitchy you want to react and your combat range.

Sprinkling in the guy whining about FF VII is “real” Final Fantasy, while valid, was placed there to buff your argument from before. We can do better than that. Great video though.

Final Fantasy to me is about the character growth, gripping story, iconic music, memorable summons, and impressive visuals.

What I missed from XVI, that other games had, save for maybe XV, was buffing and strategizing in combat. Even XIII had this, when you would juggle enemy debuffs and maximize the damage output you do when the enemy is staggered. XVI does this as well, but it’s more fast paced and less, planning far out into the combat. XIII-2 did this well, especially against super bosses.

managing your HP, defense to not get one-shot, debuffing the enemies and maximizing your damage output, its extremely satisfying, just to “do it again” but this time the boss has 40% HP and is throwing even more deadly attacks at you.

I dont need it to be medieval. FF XIII is as much FF to me as FF III is, XV, XVI, all of them.

I cant explain it. But I love this franchise, regardless of what world it takes me to.

very cool video. I like and sub

I played ever Final Fantasy between 1 and 10, as well as 12, 13, 13-2, Light ING returns and 15. I also play 14, but I haven’t finished it.

Since FFXIII, I thought that the series just had to go back to its roots. Those roots are a turn based adjacent RPG and a focus to the main story in a not completely linear world. SquareEnix did all it could to not meet that expectation – always trying to bring in more action to the genre.

So, after I was a hardcore fan for the majority of my life … when I heard that 16 was an action title, I just did not give it a chance. The brown in grey aesthetic and the “Final Fantasy meets Games of Thrones” elevator pitch did not exactly convince me otherwise.

At this point, Final Fantasy has become synonymous for me with disappointment while it was a “buy ASAP” series in my youth.

So, “dark fantasy”. I read the ASOIAF and Witcher books passionately. Both TV shows completely misunderstand the source material and become worse and worse as the milquetoast aspects of the adaptation add up and proliferate. They are not exactly good storytelling.

This brings me to spectacle – and how this has been poisoning the series since 13. I’ll describe the beginning of FF7: we get an introductory cinematic of the place the game is set in. Then, we jump into gameplay where our character fights some soldiers and storms into a reactor. We get an introduction to the main character, Barrett gives us a lecture about why we’re all doing this and we see the “cyberpunk, but with swords” aesthetic of the game in the environment.l, have a boss fight against a bigger robot than the normal enemies and then escape to the city.
There is not much spectacle there. FFVII was famous for its visuals, but those scenes of spectacle are rare and show a culmination of the story.
FF8 is similar. We have a pretty spectacular intro, but after that, you are set to explore the world, catch your first GF, get a mission briefing and then go into a mission that has an impressive shot that introduced you to the location. A lot of gameplay happens and when the mission takes an unexpected twist, you get the next spectacular scenes – the antenna tower setting up derails the mission and the scenes of the around that spider robot frame a frantic chase.
That already was a departure of what Final Fantasy was before. The stories of FF1-6 were told without fancy videos.

There still was spectacle. For this, let me get to my favorite Final Fantasy: FFIX. In the first hours of the game, you explore a vibrant fantasy city with a distinctive looking population and the feeling that there is just much going on there. You have a theater play that’s actually an abduction on a theater that is also an airship and you have a bumbling guard captain who gets not respect trying to foil it. The theater play, the abduction plan and the slapstick meddling of the captain combine into a crescendo at the finale in which the ship gets damaged. Then, you get to explore a foggy, deep forest that is hostile to you and pushes several characters towards showing their heroic side – just for the forest to petrify. Yeah, there is spectacle, but all of it points towards an interesting world and over the top characters. I’d say that’s Final Fantasy.

As someone who played FF 7,8,9,10,10-2, 12. This one where i am thinking in buying, i played the demo of those available and this one is the one that didn’t made me feel sleepy. The FF7 rebirth demo made me feel sleepy, FF15 was such a heartbreak for me when it launched i don’t feel myself into playing it. Now FF16 i didn’t feel bored, combat and plot, it gripped my attention.

I thought this game was a 7/10 it was kind of boring the combat got really repetitive at a certain point I’m a fan of Devil May Cry but for some reason FF16 just got repetitive for me and the game was way to easy they defiantly should allow us to access the harder difficulty from the start also the side quests sucked if square keeps going the action game route they need to balance for better difficulty and from a final fantasy perspective where was the enemy weakness’s exploits or character switching/letting us put equipment and items on our teammates or mini games also way too much of the same mob fights over and over another issues is the gill/crafting the gill feels almost pointless because its so easy that I just had some much of it and when it comes down to crafting I never felt like I needed to plus 1 my weapons because the game never challenge me enough I this game was alright but could have been better I’m fine with them making a another action game just like FF16 but I do think the variety needs to be better across the board spectacle can only carry you so far

This was my first FF game I’ve ever played and I loved every second of it

You should review Xenoblade series.

Not really. I get it, you like it but the laurels you’re placing on the game are predicated on ignoring larger context. Game development aside being different in east and west and in the east from company to company due to company culture being a thing in Japan and Korea, if we’re to go at it even on a metatextual level like you ponder by the end, it doesn’t look good for anyone involved. Because metatextually what you suppose is conveyed about the freedom of the series is just slapped back on its face. For more than 10 titles, Final Fantasy innovated and inspired other JRPGs in many ways. When it turned stale it didn’t turn stale because it tread the same water with the same story, same gameplay and same characters; it turned stale because it became a vessel for a certain few within that company to write their own thinly veiled erotic fanfiction regarding genderbent versions of previous FF characters while cannibalizing other games already in development to put out a below average product if it meant the creator could finally get the body pillow of his waifu to be a reality.

So when 16 comes around, while it does free us from these shackles(not really but that’s not the fault of the 16 team) it replaces this utterly wretched culture that’s existed so far with one that is foreign to Square Enix’s. FF16 is as much a Final Fantasy game as much as Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages are Zelda games; they are close to what they aspouse to be but the creator’s own sensibilities are woven deep enough to realise “wait, this isn’t by SE / Nintendo”. FF16 is Capcom’s Final Fantasy and Capcom has a few quirks, namely the influences it has. Despite Yoshi-P steering the ship around, the Capcom touch is around and what it ends up being isn’t so much a story of power but rather “Hey remember all those cool moments in Asura’s Wrath? Let’s redo them. Oh yeah, remember Tales of Symphonia, Tales of Phantasia and their racism plots? Let’s do those. Hey, remember the combat system of Tales of Arise? Let’s do that.” and it’s worse for it. The story and gameplay basically trip themselves over and self-sabotage the game from becoming a masterpiece to just a clumsy attempt. I don’t need to go on to why Ultima being basically “Evil Origin” and Yggdrassil from Tales of Symphonia is a laughable villain especially when he looks like FUCKING ORIGIN ALREADY. Or why Clive and Joshua are basically the non-hindu versions of Asura and Yasha from Asura’s Wrath.

These are problems that were always present in Capcom’s games(their stories are basically blatant fanfictions of things the creators loved at the time, instead of being simply inspired by them) but people ignored them because the gameplay was great. But here it stumbles all over itself for no reason as I mentioned. To name a few :

– If there’s meant to be an upgrade system, why do the upgrades do nothing substantial when it comes to damage and cooldown of skills to the point of having players MOD the game to finally be enjoyable?
– If there’s so much emphasis on combos, dodge offset and the combat in general, especially with aerial combat and bringing over that DMC DNA, why is it that there are no ways to further increase the moveset with new combos or moves involving pause attacks? Even Darksiders knew to do that.
– If there’s so much emphasis in combat, again, why is it that every Eikon and its long range attacks that are so different from each other, eseentially all produce the same tired Melee-Magic attack moves with no variation at all?
– If it’s meant to be such a liberating and “In the zone” combat system, why in the unholy mother of crystals, did they think that copying the absolute worst stagger system in existence was a good idea in the first place? To iterate, I’m talking about copying 1-to-1 the stagger system from Tales of Arise, down to the parameter in the weapons that allows the player to stagger or stagger enemies faster. Pure stupidity. When the devs already knew infinitely superior systems like they one they made for Kingdom Hearts 2, Devil May Cry 4 and Dragon’s Dogma 1. And if those were too bothersome to recreate, there’s always the Ys series or older and much better Tales games than Arise.
– Why oh why is it impossible to have THREE skills instead of two? It just limits the gameplay so much and it makes an already sponge-fest game worst. Why not have the third skill be R+Circle and if the devs wanted to impose a limitation, why not have that particular third skill be the Ultimate Skill of that Eikon, specifically locked to that set-up? Or why not have that button input exclusively used for Ultimate Eikonic abilities and have them freely swapped for the three Eikons you have set up? There’s no reason for just two skills only. And ideally, it would be four skills, like in Tales and Ys games but I’m getting ahead of myself.
– If it’s meant to be taking after DMC and Dragon’s Dogma, why is Clive restricted only to ONE weapon and namely of one element, the fire sword? Even DMC had more weapons, Clive doesn’t need to be a more blatant copy of Alphen than he is already is visually(down to the mark over his eye and the clothes).

I can’t speak for the newcomers to the series or to the newcomers in gaming but I suspect a few JRPG oldheads like me, who have played around the block, can see what 16 is and it really isn’t that great seeing your good buddy sloshed, stumbling over his own puke right after singing a banger of a karaoke song. While the narrative etc can’t be fixed, at least the gameplay can and sadly SE just didn’t want to do that, leading to gamers taking up that task. And that’s sad. Especially when SE used to be the one to do that themselves because they realised what was wrong and if they couldn’t do it, it was due to the technological limitations of the era, hardly their own fault. Here, they have no such excuse, doubly so for the members who transfered over from Capcom; it’s like they purposely forgot everything and stumbled on purposed.

And no, THE Final Fantasy isn’t this. It was Dissidia. The Final Fantasy. The end of the Final Fantasy we knew because after that, starts FF13 and that’s the current era we’re in, FF16 being a part of that. FF16 wasn’t a risk. It was safe and it got fucked by its own incompetent devs in gameplay and by an incompetent localizer team that messed up even the original intention of “Final Fantasy meets Game of Thrones” by toning down the Game of Thrones aspect even more from its already minimal amount.

Breaking News. New FF fan prefers new FF gameplay.

I’m glad you liked this game, but as a 40 year old that has been with the franchise since the beginning, FF16 was by FAR the most boring FF game I’ve ever played.

While I do share your sentiments about the overall experience with rebirth, I find myself going back time and time again just to play around in the rebirth world because the worlds are my favorite parts of these games and that is just not something you can do in 16 and that is why after I finished it I uninstalled it knowing I will never play it again