Final Fantasy XVI would be my favorite game in the series, if it wasn’t making an effort to constantly remind me of how bad it is.
The media narrative around this latest entry in the Final Fantasy series has become so repulsively bad that I’m going to make an effort to not acknowledge it outside of this blurb here. Is Final Fantasy XVI good? If you like it, sure. Should you play it? I guess if your PC can handle it when the port comes out, please do not purchase a PS5 for the sake of this or any game. Is it “Final Fantasy” enough? Unapologetically.
This piece will contain spoilers for all of XVI and also contain context only where I think about it. Don’t worry about it! It’s a video game.
I’ve had a pretty intense work schedule since XVI came out about a month ago as I’m writing this. I’ve mostly played the game on my weekends and random days off, with my first playthrough clocking in at just shy of 55 hours. I’ve had a lot of time to digest the in-between parts of this game, and I’ve joyfully read zero articles anyone else has posted, sticking mostly to consuming people’s errant thoughts about it on Twitter.
FFXVI can roughly be divided into five acts. The first act, recounting main protagonist Clive Rosfield’s time as a child in his home, the Duchy of Rosaria, ends with the fight between a mysterious Eikon (it’s a Final Fantasy summon. Don’t worry about the details) that is extremely obviously Clive, and Joshua, Clive’s younger brother, supposedly ending in the death of Joshua.
The second act continues from there, showing Clive’s character developing from a dubiously loyal soldier to that of a rebel on a quest for revenge, liberation, learning the truth of the first act, and ending with the revelation that rumors of Joshua’s demise had been greatly exaggerated. Also, he cries, a whole lot.
Clive is the central character of the game, being the only playable character across the games’ runtime, so it makes sense that the bulk of the character development would fall on him. Around the end of the fourth act, I did realize that most of Clive’s meaningful development is accomplished by the end of the second act, where the revelation that Joshua survived their battle 13 years ago comes in, and Clive takes up the mantle of his dead mentor, Cid, and in a way, his father’s as well.
If you’ve had the displeasure of following me on Twitter for the past month, you’ll know I’m quite fond of Clive. As I finished the game, I thought that I probably wouldn’t have stuck the whole thing out if I hadn’t been so fond of him. I have a regular problem with RPGs (despite them being my favorite genre) where I’ll get around 80–90% done with them and just lose any interest in finishing them for whatever reason. Strong character writing is usually what gets me over this hump, as you may have noticed from the type of games that I like.
One of the challenges that FFXVI has placed upon itself, however, is that all character development in the game happens through Clive, there is extremely minimal character development independent of him. Clive is your lens into Valisthea (the world of XVI), and so if you don’t enjoy Clive as a character, the game’s often weak characters won’t really come to life. I have the dubious benefit of really enjoying Clive Rosfield as a character, but the cast outside of him doesn’t really get much of a chance to shine, with each major player only getting maybe one-to-three impactful moments across the game.
If you really like Clive, which honestly, is something the game accomplishes pretty easily, this is great. I did muse around the beginning of the fourth act during the extended Barnabas chase sequence that Clive’s character is mostly fully developed by the end of the second act. At the end of this sequence, there’s a five-year time skip (which totally took me by surprise), where you get a slightly more grizzled Clive as the leader of the in-game resistance. By this point, you know who Clive is. You understand his motivations. You are able to understand how he’ll react to world events as you experience them.
The biggest downfall of this route of character development comes in the game’s antagonists, who Clive is naturally not close to and therefore don’t get any of the benefits of periphery character development. Not to say that the rest of the protagonists fare much better, but they are at least a little better off.
Benedikta Harman, the major boss and driving force of the second act, is a great example of how this type of storytelling isn’t very effective. Benedikta’s character has all the earmarks of being interesting — hints at a tragic backstory, hints at a turbulent relationship with multiple members of the cast, cool, confident, sexy and evil — but all that amounts to her story are just these hints. There is no further narrative development given to this character that is waved in front of you while you’re told “Look how interesting she is? Isn’t she fun and evil? Wouldn’t you like to know more about her?” Yes, actually, but we’ve moved past her already.
Benedikta’s final moments end with an extremely tacky sexual assault allegory that isn’t subtle or necessary, ending with her cursing humanity before giving up what she has left of it before turning into a scary monster that makes for a fantastic boss fight. It’s… well, it’s really bad! Her dead body is later repurposed to taunt another character leading to the game’s third act, which is also really not great actually. Benedikta is one of only two major female characters in the game, and her entire character is wasted on bad usage of extremely delicate narrative tropes.
Benedikta is almost a really fun character. If she had time to assert more of her influence on the narrative she would have been incredible. I love femme fatal characters, her design is campy and fun, her hints at her backstory are so tantalizing, but ultimately she doesn’t get to live up to the full potential of her character.
It’s been bandied about endlessly that Final Fantasy XVI took inspiration from a handful of popular media during the game’s development, with Attack on Titan inspiring the game’s fights between classic Final Fantasy summons, Evangelion inspiring some of the game’s later questions about the nature of humanity, and Game of Thrones inspiring the messy medival dark fantasy politics of Valisthea. These are all self-confessed from the game’s development team, and all mostly true, but the Game of Thrones inspirations are the most clumsily implemented.
If you’ve watched the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation, the first act of Final Fantasy XVI will feel eerily beat for beat. Evil mom character, Sean Bean dad dies, broody main character has a wolf puppy for some reason. It’s uncanny. Benedikta feels a little Cersei Lanister, a little Tyrion, with latter villain Anabella feeling very Cersei. The issue is that Game of Thrones — however questionably — takes the time to develop these characters into something that while maybe not sympathetic, are at least believable and fun because you understand their motivations, even if you don’t agree with them.
Final Fantasy XVI’s villains are act based, with Benedikta making way for Hugo and Anabella in act 3, making way for Barnabas in act 4, making way for big boss Ultima in the game’s final act. Each act of the game drip feeds you bits of each of these antagonists before you get to them, with Ultima in particular haunting the narrative like a specter, but ultimately, there is extremely minimal context to each of these characters.
Benedikta Harman, Dominant of Garuda. Was probably a bearer slave at one point before being rescued by Cid. Had a messy breakup with Cid before being the sexy intelligence officer who has weirdly forced sex scenes with Hugo and Barnabas both. This is all we learn about her and her past is never further explained.
Hugo Kupka, Dominant of Titan. Loved Benedikta. His motivations are centered around revenge for her death, which he believes Cid — and later Clive — to be responsible for. We learn that he dreamt of ruling the world with Benedikta, a goal which we never learn if she shared with him. His revenge plot contrasts with the end of Clive’s revenge quest against himself, and Clive’s revenge quest against Hugo for his actions at the end of act two. We learn nothing more of Hugo after his death.
Anabella Rosfield, mother of Clive and Joshua, is the Cersei expy having betrayed husband and country to secure her own house and lineage, etc. etc. She has maybe two defining cutscenes before her suicide near the tail end of act 3. She’s very concerned with the preservation of the nobility, which coincides with the game abruptly no longer caring about the nobility politics outside of some late-game sidequests. We’ll revisit that.
Barnabas Tharmr, Dominant of Odin, is the game’s first greater-scope villain, and last human villain of the game. He rules the eastern half of the continent, which is by far the most lacking in detail part of the world, being explored in only a fraction of the detail of the rest of the game. He also looms over the first half of the narrative, only for him to be relatively ineffectual as a villain despite being lauded as a major threat for most of the game.
Of these four, Barnabas’s motivations are the most fleshed out, being tied into those of Ultima, the game’s ultimate antagonist. Ultima seeks to erase humanity and rebuild the worst, using Clive as a vessel to do so. Ultima is somewhat cartoonishly evil, a victim of hubris and somewhat bland as a final boss considering what this series has put out so far. I like how he haunts the narrative, but once he takes center stage, he wastes it.
Ultima convinces Barnabas that he will have some sort of place in this new world, telling Barnabas that humanity’s will to live is what drives conflict in the world. Conflict is Barnabas’s central conflict, both loving and hating it. He lost his mother to religious conflict, yet revels in strong opponents and bloodlust. He’s a contradictory character, which makes sense considering his on-screen descent into insanity, but he does little to drive the narrative outside of being a contrast to Clive’s ideals of humanity getting to live by its own terms.
Anyway. Lets talk about magic slavery now.
FFXVI’s magic system has three main aspects to it. Dominants, living embodiments of Final Fantasy’s elemental summons, make up the game’s main cast, and can use magic freely and can transform into the summon they represent (Clive for Ifrit, Jill for Shiva, Hugo for Titan, etc.). They’re treated mostly with respect by the game’s narrative and the people living within the world of Valisthea outside of a couple outliers.
Bearers are humans that can use magic, and are enslaved throughout the entire world of Valisthea. Bearers can use simple magic for the most part, with no in-game examples of them accomplishing the feats that the Dominants can muster. Over time, both Dominants and Bearers will ossify, slowly turning into stone the more they use their powers. Bearers identified as such as branded at time of revelation, being interchangeably called “branded” in game.
Regular humans can use magic via crystal shards, mined from one of the game’s Mothercrystals, huge structures of crystal that dot the map around central locations in-game.
Magic, its growing scarcity, its overuse, and its repercussions are the underlying thread that ties the elements of the game’s narrative together, making for a vague sort of climate change allegory that almost comes together. It gets mixed haphazardly into both the slavery allegory and the human free will allegory, but it is the most consistently driving force of the cast’s motivations.
Clive spends the 13 intervening years between acts one and two as a branded enslaved by one of the game’s three major political factions as the result of his mother’s machinations, and the second act navigating the way that people treat bearers in this world. In the third act, he’s able to skip over this due to the removal of his brand, having taken on the mission of liberating bearers from their enslavement, hoping to give them the freedom to “live on their own terms”.
The usage of slavery in a world set up to mirror medieval Europe — where slavery did absolutely exist — without any BIPOC representation in the cast is not a narrative choice I would have suggested. The allegory is extremely weak, with early sidequests focused sparsely on freeing bearers from their enslavement, but no context as to why the system exists outside of a couple of quips about “this is how it’s always been across the continent” and specifically and repeatedly “bearers are seen as something other than human”.
If there were any nonwhite characters (outside of maybe a handful of NPCs in the northern Africa part of the map) in the cast I’d probably just accuse the game of having a white savior narrative problem, which it still might. The slavery allegory is never handled with any grace, certainly not by the main plot, and even less well in the game’s sidequests.
There’s one late game sidequest in particular, where Clive has to fetch a book about the origins of bearer slavery from a remote, destroyed town. An evil illuminati-like organization (who have never been mentioned prior and will never be mentioned again) who seeks to control the flow of information in Valisthea because… they’re afraid that people might think things about history, is trying to destroy all copies of the book for what it says.
That being, that bearers were once in an elevated position in society, and their current enslavement was brought about because they one time decided to have an organization only for bearers, which the world’s governments weren’t too keen on. This sucks. This sucks so bad as the basis for the origins of slavery is Valisthea. A minority group makes a minority-only group and the majority goes “well I guess it’s time to invade that space and do 500+ years of atrocities because of it” great. That’s very very good Final Fantasy XVI.
This also brings up the sidequest problem with XVI. Most of the narrative weight in the game’s sidequests in situated only in the ones that come up near the very end of the game, giving the player a false sense of their import. If every sidequest was like the ones in the first third of the game, I’d suggest skipping nearly all of them.
The game settles into a pretty reliable gameplay loop after the second timeskip. Clive and party enter a new village, settle some type of dispute for a local leader, and three or so sidequests pop up that vaguely relate to the struggles of either the village, the slavery system, or the local leader, before centralizing on that leader in future sidequests. Other quests pop up at the main hub featuring more in-depth stories with members of the resistance, but almost none of these actually feature the game’s main cast.
There’s maybe two quests in the late game that feature major party members — Jill and Joshua, Clive’s central motivations for most of the game — and that’s it. These major characters are equally lacking in terms of the plot outside of the aforementioned handful of impactful scenes. Jill, touted at the game’s female lead and Clive’s love interest, gets one majorly impactful scene at the beginning of the third act before promptly getting benched for most of the remainder of the game. It’s not great. Jill is one of the most frustrating characters in the game partially because the game does the bear minimum to tell you about her.
She’s a kind woman in a world full of monstrous men, yet is convinced that she must become monstrous in order to stand up to stand up to the real monsters. She doesn’t, and doesn’t, but that’s really all there is to her character. She’s kind. It’s not a fault, but it does make her somewhat one dimensional in that she cares for different people, but her caring is the central point of her character.
It’s not a flaw, but it highlights the issues the game has with developing characters that aren’t Clive. Jill, female lead, who accompanies you more than any character outside of your dog, Torgal, has two sidequests and one and a half main quests in total to flesh out her character. This is about 2ish hours of a 50+ hour game. It’s not good.
Dion, Dominant of Bahamut and Final Fantasy’s first gay (citation needed) character is similarly almost good but there is even less to flesh out his character outside of about a combined 45 minutes of cutscenes, no focal sidequests, nothing. He’s disgustingly noble and gay and I do appreciate those qualities. His queerness isn’t “blink and you’ll miss it” but his role as a character in Final Fantasy XVI is. I like Dion for what we see of him, but we sure don’t get very much.
The dog gets more characterization than either of these characters. Which is fine. He’s a good dog. I really like the dog. More action games should have animal companion combo finishers, honestly. Torgal being the core of two of the game’s more emotional moments is both quite touching considering his relationship with Clive and also extremely funny considering that Clive’s fondness for Torgal is probably in the text more than his love for Jill. Man and his dog I guess.
Clive does literally hold the narrative together, though you can tell he’s struggling to do so about as much as the strings on his shirt are struggling to hold his chest in.
Final Fantasy has never really had a problem with creating male leads that show emotion, at least in the same way that much of the rest of the RPG genre has over the past decade, but Clive stands out to me in a few ways. He’s tender in a way that I wouldn’t describe any other lead Final Fantasy character outside of maybe Cecil as being, and his emotionality is one of the defining narrative aspects of the first half of the game in particular. He somewhat falls into the same trap as Jill’s character — he’s a decent man in a world of monsters despite his self-professed crimes — but you spend the entire game with him so he feels more well-rounded.
I don’t think I would have finished Final Fantasy XVI without the strength of Clive’s character in spite of his — and the narrative’s — flaws. He’s extremely likable, entertaining, and Ben Starr does a fantastic version in the English dub. Clive doesn’t really depart from the conventions of typical Final Fantasy protagonists, but he does feel like an evolution of them in some ways. Trauma isn’t a new character development for RPG protagonists, but Clive’s is one of the better executed, largely because of Starr’s performance as him, in spite of the inconsistent quality of the writing.
I feel like I’m being somewhat mean to the writing of XVI, because I am, and because it deserves it. For every good idea the writing team has, it puts in two bad ones to compensate, and that ideology follows through with the rest of the game.
Final Fantasy has been trending in the direction of a character action game since Final Fantasy XV and the Final Fantasy VII remake, and this is unapologetically that. It’s a somewhat simple character action game in the style of Devil May Cry or God of War with textual and visual elements of the Final Fantasy series to remind players what series they’re playing when the story isn’t happening. It’s more action RPG than we’re used to seeing from this series, but it in no way is less Final Fantasy because of it.
I enjoy the combat. It has much of the same flow as the action-based games that inspired it, with Clive learning new abilities from the cast of Dominants as you defeat them in-game, fleshing out his move pool and eventually allowing you to mix elements of each fighting style together. It’s just shy of coming coherently together. No two players will likely build Clive exactly the same way, but the game gives you free reign to try and reset skills as you please.
That said, it’s pretty easy to find one loadout you like and stick to it for the rest of the game. By the time you acquire your fourth Eikon loadout, you’ll likely start to struggle to find ways to integrate it into your rotation, in addition to being bottlenecked by the limited amount of ability points you earn during the first half of the game.
The feeling you’re left with is that it all just comes shy of coming together. At the end of my second playthrough when I had essentially everything unlocked, I hadn’t majorly deviated from my loadout that I had finished my first playthrough with. Clive’s varied skills are fun to execute and play off of each other in interesting ways once you get the hang of them, but you can really tell that a team familiar with MMOs helped to develop the combat system because once you learn to properly sequence Clive’s abilities, that becomes the central focus of the combat.
It also causes challenges for in-game encounters. Regular enemies are plentiful and sparse at the same time in the game’s possibly too-empty set pieces, and take too long to defeat for the meager rewards you receive from them. Bosses, on the flip side, are interesting and fun and provide a good variety of challenge in addition to often useful rewards. Mini-bosses, which occasionally dot the landscape, are a good balance, but also offer minimal benefit to the player outside of experience and ability points.
My personal favorite part of the game’s combat was the in-game trials, which locks you to certain loadouts and challenges you to make the best of them in a timed fashion. Not only was it a great introduction to each of the skills in the game, but they make for one of the more genuinely challenge (and rewarding!) parts of the combat system.
I did regularly run into issues taking breaks where I’d forget my rotation. I really can’t go back to MMOs, can I? Such despair.
Everything, every little thing in Final Fantasy XVI just comes shy of being truly great. It’s all good. It’s all serviceable. It’s a good look at the future of the series. It’s graphically stunning, an absolutely gorgeous game, even the parts without Clive Rosfield. It tells a complete story from beginning to end, and I can feel that people put care and love and passion into this game, which is something I don’t get out of many AAA games as of late.
It’s frustrating because I want more. As I finished the game’s final sidequests and completed the last couple achievements, as the game told me that these character’s story was over, I realized that I wasn’t done. I wanted more out of these characters and story, I wanted more out of Clive, of Jill, of Valisthea. I wanted these half-baked characters to be at least three-quarters baked. I wanted the combat system to have a couple more weapons, maybe two more Eikons, more airborne combos for Clive.
And I wanted those things bodily. I got frustrated that the game didn’t live up to the potential that it could have had, that it stumbled as often as it succeeded. I can’t tell you the last time I finished a game and was immediately ready to drop $49.99 on some horrific season pass with three new story scenarios. All for a game that I fully admit is just, is just pretty okay!
I still want more. I want so much more out of this game and not for any particularly good reason other than it’s a culmination of disparate elements that I — as a human individual — like about both video games and characters. I haven’t loved a video game character as much as I love Clive since either Ike (of Fire Emblem fame) or Bayonetta (from, well, Bayonetta), and that is saying a lot for me. I almost really love the combat, I just want more. I almost really like every character in this game. I just want more.
Final Fantasy XVI’s ending is ambiguous to the fate of much of our main cast, which I rather like. You get the hint of a world unburdened by the conflicts of the main narrative, but as the game ham-fistedly reminds you, likely not without conflicts of its own. It’s that kind of ambiguity that Final Fantasy has masterfully had for years in its writing, that Japanese media executes on consistently well. I love ambiguity, because I generally never want the things I love to end.
One of my favorite book series as a teenager was The Belgariad, by David Eddings. My feelings on it have complicated in a major way, but the full Belgariad series can be read in an endless cycle, functionally creating a never-ending story. I ran that series into the ground, and I speculate that I’ve read all twelve books thirty or more times. There is no ambiguity in The Belgariad, only happy endings for its cast. No room to interpret, no room to feel anything outside of what you’re told. There’s a comfort in that, but as I’ve grown up a bit more, I’ve realized that’s much less fun.
Anyway. Weird segue aside, my desire for more of whatever Final Fantasy XVI has put me in a very weird headspace. I enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy XVI, but I perhaps most enjoyed getting to talk about it here and on Twitter. I’m perhaps most excited for what new developments come out of the successes of it, provided Square Enix is able to learn from their failures, something I’m not especially hopeful for. They’re great at learning from their successes, but fair less good at improving on what they lack.
As I’ve learned a lot this last year, my single greatest takeaway from this new piece of media that I’ve consumed is that it’s driving me to create more, and I have really enjoyed taking that journey with it. Final Fantasy XVI is an imperfect, passionately created mess, and that at least, has inspired me.
