izigame.me

There's a lot to love about FF16. I love its story, I love its characters, and I love how its side quests do such a good job of fleshing out the land it takes place in and how the people in it grow and change over the course of the game. I love how for most of the game it feels like the various nations of the setting are making just as many moves as you do, to such an extent that it warranted a lore assistant tool being built into the pause screen of every cutscene. The kaiju-sized boss fights are flashy and awesome in ways I haven't felt since Asura's Wrath, the soundtrack is as amazing as you'd expect from Soken, and the combat, while no Devil May Cry, is satisfying. For the first 30, maybe 40 hours or so, I think most people would be hard pressed to call this a bad game.
But this is not a 30 to 40 hour game.
The core, fundamental problem with FF16 is that it wants you to think that it's an open world RPG, when in reality its overworld is largely dull and empty even compared to its cousin FF14. The towns are basically window dressing, the overworld only exists to make you walk through it, and the only thing holding any of it together is its bizarre obsession with rewarding you for everything you do with crafting materials in a game where the only things you can craft with them are equipment weaker than what you're already using. It doesn't take long to realize that FF16 is not a game about taking its open world seriously; it's a game where every time you finish a side quest it pops up a big HOLD F TO TELEPORT TO QUEST GIVER prompt to speed over to your reward of what is usually literal garbage. It never stops feeling almost oppressively linear to such a degree that even things like crouching under obstacles or jumping over gaps are all scripted events that you do by running at big blinking arrows in the environment. Your only real agency as a player is holding forward and swinging at anything that gets in your way, and you're expected to do this for about 70 hours or so.
What you quickly realize is that there's a good reason most action games cap out at around 15-20 hours. The game just doesn't have enough variety in either its enemies or its player abilities to be entertaining nearly that long, and instead of emphasizing what is overall a plenty fun combat system it just highlights every fault it has when all you're doing is wailing on an adamantoise or a coeurl the game rolled out as a "boss" for the 200th time. Normally there would be diversions to break things up, like the usual minigames, but FF16 ditches those without replacing them with anything. By the time I was even halfway through the game had me pining for even FF15's mediocre stealth segments, because at least you were actually doing something different there.
If the combat were more of a challenge then maybe it would be able to overcome this, but I'll never know because the only hard mode the game has is locked to New Game+. In an average fight the enemy is lucky if they even get to hit you at all, and if you resist the urge to just nuke most encounters off the map in seconds using the massive AoE attack you practically start the game with (which has no downsides or restrictions beyond a moderate cooldown, and also heals you every time you use it) they spend most of the time just getting juggled by 50 hit combos anyways. Near the end of the game it starts giving almost every boss the ability to teleport around nonstop to make them harder to read, and it's pretty much necessary by that point because it's the only way any of them can actually hit you before getting hit by 10 different parry abilities and sent to the floor within the first few seconds of the fight. For a while it's easy to keep yourself entertained by just playing with the abilities to do flashy combos for fun even if it isn't required, and every now and then you get moderately difficult fights in the game's higher ranked optional hunts, but most of the time it feels like challenging literal children to a game of wits just to flex on them because most of the enemies don't accommodate the combat system in any way.
You barely even get the usual fun of customizing your character, because aside from weapons and completely non-cosmetic armor that are just given to you by the plot at regular intervals your only meaningful customization is the 3 accessory slots that feel like a parody. These pretty much only come in two flavors, either cutting off 3 or 4 seconds of cooldown from a move with a 40 second cooldown or buffing a single move with a 2 minute cooldown by 10%. One of the late game rewards for doing a certain amount of side quests is a necklace that "lowers charge-up time for ranged magic by 0.2 seconds", and these are somehow supposed to be comparable in any way to the tiny handful of accessories that give you a global 15% extra xp or just give you a flat attack buff.
What holds the game up is its plot, but even that has issues. I love the game's side quests for their story, but they're all basically the same to play; you walk/ride to some spot that's always conveniently an equal distance between two fast travel points in the middle of nowhere, demolish a bunch of enemies you've already killed 1000 of, and then come back home. The game is at least cognizant of how dull they are and marks the quests that don't reward you with 8 briar clams and some string with a "+" sign to show that they're important, and the most common sentiment I see is that you should just skip everything that doesn't have that because of the atrociously mismatched quality the quests have. The problem is, if you actually do that you miss out on some of the best storytelling the game has. The side quests are where you get a context for the ongoing events of the world; you see Clive going from an unwilling errand boy to a leader figure looking out for the people of their hideout, with all sorts of NPCs having their own little mini arcs that really make it feel like home. Whole villages fall and rise, side characters go from being a minor side quest objective to a character you would throw yourself onto a sword for, and along the way you deliver about a thousand random ingredients to random nobodies. The good side quests all come together to show a world just trying to hold itself together on the brink of disaster and it's one of my favorite parts of the game, and the bad sidequests show you, the player, just trying to hold on amidst a torrent of generic mmo errands. But even if you ignore all of them, the main quest constantly reminds you that it's by the creators of FF14:ARR anyways, and at regular intervals the game comes to a screeching halt to make you fix a bridge or forcing you to stop and build a boat at the game's highest point, and in the latter case the game's story never really recovers its steam from it.
The other problem with the game's side content is that they're never given to you naturally over time, or through exploration; they get dumped on you in packs of around 10 at a time at various story intervals that are usually the worst possible time to go off and side quest. There's a part right in the middle of the game's climax, between approaching the final boss and the final boss itself, where you're given 14 side quests and also invited to start the game's two entire story DLCs (which are fine, by the way, but not worth the $20 extra), which for whatever reason have been saved for this moment and not a second earlier. And that pretty much just describes the whole game. FF16 is a game that starts with one of the coolest openings I've ever seen in a video game, and then everything that follows is an unbelievably mixed bag. There are lots of extremely high highs, lots of abysmally low lows, and if you're like me and become interested enough in the story to want to see it to the end you'll probably find enough good content along the way for the journey to be worth it. It's just a shame about pretty much everything else.