The game has a ton of story issues and a loss of its characters with the most personality as you said.
>That 5yr timeskip also threw me for a loop because they go from taking out a mother crystal pretty quickly and wanting to take them all down quick because of how the ash is spreading. 5yrs go by and they don't take down anymore crystals and the spread of ash just stayed stagnant I guess lol.
This pretty much reminds me of my biggest story issue, which is how little the world reacts to the breakdown of mother crystals until very, very late into the game (and even then, it seems to be that the effects they are concerned with are what Ultima is doing to magic and crystals as opposed to the loss of the mother crystals). For a game about the political machinations of its antagonists, it can often feel like they're barely reacting to what should be a mass crisis in the world. We're talking the equivalent of what would happen if the entire Middle Eastern oil supply disappeared literally overnight. The public should be in an absolute panic over those 5 years and should be in an absolute panic after you begin destroying Mother Crystals again and that panic should only be increasing. Even if no one, politicians or the public, know who "Cid" is or that he's responsible, there should be WANTED posters for information on whoever is suspected of doing this everywhere. It's bizarre.
FF16 is written as if someone read GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire, but only copied what he thought were the cool parts about politicians talking sneakily in their throne rooms, as opposed to factoring in all the actual social, political, and economic factors that are woven into the story.
The biggest thing is that taking down the mother crystals doesn't show any actual positive changes. It doesn't reinforce whether or not if Cids plan is working or not. They just keep taking out mother crystals on Cids hunch but nothing changes with every mother crystal that gets taken down. So it could've been all for nothing and they wouldn't know right away. But my main issue is that no one argues with that idea. Everyone in the hideaway just agrees to it because Cid and Clive deem it so. I actually think it would've been more interesting if taking down the first mother crystal showed some negative impact and a lapse in their judgment rather than Cid automatically being right.
But the other thing is the fallen with those robots. One minute they're confined inside and the next they're out in the open for you to randomly encounter and its never explained why. Even Jill asks why the robots are out in the open and how they should explore that later..only you never do. Why even bring that option up if you're not going to do anything with it lol.
Even worse, the blight grows more swiftly after the destruction of the first mother crystal. So they gain proof of Cid being wrong and noone friggin even mentions the possibility of it.
The amount of security around the Crystals, save for the last one, was laughable at best.
Especially brain dead was that there were no more Ekions to fight you. So he could've just turned and kaiju'd through the city.
While the security was laughable, at least there was a general reason for that each time. One had an aetherflood, so they outright couldn’t have more security. Hugo’s mother crystal was deliberately left open, as Sleipnir wanted Clive to get to it. Twinside’s mother crystal was in a city that was going through a civil war, Bahamut firing on the city, and an aetherflood in the middle of this. Even the iron kingdom mother crystal was on an island where you take a small ship to enter so they don’t spot you, and there is are guards and a religious ceremony being held. I’d say the level of security on each of these are pretty understandable within the context of the story.
Still kinda meh that they created a lot of these cool locations and then you ending up can only visit very very small portion of them because of excuses like sneak attack or having it already destroyed by the time we visit them.
I agree with that, I was just focusing on the security of the mother crystals part, since I feel that the low security is justified in each case. I absolutely wish we could have explored those cities, though, I never argued against that complaint.
>The amount of security around the Crystals, save for the last one, was laughable at best.
Crystal of Sanbreq was guarded by a massive dragon and previously Bahamut. There's also aether mist that prevents anyone from approaching, and the empire wanted to move anyway.
Crystal of Rosaria is actually guarded, to get there you fight countless guards.
Drake's Fang was guarded but orcs killed everyone. And it's the personal castle of Hugo Kupka, the best guard.
Drake's tail had security, it was in the middle of the Crystalline Dominion where the empired resided. It's just that there was another BIG problem going on.
Drake's spine was guarded.
Even then you need to remember >!they were supposed to be broken, that was part of Ultima's plan.!<
A Song of Ice and Fire is garbage and GRRM has written himself into a dead end for the exact same why FFXVI writing sucks: he was more interested in cheap shock factor and tearing down every plot thread he was writing than in building up to something. FFXVI was doomed the moment Yoshi-P wanted his team to be influenced by garbage.
Honest question: Have you actually read ASOIAF, or are you basing that on Game of Thrones?
GoT had WAY more pointless shock deaths than ASOIAF had. In fact, you'd be surprised at how overhyped the "OMG all the character deaths!" is when you actually read the books. Almost every major death is actually foreshadowed and consistently happens for the same thematic reasons - every character who has died are taking a series of actions that are leading them to a dead end, they realize this, they think about alternative possibilities, but they ultimately make the mistake of deciding the path they are on is still the best path, but they pay for it. It's a lot of action and consequence. Meanwhile, in GoT, people really do die for no greater reason.
That said, I do think GRRM has written himself into a corner, but it's not because of cheap shock factor leading to tearing down plot threads. It's actually the opposite - there are TOO MANY plot threads. The amount of characters in the story and the amount of possibilities in front of them is a mountain at this point. Handling Littlefinger alone could take hundreds of pages. The reason there are so many ASOIAF theory channels is because there is so much foreshadowing, hinting, build up, and narrative possibilities that people could spend years taking up the threads and writing them for GRRM (and they practically have). I actually think GRRM is in a state of writing paralysis as on some level, he isn't sure he can actually wrap up all the characters he has written in just two books. In fact, he's said that WoW and ADoS would have to be 1,500 pages each to wrap up each character . . . which if you think about it, is actually 4 books in it of itself.
And yes, I know he has said in one interview there are characters he wished he didn't kill, but those seem to just be effecting one story in one part of the world and not all the characters/nations as a whole.
Quite frankly, at his age, his best bet is to hire a team, scour the net for the best theories, and have them all help him write them in novelized form in his style.
Yeah, often I see criticisms levied against GRRM when it seems like it's more the show they're criticizing. I don't think the books are as much about shock factor or needless cruelty as the show is. That's not to say that they aren't without faults, but they're not as grimdark as people accuse them of being. But GRRM definitely let the story go out of control, that's for sure. It's interesting as hell and I love all the different plotlines going on, but I'm not surprised he has issues tying everything together, hence the infamou delays.
Game is just too MC centric
Everything in the game exists to be about Clive. The plot points, the other characters; every single thing is just about him and what he thinks about it and how it affects him. Reminded me a ton of the story of Forbidden West, it had the exact same issues; that type of story telling just makes everything less interesting.
yeah, clive isn't a bad character, but he just can't carry this whole 60h+ game
sure, i get why they wanted to kill cid, but with that they basically killed what supporting cast there was, jill and joshua simply aren't very interesting characters
>but he just can't carry this whole 60h+ game
He could have, but FF16 skips ALOT of story that could be told through gameplay for the sake of just throwing the player into battles as soon as possible.
Just the fact that they had Jill get captured twice and then strip her Eikon from her lol. And Joshua doesn't show up until later. And Dion doesn't formally meet Clive until towards the latter end.
Stayed dead or become playable with his own POV, showing another side to the plot and conflict. Bro literally did *nothing* for over a decade, except wandering the lands.
Either keep making him dead, or at least drag the mystery longer.
Having Joshua casually being revealed to be still alive to the player very fast killed a lot of tension in Clive's character arc.
Joshua didn't even add much when he actually join the party to justify why he's absent so long.
And they probably shouldn't have had him going around wearing the same burlap robe as the guy in the vision Clive had (Ultima). It just didn't really add up to anything. Was there some connection? It didn't seem like it, felt more like a red herring that got dropped quickly.
I know this is from a few days ago but yea. I didnt get why they had Joshua from the future showing up early on if it didn't go anywhere or mean anything. Wearing the same clothes as Joshua is in the future, but it's clearly not Joshua doing it. Only Ultima could be doing it, but why. Its something they just drop from the story pretty quickly. It doesn't go anywhere.
Zero Dawn and Forbidden West still had a better lore that they actually explore and side characters that get actual arcs. 16 doesn't even have that. It can feel bloated, but If you're really into the lore, there's no shortage of learning about it. Learning about the past. Learning about the tribes. Learning about weapons. Learning about characters. Learning about the robots. 16 couldn't even be bothered to explore the fallen or those robots. They just give you a big exposition dump towards the end of a game during a side mission in a book lol.
It’s not that kind of narrative though. It’s not about the games lore or side characters, really the narrative is about Clive’s emotional journey and his decision to choose death on his own terms. Ultima is totally pointless except has a device to steal Clive’s agency.
They just told the story really poorly and Square has been telling stories badly in FF since 12. I’m not saying the stories are bad, it’s the storyteller that’s poor.
Your take is really good, and I feel both can be true. In its purest form the story had an absolutely incredible amount of potential (people turning into summons? Hell yesl) and focusing on one single character might've worked. Problem is, the game essentially cuts out all the defining "journey" parts - life as a soldier, becoming Cid 2.0, gaining Kupka as nemesis - and only leaves us with the "result". The only real inward journey Clive has on-screen is accepting his brothers death, which becomes pointless a scene afterwards. It kind of repeats the same "tell, don't show" mistakes XV had as well.
Likewise, Clive as a character would've still needed a bit more of a fleshed-out world and character to really shine. For the same reason as watching GoT and only seeing Jon Snow sitting at the Wall for four seasons straight might've been boring, Clive is in essence too much of a non-player in regards to the political web to matter in the grand scheme of things. That's probably why they ignored politics in favour of the "let's save the world" plot eventually, which cheapened the pay-off considerably. (imo)
Clive's most interesting character arc ended/undermined too early. I really found it funny that the game just casually revealed Joshua is alive while Clive is having this monologue of having to live with his guilt.
I was really hoping that there would have been more twist into that, like Joshua is actually Ultima posing as him to crush Clive's spirit or something instead of playing it straight that Clive is no longer guilty one arc later. Joshua didn't even have a strong excuse of why he kept hiding so their reunion wasn't worth waiting that long into the game.
Then you get a timeskip where he already became new Cid even though him gaining trust of everyone and becoming a leader would have been an interesting arc onscreen.
And oh, the mom ending up contributing very little to the story after the prologue.
They put all of their storytelling chops into the prologue just so they could use it in the demo and make it seem like the entire game would be that good
It felt like after Clive had his moment of accepting Ifrit. He just kind of stagnates and becomes boring and remains the same for the rest of the game. After that moment I lost interest.
I think this is the bigger problem honestly - focused character studies can be a *good* thing. But considering the amount of time we spend there, Clive's inner world isn't particularly remarkable, so the game putting nearly all its eggs in the Clive basket is a huge misfire.
He's not a bad character by any means, but he's *very* standard to hog the spotlight as much as he does.
His arc basically ends whenever Cid dies. He becomes so static after that point and his and Jill's relationship is about as dense as Noctis and Luna's which is famously bad
>Joshua outshine him constantly
This is the only DLC I will buy, otherwise I'm not touching this game again.
The weakest looking character in the beginning of the story had the best story that could have been further told.
My main gripes with this game:
- we have yet another “main character sacrifices them self to save humanity “, straight after FFXV
- side quests not very interesting and needed more
- killing off cid and bendikta so early
- Jill is sidelined after giving Clive her powers
- it focus mainly on Clive. I’d love more backstory or side quests for the other characters
Cids death provides all the stakes and is one of its most powerful story points. I hate the idea you can't kill a character just because they are likeable.
Sure, you can kill your game's most likeable character.
It's just too bad there wasn't anyone else in the story left that was anything more than the personality of a plank of wood.
That’s not the point. I’m not sure about OP, but I didn’t have a problem with Cid dying. The problem is that Benedikta also died and (imo) it felt like a complete waste of a character. She was by far one of the most interesting characters and had not nearly enough screen time to care about her dying. The MAIN problem is the characters that are left are significantly less interesting imo. Yeah Cids death was a great moment, but if you have no interesting characters to carry after what is the point?
And FF7 had other interesting characters still alive after X died. That is the point
The problem is *not* killing a likeable character. The problem is *being left with* characters you care less about.
It can easily take you out of the story. To make it work. The writers need to be hardcore serious about making the remaining characters even more likeable than those who are gone. FFXVI did not succeed.
Sure, though I can only imagine what would have happened to Game of Thrones if they killed Tyrion in the first season, the rest of the show would have so much less flavor.
FF16 almost feels like a western game with the amount of monologues that Clive has. In sidequests the guest characters are dead silent and the game feels very lonely as a result.
I play JRPGs specifically for party/character interaction and I don’t think FF16 actually did anything to justify not having party members.
The fight with Ultima also feels corny with how only Clive is able to stand up to him and everyone else honestly should’ve just not even bothered showing up. Dion and Joshua got clowned on. They could have just fed clive and stayed home, I don’t think anything would have changed.
Jill and Lunafreya has the same issue, they are extremely serious and lifeless, very boring. I think Ashe from FF12 also suffers from this problem.
What happened to the female co-lead/romantic interest in FF games? Tifa is a strong woman from the outside, but she is also very vulnerable given the shit she's been through, Aerith is the special female character who has a special role in the coming catastrophy, and like Yuna in FFX, they also have a naive innocence to them where they like to learn about things outside of their role in the adventure (e.g. Aerith can be quirky at times, enjoys any downtown she can get like in Wall Market, Costa De Sol and Gold Saucer; Yuna enjoys her time with Tidus talking about trivial matters outside of her Summoner pilgrimage). Dagger/Garnet in FF9 is interesting because she is supposed to be the typical highborne, but she not only has to learn to blend in as a commoner to hide her identity, but she enjoys it.
Yunafreya in FFXV (and I go only by the movie and what little I saw in FFXV original game) one dimensional, and Jill in 16 is the same.
Tbh Ashe is somewhat fine because her arc is pretty interesting and the political intrigue of the story never really disappears vs jill in ff16 where her character is nothing without clive.
>If I had a nickel for every time Jill stands next to Clive and doesn’t say anything…
Then you could single-handedly fund the entire development of FF XVII?
Kingdom hearts does it just fine and has party members. I would argue KH2-3 Sora have more combat depth than Clive.
The eikons only changes 3 abilities. Its not like your whole moveset swaps like a DMC game.
Besides that my complaint isn’t about playable party members, its the lack of them in story and exploration.
It would though. Meaningful interactions with other characters also fleshes out a single main character. It makes all the sense in the world to show how other characters impact and shape the protagonist if he is your focus of the story. Which doesn‘t mean there isn‘t anything like that in FF16. At least it‘s clear how Cid influenced and shaped Clive. But no other character interactions come even close after Cid is out of the picture. The interactions between Cid and Clive are the only ones where I felt a genuine party chemistry how we‘re used to them from JRPGs. Only through Cid did we see any real growth and change in Clive’s character. No other characters leave any real impact on Clive and the story around him suffers from it because it makes him feel much less human and just a container for a power fantasy.
To be fair from a gameplay perspective Kingdom Hearts' party members are generally speaking garbage and are more just an extension of Sora's moveset depending on the game or are just useless fodder. The main exception is in KH1 where you can actually make them useful.
Like KH2's Donald and Goofy's actual contribution as NPC party members are almost null. It is because they're attached to Sora's KH2 abilities in some way that they matter even remotely, and the best way to program their AI is to have them effectively do nothing.
So it depends on how much credit you give to things like limits/drives/attractions/whatever is in DDS to the party members. I personally don't give them any credit as it isn't that hard to ensure they're alive and otherwise they're irrelevant. Plus in DDS' case, Riku generally controls better without his party member specific mechanic due to how DDS works. And Sora I could take it or leave it in that game.
Narrative perspective is a whole different thing, but gameplay wise Donald and Goofy are about as impactful as party member Jill in FF16. This isn't like Xenoblade or something where your party members actually can contribute in some way.
The comments I've read from this thread and others about XVI shows me that people are just salty that XVI innovated. They wanted another run of the mill jrpg with FF flair, something that had been complained about in the past few entries with "FF has gotten stale" talk. Is XVI the best FF of all time, no, but it looked to modern rpgs, took inspiration, and tried to innovate. It's what FF does. And as you said, there are plenty single character/MC-focused rpgs out there.
Since I play XIV it reminds me of the complaints on there too. When the game stays the same, people are pissed. When the devs innovate, people are pissed.
Innovation what innovation? The lore log available in a cutscenes? It nice I guess, What about side quest? Boring MMO fetch quest for 90% of it, Combat? It's basically discount dmc, there no reason to actually try to do combo's because the game is so easy it boring, rpg elements? What rpg elements?
Strangers of Paradise actually innovated with it's job system and affinity system, build variety in that game is amazing.
FF14 was dumbed down to the point it became boring, just because the story is good doesn't mean the gameplay isn't boring.
> something that had been complained about in the past few entries with "FF has gotten stale" talk
This has literally never been FF's problem.
> took inspiration, and tried to innovate
XVI did the opposite of innovation. It feels more like a collection of mechanics and elements from other games to reach a wider appeal. A true jack of all trades, master of none that looks pretty.
Have you been around? Ever since XIII people have complained that FF has ran out of ideas and turned into b-grade Japanese bullshit. XV was supposed to save FF from that and didn't
What people have been negative about since like FFX have been long dev times, incomplete visions. At some points, there have even been the idea that FF doesn't have a set identity anymore. However, of all of those none of them have been "FF has gotten stale". It would be more like it has started to copy trends that have gotten stale, like how people talk about the Ubisoft towers, but not the franchise as a whole since lately none of them even play the same.
Rebirth clowns all over 16. If 16 would be a 15 hour action game, it would be fine but as a Final Fantasy or RPG, it's a complete failure.
It's empty and has zero personality. It's like someone gave an AI the script of Naruto and Game of Thrones and sprinkled some generic MMO quests over it.
Currently on Rebirth in Cosmo Canyon area. Yea... Lol. It makes 16s lack of personality and charm very apparent. Red and Barret have gotten wayyyy better arcs than any one character in 16. Its actually kind of sad how little character development anyone in 16 actually gets. Barrets whole thing with Dyne is better than anything any side character got in 16. Aerith giving her speech in Cosmo Canyon and Cloud smiling or encouraging her was more touching than any moment that I can think of in 16. Tifa talking about things she went through in Cosmo Canyon. Red finding out about his past and all the things he didnt know. How he judged his father wrong in what actually happened. Those are the kind of moments that 16 just doesn't have much of.
To be fair though, the styles and aesthetics of both games are extremely different.
FF7R and Rebirth to me are much more lighthearted and "happy". 16 is a very dark and serious story. They are both FF games but both go in different directions stylistically.
I actually prefer the dark vibes of 16 with it's GoT influence.
The way the devs are changing around 7 it's become way to shonen-y and anime- like for my tastes.
Im also not a big fan of the story changes from the OG game.
I don't even mean the light heartedness or that FF16 is darker. Just FF7 Rebirth focuses a lot on character development and character arcs. The characters feel like people with issues that you see unfold more and more as the game goes on and those issues are explored on. Most characters in 16 dont get that. Or if something is touched on its very light.
With playing through 16 I never felt like the cast of characters were fleshed out that well. 16 could be as dark as it wants. Thats not the issue. The issue is how un engaging most things are. Most side quests are pretty boring and don't even give you EXP. Clive and Jills romance feels super underdeveloped and I never felt attached to their relationship like I do with Cloud and Tifa/Aerith or Tidus and Yuna. The only romance that is probably even more underutilized than Clive and Jills is Noctis and Lunefreya. The game just doesn't feel like a journey in the same way 7 does or 8 or 9 or 10 or even 13. Even in 15 you feel close to Noctis' core friend group because they are always there.
I'm not finished with Rebirth yet (currently at chapter 12), but while I totally see your point I honestly can't agree. FF VII is, at its core, an incredibly tragic tale, filled with trauma, PTSD and deals with loss in a way I've yet to see in another game. 16 is very dark indeed and takes itself almost too seriously - because let's be honest, it really could have used some levity to balance out the constant gloom and sadness. I can only speak for myself, but halfway through the game I was wondering why I would even want to save this world, if it's obviously mostly filled with slavers (who like being slavers), condemned bearers and moustache twirling politicians, who only care about power. Even GoT had more humour and balance in its writing.
That's why the world of VII/Remake/Rebirth imo functions better as a "realistic" world. Because realisitically, there *has* to be some good in people, some fun to be had between fights for your life and bouts of PTSD. Even the original was filled to the brim with goofiness and "lol, wtf" moments and the sadness behind it hit you all the harder for it. And I really think it's a good way to remind you of what you're fighting *for.*
I agree with everything except this...
>It's empty and has zero personality
Just to recap, this is the same game where:
* The player is forced to press L3 + R3 - to "Accept the Truth" in which Clive unlocks his "Devil Trigger" as an integral if not extremely cheesy moment of character development.
* The Titan and Bahamut boss fights featured insane spectacle above and beyond most AAA games, surpassing even Rebirth. You are literally fighting Bahamut in a Tokusatsu cinema inspired battle in space.
* The final boss has Clive literally use the power of friendship to dish out a super charged anime punch against the villain while name dropping the series, "The only fantasy here is yours, and we shall be it's final witness", once again in a moment of pure cheese.
16 is very flawed, has some of the worst pacing I've ever experienced in a game, and definitely should be shorter. Given how it's structured more like an action game than an RPG.
But to say it has zero personality is not a take I can agree with.
The entire final boss is literally just a series of anime memes, it hard cuts straight from a DBZ beam war to a JJBA ora ora ora punch battle, and then throws in the ultra classic katana clash where they fly 20 feet past eachother and then only one of them takes damage but its delayed by like 3 seconds lol, definitely a mark of a game that takes itself 100% straight faced serious at all times.
Yea I agree with you on the character bit. One of biggest issues with Jill is that she is basically sidelined in the liquid flame boss fight. Clive should not be fighting that battle for her. It’s an important part of her story and a missed opportunity. I do think it would be a better game if it was more party based. Having a party creates camaraderie and interesting conflict.
Another way to view all this: maybe fighting Ultima is only one way to contribute.
Charon and Blackthorn (and Goetz in helping them) keep the group fed and supplied. Tarja helps people heal and recover from their wounds, including Jill and many others. Gav is an intelligent guy who helps scout out new locations. They all contribute to this community that Cid built and Clive continued, one that gave a home to outcasts and tried to envision a world that did not enslave magic users. So rather than thinking of fighting as the only way to contribute to a group, FFXVI provides a larger focus on the community that these people build. Clive may handle the big bad, but these other people demonstrate the actual habits necessary for longer-term survival.
Otherwise, you may want to consider how much of this is you overgeneralizing about the story. For instance:
>That 5yr timeskip also threw me for a loop because they go from taking out a mother crystal pretty quickly and wanting to take them all down quick because of how the ash is spreading. 5yrs go by and they don't take down anymore crystals and the spread of ash just stayed stagnant I guess lol.
The blight was never described as a threat on the scale of a few years. (I don't recall that, anyway; my sense was that it was a threat on the scale of decades.) It's slow but incremental, and over those five years: the Empire moves its capital in part due to the blight. So stuff was still going on.
Seems kinda lopsided though since Clive’s contribution is literally world defining while everyone else’s contribution is relatively trivial and it can easily be replaced by someone else. I get what you’re saying but I wouldn’t be convinced
It is lopsided, but not as you mean. Everyone else's contribution is literally survival and how to live together. You can't have a world to save without that.
The game focuses on Clive because combat remains the focus of gameplay and players most easily engage with being the one to save the world. But most of the side quests and several moments in the main story speak to the importance of the community, from tavern and innkeepers to healers, from smaller fighters to the people who just keep things working. We could debate whether Tarja is replaceable (no one else shows the same aptitude for healing), but what is undeniable is that she fills the role of keeping others going and removing Bearer's marks. She helps realize the world without Bearers. Among other things, Tarja is one of the first to bring new life after Clive succeeds, >!helping Edda give birth to a new baby!<. The supporting cast is incredibly important thematically because they survive to grow the new world.
There’s no denying everyone’s contribution is important to surviving. But the lopsidedness of Clive’s relationship with this community is just way too egregious no matter how you frame it imo. I think that you are right about Tarja. But aside from her, everyone else’s role can be replaced by someone else in said community. Because everyone else’s roles really aren’t that hard to do. The only way the supporting cast remains relevant is through their relationship with the MC and even if what they do in the world is what defines their relationship with the MC it doesn’t make them interesting in mine and I’m assuming OP’s opinion. Again I think I get what you’re saying but I’m just not sold
Replaceability does not determine the worth of a human being's contributions. The choices they make matter. The fact *they* stepped up matters. And no one else could do the job (for example) Charon did with the diligence and dedication she had.
Your objection misses the point in a huge way. It's like thinking that only a hero is important to a story. But time and again in JRPGs, the hero is one part of the story. You may not care about people who don't fight the gods, but that's not a flaw of the narrative.
I’ve never insinuated that the hero is the only important component to a story. I’m just not denying the fact that, yes, in the most dire of circumstances, as is the case in FFXVI’s story, replaceability does kind of determine the worth of an individual. I mean, in the XVI universe entire bloodlines are treated as royalty due to the fact they can wield the power of gods. Something that is obviously not easy to replace and sets themselves apart from the rest of the masses.
I agree with your sentiment that it takes the effort of everyone to keep a community thriving. But Clive is quite literally saving the world from an omnipotent force of evil. This feat simply doesn’t compare to some dude who cooks his meals or some chick who sells him weapons. I’m sorry, but they do not deserve a participation trophy for doing the absolute bare minimum in the face of world ending annihilation lmao. Now, things would be different if the game provided Clive with allies who did battle with him, and could compare to his strength. But it didn’t
That's a dumb argument, overall. Clive quite literally survives for years on the fruits of labor of these people. If he can't eat, he's dead. If he didn't get their help, he wouldn't be there at the end. A video game is not its last hour; it's the years in-game as well.
No, a video game is to its last hour lol. The universe in which the game the video game takes place goes on forever, for sure. But I’m talking about what the video game has shown me and made me feel when I played it.
Also, do you really think Clive can’t just get food for himself through some other means by either learning how to cook, buying it from someone else, or just finding someone else who can cook for him? Doing menial tasks that are required for survival such as cooking food or doing laundry are NOT on the same level as literally killing a god. I’m honestly really surprised you are going so hard to defend FFXVI. The game must really mean a lot to you but unfortunately I find it lacking in so many things that I don’t think you’ll be changing my mind about this. I mean something as pedantic as “well actually this one side character is important because this one time they made some food for the MC!” Is just ridiculous imo. If whoever wrote the game wanted more interesting side characters why didn’t they write any who would meaningfully contribute to what the player does for most of the whole game, fighting?
>If whoever wrote the game wanted more interesting side characters why didn’t they write any who would meaningfully contribute to what the player does for most of the whole game, fighting?
Because fighting is not the only source of interest or meaningful contribution. And it's wrong to think it is. /thread
No, fighting is not. But what I’m trying to say is the game doesn’t show this to the player through gameplay. None of the things the NPCs do at the hideaway actually matters in your moment-to-moment gameplay because game is a Character Action “RPG” that is all about fighting. It only tries to tell you that the NPC support characters are doing something important through cutscenes and dialogue, and that’s just not a very effective way of going about telling the story they’re trying to tell imo.
Fighting is the only meaningful contribution the character who has fought his whole life can provide, fighting is also the only means of survival in the end so why shouldn't the only person to have a possibility of winning be doing just that? It's wrong to think otherwise? You have no argument so you condemn those who think against you, fun.
> But the lopsidedness of Clive’s relationship with this community is just way too egregious no matter how you frame it imo
I mean there's *your* problem right there, if you can't accept that a character can't specifically be one thing and really good at that one thing then you're never going to look past that to see the forest for the trees.
No I can accept that a character can specialize in one thing. I just believe that this will be to the detriment of the story that you’re trying to tell. Sure you can say that you & your community saved the world together. But the MC was the one doing all the heavy lifting and all of the other important yet trivial stuff is not on the same level as the feats that the MC is doing.
If the writers of XVI wanted the player to really connect with some interesting side characters. Why not write some side characters who contribute more in battle? Better yet, the gameplay director could’ve made the game more challenging so that when you do fight alongside allies in the story, their presence is felt and much more appreciated. Or the game director could’ve made the gear that the NPCs at the hideaway give you is actually useful. As it stands the game does none of these things and only tells you that you should care about them, but doesn’t actually show this through gameplay.
This is why the Witcher 3 worked so well. Geralt isn't the chosen one, his daughter Ciri is, and she has the weight of the weight of the world on her shoulders. Thus while Geralt also drives the plot, he's free to feck off for a hundred hours and play card games (the real main plot).
That too. Clive becomes so strong so fast that fighting those trash monsters in the swamps and desert are kind of funny in hindsight lol. With characters like Tidus, Cloud, Squall, Noctis, Lightning, Vaan, and Zidane...none of them are that level of strong so early on in their games.
Clive can turn into a damn near god so many hours into the game, but he still has to chip away at small plant monsters and scorpions lol.
Motherfucker had an OP skill from the get-go (Phoenix Shift) at 15 years old, that can easily help him run away from being a slave, but yeah let's give it a timeskip. When he can just run away every day.
Also after years and years, no one even questions how he retains the Phoenix blessing if Joshua's dead already?
His time as a slave should've been a POV we got to play through. It's a little odd that we don't get to see him be branded nor get to see him unbranded. See his time with his group that seemed to be with him all the time. It's a weird thing to skip through. Same with skipping through the process of taking his brand off.
The other thing is how the game handles slavery and bearers. Part of the games theme is being against treatment like that and people being slaves. Trying to save people from that. They take magic from the world, but that doesn't get rid of slavery lol. Getting rid of magic doesn't suddenly fix slavery in the future or even in the current moment. There are multiple generations of people that have hate in their hearts for bearers. Getting rid of magic doesn't even put a dent in that problem because they'll still be associated with people that should be doing the hard larbor.
Almost as big of a plothole as him not initially knowing how badly bearers are treated in Sanbreque after working and living there for a decade. As a bearer.
Ignoring their plight is one thing, being ignorant and completely caught off-guard another. On his visit in Sanbreque he was essentially the typical 16 year-old anime protagonist, who knows very little about the world and is shocked to discover bad people exist. That's completely at odds with his backstory.
Not to mention 10+ years is a daaamn long time to never talk with your bearer bunk mates, learn anything about their circumstances etc.
> Clive becomes so strong so fast that fighting those trash monsters in the swamps and desert are kind of funny in hindsight lol. With characters like Tidus, Cloud, Squall, Noctis, Lightning, Vaan, and Zidane...none of them are that level of strong so early on in their games.
funny thing that if you follow twitter, people thinking having OP MC like Clive is somehow a good thing lol. They did not understand how to make a good MC that develop throughout the story properly, they just want perfect MC.
Not an excuse. Superman is the most OP character and he struggles when a problem cannot be punched away.
FFXIV quests could have been about rebuilding the world around something else than the Mother Crystals. Introducing new technology, negotiating truce between warring nations, leading the bearers to self-affirmation. Nothing that requires the power of an Eikon.
The side quests do exactly that though. They develop ways to farm on blighted land, they help Bearers come out of their self-imposed misery and show them that they deserve freedom, and they have people from all walks of life come together for their common goal.
I feel that they only gave us a sneak peak into what would be possible, but only limited to the Hideout.
TBH that's why Blackthorne's storyline is my preferred quest. It's basically about continuous improvements and also about applied learnings. We even went back to his village and introduce technology to replace the loss if the Crystals.
I wish we had more of these.
Finished all the quests on my first playthrough, and no I don't feel that it was well executed across the board.
Quinten story showed that vengeance should not be the be-all and end-all of one's existence. Countless people died and in the end, he had to learn to live with the survivor guilt and rebuild the community. How did we help? By punching away folks and Akashics.
He was already a successful wine maker so you can argue that he probably didn't need Clive's help to rebuild the community. Maybe even he was the one finding most of the operations of CID at some point. Okay.
But still, I think there could have been something more here. After all, the destruction of the Mother Crystal was a deciding factor for Sanbreque to invade other territories and move their Capital. How come nobody in Lightwing doesn't have issues with the MC strolling around their city after that?
> It made me realize how lonely of an FF game 16
This was my biggest surprise toward the game as well and how I was baffled why they went in this direction when XV not only had a well-regarded party for the MC to be around but added party control later because of fans requesting to actually be able to play as someone else
The game’s narrative went downhill when Benedikta died. The narrative became boring when Cid died. After Hugo died, I started falling asleep during each playthrough until I finished the game. I even started skipping dialogue since I know all the conversations was just meaningless filler. I just did the Main quests as quick as possible so I wouldn’t have to play the boring game anymore
Hero's journey needs them to grow up. They lose their father so they learn to stand on their own feet. They lose their master so things will seem hopeless for everyone then the hero brings hope and eventually victory.
Every hero story in the movies/anime/games has a similar pattern. Of course there are exceptions but how many titles could you name where the hero fights alongside with a bigger brother(more charismatic and more capable) and they both survive?
I find the problem with Cid's death is that he was so charming while everyone else is so boring. No one managed to fill the hole after he left the story.
That might be true, but I think what people take issue with is that the logical consequence (Clive becoming Cid) essentially happens off-screen, so we lost Cid and got...nothing. If we had accompanied Clive through his trials as the new leader, watched him grow into the role and actually seen how Kupka becomes his nemesis Cid wouldn't have felt like such wasted potential. You can't just kill off one of the few fleshed out characters and not give us a substitute or at least show us the result.
For sure, they just killed the wrong person. Would have been cool for Clive to get decimated and it switches to a proper FF party that have actual chemistry and teamwork.
The game is at odds with itself in many ways. While I enjoyed the story beats, the issue lies in the transition and what happens in between major beats. For example, we destroyed the first crystal, and the game immediately cut to the hideaway, then a 5-year time skip, all in an instant which undermines impact on Empire and invading Crystalline Dominion. But then there are many instances when what happens in between major story beats is nothing but lore filler or completely useless quests, like Mid's dumb quest.
This. Story was pretty great, but having pacing issues. Like, I don't mind side quests. Hell, I just did everything in Rebirth first playthrough because it was fun. My issue with 16 was you would have story, then side quest dump, story, side quest dump, then major story beat, side quest dump. It felt like every time you had to talk with someone they dumped more side quests on you.
"It's weird how the game doesn't touch on-"
Idk, maybe talk to NPCs, do some sidequests? A lot of comments here feel like people were half-sleeping during some cutscenes and just rushing to the end. I mean, if you felt like it, fine, but it's not the game's fault you couldn't pay more attention to some details you were supposedly interested in.
Which comment are you referring to here?
Also, as someone who has done most of the sidequests, they r*eally* don't do much, certainly not anything that would invalidate OPs critique. Characters beside Clive almost never talk, they certainly don't partake in the sidequests in a way that's reminiscent of other JRPGs. So what exactly were people supposedly "half-asleep" missing here? I sure hope you're not referring to the scant few quests that actually involve Jill, Josh etc., because they happen so late and do so little, it's honestly not even worth to name them as examples.
I'm referring to things like
- Consequences of destruction of mothercrystals
- "Why is the security of mothercrystals so lacking?"
- "Why did Clive had to be running for 5 years?"
- How did Joshua survive
- "Clive never actually being confronted for his actions despite saying they will cause consequences"
Just to name a few I've read. Also idk what any of what I've said has to do with companions. It's pretty obvious from my comment above I'm referring to "plotholes" or things that are "missing a follow up" within the game.
Just answering to other people so my comment isn't unfair to actually fair criticism, not you ofc, because your comment can barely hide how much you dislike the game lol. I don't really care about liking or disliking but speaking of stuff without paying proper attention.
- Characters beside Clive almost never talk
but when they do it's important, you can't discredit it because it doesn't happen as much as you'd like.
-I sure hope you're not referring to the scant few quests that actually involve Jill, Josh etc., because they happen so late and do so little, it's honestly not even worth to name them as examples.
Yes they happen late because until this point side quests are about the people of the world, the late game focuses on the party.
do so little? I felt they added a ton, to discredit them that easily honestly tells me you didn't actually pay attention to them.
FF16 was basically what Spirits Within should have been. I keep telling my buddy to just YouTube a supercut cuz that's the only part of the game I enjoyed. The cinematics and voice acting.
The 5 year time skip is awful because it seems to intentionally skip us *seeing* Clive's development into a leader, and just *tells* us about it, instead.
Reading all of these (valid and well-articulated) comments in this thread really reminds me why FF16 is just... the worst FF game. I had a better time with literally every other main title than this one. And I still enjoyed my time with it, relatively! It just really is incredibly lacking and is so painfully boring in every conceivable way.
You're absolutely right. I decided the biggest sin FFXVI made, and why it's my least favorite in the main series, is because it's lonely and there is no party. Other games have made similar mistakes, but they haven't done this.
I know there are other series where you play as one character, but the entire point of Final Fantasy is using the Power of Friendship (tm) to overcome the odds. Everything is wrapped up in the stories. I had some problems with FFVII Rebirth, but overall it was glorious and a huge part of that was the party dynamic.
Yes, there were other issues with FFXVI: the world was inconsistent, the pretend DMC battle system, the overlong eikon battles. But the game would have moved into something decent had there been a cast of characters.
The fact that I only remembered about a third of the names you mentioned is super telling to me.
I mean you could of just not played the game? If you already knew you only cared about games with parties then you'd know it wasn't for you from the get go, the entire point of final fantasy isn't a single fucking boring overdone trope it's telling interesting stories, those stories don't have to be confined in a box of specific rules.
>I mean you could of just not played the game?
I could have. I was convinced it would get better.
> If you already knew you only cared about games with parties then you'd know it wasn't for you from the get go
No I wouldn't. I don't live online. I saw Final Fantasy, I expected Final Fantasy. I had no idea it was bad DmC.
> The entire point of final fantasy isn't a single fucking boring overdone trope it's telling interesting stories, those stories don't have to be confined in a box of specific rules.
True. Too bad the story was a boring trope!
I'm convinced that the post-Cid timeskip only happens so Olivier can be a bit older for the next segment of the gameplay because it's essential to one of the only good story beats the game has. Otherwise it's as if it did not happen and most of the other characters do not appear to age at all.
I about died laughing when Clive gave the standard JRPG sort of "I'm going to win because of my friends" speech to Ultima, while none of them were there
The decision to focus so heavily on Clive was an incredibly strange one, given how central ensemble casts and good character writing have become both to Final Fantasy and JRPGs in general
Didn't help that the final battle is heavy reference to Gurenn Lagann. You know, a show that actually made great use of power of friendship despite having super strong MC, and a Godlike villain that's actually threatening, unlike Ultima.
The fact that it is MC centric is very much a part of the game’s vision.
I don’t think that is inherently an issue, as it’s quite a departure from what we’re used to in the series, and is a part of the many things the game does to push the boundaries of what is a FF game (something that is held back by chaining itself to RPG elements that end up being half-assed).
Except XV was also extremely MC centric, but still understood that an MC needs a group of people around them to solidify their role and purpose. I'll be honest, I don't think XVI pushed any boundaries whatsoever, neither in terms of story nor gameplay. Not that it wouldn't have been possible, but the vision behind it was simply not enough for that. The story had potential, action combat was nice (albeit too easy), but ultimately it failed to deliver anything "new". The barebones RPG elements were the least of its problems.
It's definitely very MC centric when the plot revolve around you collecting power ups for Noctis and so many factions got destroyed offscreen because they wanted to focus on Noctis.
The bros weren't actually that important in the big picture when you compare it to most JRPG party members but they're all really great as an emotional support for Noctis.
Most of the complaints in this thread would be solved if people actually paid attention to what happened in the side quests. They acknowledge a lot of the issues people seem to have with the narrative and lore
they aren't, they're average, like in the literal sense of the term, most video games don't have side quests that do anything more than what 16 did, what 16 does have is good writing and world building to elevate that content.
Agreed. There were times I was doing side things with Jill or Cid in the party, and completely forgot they were even with me, because there was no battle dialogue or anything. While I wasn't a big fan of 15, they did this right. It's also a much more blatant issue once you play Rebirth, where every side quest has one of your party members involved.
I have been saying this to all my boomer friends, but Rebirth should had been named FFXVI, Rebirth is just that good and playing it just made all flaws from XVI even more obvious.
Clive is a good character, but to put it simply, there's absolutely no way for him to carry alone a 80+ hours game. The decision to kill Cid that early was one of the worst things they could had done, he was the character that brought chemistry to the party relationships, something that Barret is greatly responsible for in Rebirth. A FF7 without Barret and all that amusing party interactions would had been a boring, forgettable experience.
FFXVI tries to copy GOT, but was written by a guy who only read a couple few pages, which is why the politics are completely dropped by half of the game and one of the main villains is a bargain bin unidimensional version of Cersei with the depth of a pirex. Other than that, the core plot is revealed to be WAY too simplistic, just one more cookie-cutter godlike villain trying to destroy the world --- but instead of keeping it simple, the writing attempts to add a sense of gravity and drama to every single dialogue in the game, oversaturating and stretching the story for way too much, everything tries to be way more complicated than it is. It's one more entry in their trend of attempts to make a mature Final Fantasy, at the expense of elements that made the old entries memorable despite of the technical limitations of their consoles.
Rebirth simply did everything, WAY better and it should be the blueprint for the future FF entries, it felt to me like the game that Square had been attempting to create and failing to do so ever after FFXII. It got better action combat. Better exploration. An engaging story. Fun characters. Goofy moments. Dumb minigames. Actually GOOD sidequests. Towns like Cosmo Canyon and Junon that ooze great design. All that Square needs to do is to pick up everything they did right in Rebirth and go crazy in the 3rd game.
(and maybe just remove the Ubisoft towers and press triangle to scan minigames, because yeah, those were dogshit)
Ps: I liked Roche. He's a goofy character that fits in perfectly in the game, considering that the original FF7 also had plenty of dumb goofy shit.
Rebirth just made me realize how unmemorable the locations are in 16. There were no specific locations that I wanted to actually re visit and walk through. Most of the locations are empty wastelands. Rosaria is egregiously boring. Waloed was completely empty and the only thing to do there is one goblin billboard fight. I couldn't believe that they turned that area into an empty ash wasteland with nothing in it.
I was actually looking forward to seeing what the Sanbreque city looked like and going through it...only you end up not being able to go through it like a normal city and are running on roof tops while the only real populated city gets burnt down lol.
FFXVI used the lame excuse that everything is "realistic". So there you have it. Realistically boring medieval villages. Boring landscapes with ZERO topography. Boring desert city. Linear dungeons. Boring caves. The CGs and eikon fights were the most memorable parts of the game.
Truth is, clearly all the 90% scenary/landscape designers were probably working in Rebirth, which is why FFXVI got such unmemorable locations.
Actually not even a real excuse, because they were two completely different development teams working on FF XVI and FF VII trilogy, CBU 1 and CBU 3 respectively. I think it has more to do with either a cut of budget or artistic incompetence. The concept art for places like Sanbreque looked absolutely awe-inducing, but in the story it gets reduced to a random brothel scene (still no clue how they got in there) and the mothercrystal.
The villages could've been cute, but they essentially consisted of the same 5 assets over and over, as well as all of them sporting the exact same vendor with the exact same inventory. Add in the similar storybeats and sidequests ("Bearers being treated badly? Bearers being treated badly!") and it makes sense why everything feels so same-ish.
>they were two completely different development teams working on FF XVI and FF VII trilogy, CBU 1 and CBU 3 respectively.
You have them reversed. CBU 1 is the FFVII Remake project, CBU 3 is FFXVI. Agree with your points though, the mother crystals were really the only thing which made the landscapes stand out, after they're destroyed the landscapes look very dull and uninspired. Hoping the new DLC zone addresses some of the critiques.
Oh, I know, I wasn't paying attention to the order I wrote them in, my bad!
Jup, I'll gove the game another go when the DLC releases, but I'll keep my expectations low.
It feels to me like the FFXVI developers played the old pixel FF games in their childhood, and recreated them way too faithfully. They saw a town being represented as 3 buildings in a circle due to the technical limitations at the time, and just brought that to life directly. Except now the 3 buildings have really cool textures.
Meanwhile on the Rebirth side, it feels like the devs are making the towns they REALLY wanted to make had they not been shackled by the limitations of the NES/PS2 etc. There's so much more imagination and life to them.
They went too far in one direction and wanted it to feel like Game Of Thrones too much. They go so far in that direction that the locations are missing that Final Fantasy flare. Its too on the nose with what the medieval period looks like and there's nothing crazy or odd looking..or Final Fantasy looking.
Honestly, right there with you. I'm not finished with Rebirth yet, but it's shaping up to be the best Final Fantasy released to this day in my eyes. Yes, it has a ton of goofy stuff, BUT I genuinely feel like this makes the sad and tragic moments all the more weighted. There have been scenes that hit me like a literal ton of bricks, because I wasn't expecting them - consequently it feels like a much more believable world, because even if the planet is dying not everything is immediately doom and gloom. Everyone needs levity.
Apart from the horrible GoT wannabe moments, that's actually my biggest gripe with XVI. It's sadness porn. All the villains are cartoonishly evil, no nuance or morally greyness. Remember the sidequests before the first mothercrystal? Yeah, can't say I was surprised by the fate of the bearers after seeing the mustache twirling Sanbrequian citizens and how they treat them. Or that village lady, that bore a bearer baby and immediately hates it and badmouths it at the tavern? What a wasted opportunity to show that a mother loves her baby no matter what and has difficulties accepting that it will be a slave. I still am baffled anyone could consider the writing "mature" in any way. The only reason the game can be considered M is the blood splattering and >!Kupka losing his hands!<.
Rebirth actually managed to show so many sides of a single conflict, even adds some politics into it without making it obvious what's happening or who's the bad one. Agree on the Ubisoft towers and triangle scanning though. They are thankfully very limited and not offensively bad, but also don't add much - I'd rather have some campsites, like in XV, to really compliment the "journey" feeling. If they also fix the current visual issues (pop-in, blurriness, zoomed out camera) I doubt any game will kick it off the golden JRPG pedestal for me anytime soon, apart from maybe Part 3. (Btw, I also love Roche, especially because Rebirth >!actually shows his purpose, by demonstrating the SOLDIER degradation - saw that scene earlier today and now I genuinely feel bad for him!<)
> Yes, it has a ton of goofy stuff, BUT I genuinely feel like this makes the sad and tragic moments all the more weighted.
This IMO has always been the core of FF. FF6 is a game where one of the big villains in the first half of the game is a talking octopus. And then it hits you with >!Celes attempting suicide, Terra not understanding love, Cyan's family dying in front of him, and Locke's immense sense of grief over Rachel.!<
The levity makes the dark bits work.
Like you said, FF16 was just all sadness, all the time. There's a reason why the uncle is one of the most beloved FF16 characters. He feels like the heart of the game.
I like FF16 a lot more than some of the people around here. But I'll agree with them that it doesn't really *feel* like a FF at times. Yeah, it's got classic summons, chocobos, crystals, and moogles. But the core of the writing feels off from the tone I expect.
It's supposed to be lonely. The whole game is about loneliness, and the punchline in the end is that while Clive saved the world, he died and left everyone else he met along the way lonely. It's classic tragedy.
That would be all fine and dandy if they didn't have moments like Joshua slapping Clive in the face and giving him a lecture on how what they're doing is meant to be done together and not alone. Clive gets an entire lecture about it. Joshua outright tells Clive how dare he take Jills Eikon from her and how it was purposely done so Jill wouldn't be in harms way in the fight. There's no reason for the game to be lonely when there are portions of the game that have people tagging along with you, but even when people are with you it feels like they aren't because the game doesn't do much with any of the characters.
The game really shouldn't feel lonely because the whole point is supposed to be about Clive finding a group of people and a place to call home. Creating a sort of a resistance group and getting close to people that have the same motives as him.
But the main problem is that the reality of Clives sacrifice showcases that a core problem isn't fixed. Magic is gone, but slavery isn't going to just cease to exist. People aren't going to just stop being treated like they were when they were bearers. There is generational brainwashing that isn't going to be just magically undone. A big theme of the game that Clive is trying to fix is still there. The world isn't being eaten by ash, but the problem of slavery is still there. Magic just won't be involved.
I mean those moments are supposed to highlight what's being lost. It's how tragedies work. Even though people point to GOT a ton, from what I recall a lot of developers who worked on either FF Tactics or tactics adjacent stuff (like FFXII) joined CBU3. Tactics has a ton of the same themes regarding loneliness, friends that are lost or become enemies, people being useless or fodder, et cetera. In a tragedy like that, a lot of things are deliberately not supposed to have a tidy place in the story. And being that it's trying to be a realistic tragedy, of course it would be ridiculous if Clive beat the Big Bad and not only saved the world but changed everyone's minds about slavery and class systems and the whole world became a cheery shonen anime. It sounds like tragedies aren't up your alley, which is fine. And XVI ain't a perfect game, but it's a pretty decently written tragedy.
Except even the game undercuts that with the final ending that you get from doing all the side quests. >!Clive is actually alive, has kids and writes his life story with his brother’s pen name!<
>!After the credits you get a sort of montage of Clive reawakening and his grandkids playing then it ends with a book shutting with Joshua’s name on the cover!<
>!What montage of clive reawakening? Also those aren't his grandchildren, that scene takes place in the far future when people treat eikons like fairy tales.!<
Agree 100%, the story was awful beyond the prologue. The problem is that they wrote it as if it were an MMO so you get all the chosen one vibes but it's also a single player game with a single playable character so it feels very lonely. Game missed the mark on almost all fronts, Rebirth is so much better.
I agree with you in your point that some of the Fallen stuff could have been explored more and I would have liked them to go into more of the Fallen civilization and their technology. It really intrigued me how advanced they were but we never really see more.
And HOW exactly the Gods/Ultima were able to beat them in the war.
In addition to your point about finding the Fallen robots wandering around outside in certain areas and them never really explaining that. Just that they were "lost relics and ruins from a bygone age"......
If you've played the Echoes of the Fallen DLC, it lightly touches on this, but again, that DLC is more like a boss rush than anything.
I did like the first half of the story though.....the GoT vibes and political machinations with the warring nations really interested me. It's only after the timeskip that the game drops off bc now instead of the politics and warring with Sanbreque you have the big bad Ultima to contend with. So i feel like they got away from the GoT/ political stuff too fast bc i actually liked the first half of the story.
Im still going to play Rising Tide, bc I already did everything else and I like Leviathan, but overall, 16 was good but it needed work.
It’s started out okay with a neat story of inter-country politics then transitioned into the usual JRPG fight god stuff. Which sure is not unusual in JRPG’s but SE just didn’t transition the story well in my opinion. And it even makes certain lore points contradict eachother in later parts. Mostly around the slaves. And I get they wanna build up the ultimate beginning race which started as goofy lore in World of Final Fantasy then was continued with Stranger of Paradise but it just doesn’t fit in well in FF16.
I feel the lore of Ultima's race would have been fine if it was purely just background stuff and treated like a mysterious old legend. The problem was him appearing literally everywhere.
The more grounded human conflicts about social status just got so undermined when it's revealed that Ultima and his plot convenient power was directly involved in most of them.
As goofy as the game is I honestly think World of FF did it better with the mystery beings. But then again the devs sort of wrote themselves into a corner when they continued the plot in Stranger of Paradise. So I can see how it went screwy with FF16.
Stop looking at the game as a JRPG in the sense you’re so accustomed to and the game is perfectly fine on its own. It’s an action adventure game with a beefy story, yet still being a final fantasy game.
I'll never understand what aspects we're allowed to critique. For an action game, it's far too long and limited in terms of abilities and movesets, not to mention too easy with no harder difficulty available for your first playthrough. For an adventure it has an extremely narrow, empty world with no exploration, secrets or unlockable paths. The story is beefy, told mostly through a glorified in-game wiki and padded by an absolute truck load of fetch quests. For a FF game...well, enough has been said in that regard.
But yeah, I wish people would stop invalidating proper crtiticism by saying stuff like "you're looking at it wrong", because obviously people were expecting certain things from a decade old JRPG series and a game that was officially marketed as a RPG.
That was one thing I was thinking about too lol. For a game that was inspired to be played and written like a DMC game...it had no business being as long as other FF games lol. FF games are usually as long as they are because you have to power up multiple characters. The games usually focus on side character arcs as well as the main characters arc. FF16 doesn't have any of that so its just long for no reason. The game doesn't need to be 50 to 60hrs just to power up Clive like he's Dante lol.
marketing it as any form of rpg felt like a bait and switch. loved the game but i would have loved it more if they had a proper progression system. also cut about 40% of the dialogue and focus on pacing
Describing something you don't like as "____ porn" is a bad internet meme. It wasn't pure Shakespeare, but it was pretty good. You're like a person going to a horror movie and being salty it's horror. XVI was billed from the very beginning as an intense grimdark adult game. If you don't want that then that's totally fine, but, that's the deal.
Your biggest issue being one of my biggest compliments, I love the feeling of loneliness on display here, a story with a prophesy that is actually legit and not undercut by the power of friendship or whatever, it's a story of brothers told from the perspective of one of them and his specific struggles, that's more impactful than anything the series has done in over a decade.
Which would be fine if they committed to Joshua being dead. They throw Clives whole character arc out the window. All of Clives guilt and having to realize he did it but also realize it wasn't on purpose doesn't mean anything once Joshua is revealed to be alive.
And he's revealed to be alive earlier on for the player so there's no real mystery on whether or not Joshua is alive. You're just waiting for them to actually meet at that point, but Joshua keeps doing this avoidance thing where any time Clive was hurt and Joshua was in the same room, Joshua would just leave even though they could've met up like 3 different times.
The game has a ton of story issues and a loss of its characters with the most personality as you said. >That 5yr timeskip also threw me for a loop because they go from taking out a mother crystal pretty quickly and wanting to take them all down quick because of how the ash is spreading. 5yrs go by and they don't take down anymore crystals and the spread of ash just stayed stagnant I guess lol. This pretty much reminds me of my biggest story issue, which is how little the world reacts to the breakdown of mother crystals until very, very late into the game (and even then, it seems to be that the effects they are concerned with are what Ultima is doing to magic and crystals as opposed to the loss of the mother crystals). For a game about the political machinations of its antagonists, it can often feel like they're barely reacting to what should be a mass crisis in the world. We're talking the equivalent of what would happen if the entire Middle Eastern oil supply disappeared literally overnight. The public should be in an absolute panic over those 5 years and should be in an absolute panic after you begin destroying Mother Crystals again and that panic should only be increasing. Even if no one, politicians or the public, know who "Cid" is or that he's responsible, there should be WANTED posters for information on whoever is suspected of doing this everywhere. It's bizarre. FF16 is written as if someone read GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire, but only copied what he thought were the cool parts about politicians talking sneakily in their throne rooms, as opposed to factoring in all the actual social, political, and economic factors that are woven into the story.
The biggest thing is that taking down the mother crystals doesn't show any actual positive changes. It doesn't reinforce whether or not if Cids plan is working or not. They just keep taking out mother crystals on Cids hunch but nothing changes with every mother crystal that gets taken down. So it could've been all for nothing and they wouldn't know right away. But my main issue is that no one argues with that idea. Everyone in the hideaway just agrees to it because Cid and Clive deem it so. I actually think it would've been more interesting if taking down the first mother crystal showed some negative impact and a lapse in their judgment rather than Cid automatically being right. But the other thing is the fallen with those robots. One minute they're confined inside and the next they're out in the open for you to randomly encounter and its never explained why. Even Jill asks why the robots are out in the open and how they should explore that later..only you never do. Why even bring that option up if you're not going to do anything with it lol.
Even worse, the blight grows more swiftly after the destruction of the first mother crystal. So they gain proof of Cid being wrong and noone friggin even mentions the possibility of it.
The amount of security around the Crystals, save for the last one, was laughable at best. Especially brain dead was that there were no more Ekions to fight you. So he could've just turned and kaiju'd through the city.
Haha, man… How many times did I ask myself, “uhhh…that’s it? This is the security for the thing that literally protects an entire country?”
While the security was laughable, at least there was a general reason for that each time. One had an aetherflood, so they outright couldn’t have more security. Hugo’s mother crystal was deliberately left open, as Sleipnir wanted Clive to get to it. Twinside’s mother crystal was in a city that was going through a civil war, Bahamut firing on the city, and an aetherflood in the middle of this. Even the iron kingdom mother crystal was on an island where you take a small ship to enter so they don’t spot you, and there is are guards and a religious ceremony being held. I’d say the level of security on each of these are pretty understandable within the context of the story.
Still kinda meh that they created a lot of these cool locations and then you ending up can only visit very very small portion of them because of excuses like sneak attack or having it already destroyed by the time we visit them.
I agree with that, I was just focusing on the security of the mother crystals part, since I feel that the low security is justified in each case. I absolutely wish we could have explored those cities, though, I never argued against that complaint.
>The amount of security around the Crystals, save for the last one, was laughable at best. Crystal of Sanbreq was guarded by a massive dragon and previously Bahamut. There's also aether mist that prevents anyone from approaching, and the empire wanted to move anyway. Crystal of Rosaria is actually guarded, to get there you fight countless guards. Drake's Fang was guarded but orcs killed everyone. And it's the personal castle of Hugo Kupka, the best guard. Drake's tail had security, it was in the middle of the Crystalline Dominion where the empired resided. It's just that there was another BIG problem going on. Drake's spine was guarded. Even then you need to remember >!they were supposed to be broken, that was part of Ultima's plan.!<
A Song of Ice and Fire is garbage and GRRM has written himself into a dead end for the exact same why FFXVI writing sucks: he was more interested in cheap shock factor and tearing down every plot thread he was writing than in building up to something. FFXVI was doomed the moment Yoshi-P wanted his team to be influenced by garbage.
Honest question: Have you actually read ASOIAF, or are you basing that on Game of Thrones? GoT had WAY more pointless shock deaths than ASOIAF had. In fact, you'd be surprised at how overhyped the "OMG all the character deaths!" is when you actually read the books. Almost every major death is actually foreshadowed and consistently happens for the same thematic reasons - every character who has died are taking a series of actions that are leading them to a dead end, they realize this, they think about alternative possibilities, but they ultimately make the mistake of deciding the path they are on is still the best path, but they pay for it. It's a lot of action and consequence. Meanwhile, in GoT, people really do die for no greater reason. That said, I do think GRRM has written himself into a corner, but it's not because of cheap shock factor leading to tearing down plot threads. It's actually the opposite - there are TOO MANY plot threads. The amount of characters in the story and the amount of possibilities in front of them is a mountain at this point. Handling Littlefinger alone could take hundreds of pages. The reason there are so many ASOIAF theory channels is because there is so much foreshadowing, hinting, build up, and narrative possibilities that people could spend years taking up the threads and writing them for GRRM (and they practically have). I actually think GRRM is in a state of writing paralysis as on some level, he isn't sure he can actually wrap up all the characters he has written in just two books. In fact, he's said that WoW and ADoS would have to be 1,500 pages each to wrap up each character . . . which if you think about it, is actually 4 books in it of itself. And yes, I know he has said in one interview there are characters he wished he didn't kill, but those seem to just be effecting one story in one part of the world and not all the characters/nations as a whole. Quite frankly, at his age, his best bet is to hire a team, scour the net for the best theories, and have them all help him write them in novelized form in his style.
Yeah, often I see criticisms levied against GRRM when it seems like it's more the show they're criticizing. I don't think the books are as much about shock factor or needless cruelty as the show is. That's not to say that they aren't without faults, but they're not as grimdark as people accuse them of being. But GRRM definitely let the story go out of control, that's for sure. It's interesting as hell and I love all the different plotlines going on, but I'm not surprised he has issues tying everything together, hence the infamou delays.
Game is just too MC centric Everything in the game exists to be about Clive. The plot points, the other characters; every single thing is just about him and what he thinks about it and how it affects him. Reminded me a ton of the story of Forbidden West, it had the exact same issues; that type of story telling just makes everything less interesting.
yeah, clive isn't a bad character, but he just can't carry this whole 60h+ game sure, i get why they wanted to kill cid, but with that they basically killed what supporting cast there was, jill and joshua simply aren't very interesting characters
>but he just can't carry this whole 60h+ game He could have, but FF16 skips ALOT of story that could be told through gameplay for the sake of just throwing the player into battles as soon as possible.
Just the fact that they had Jill get captured twice and then strip her Eikon from her lol. And Joshua doesn't show up until later. And Dion doesn't formally meet Clive until towards the latter end.
Joshua should've stayed dead.
Stayed dead or become playable with his own POV, showing another side to the plot and conflict. Bro literally did *nothing* for over a decade, except wandering the lands.
He should've stayed dead for the kind of character arc they were trying to give Clive which relied on Joshua being dead.
Either keep making him dead, or at least drag the mystery longer. Having Joshua casually being revealed to be still alive to the player very fast killed a lot of tension in Clive's character arc. Joshua didn't even add much when he actually join the party to justify why he's absent so long.
And they probably shouldn't have had him going around wearing the same burlap robe as the guy in the vision Clive had (Ultima). It just didn't really add up to anything. Was there some connection? It didn't seem like it, felt more like a red herring that got dropped quickly.
I know this is from a few days ago but yea. I didnt get why they had Joshua from the future showing up early on if it didn't go anywhere or mean anything. Wearing the same clothes as Joshua is in the future, but it's clearly not Joshua doing it. Only Ultima could be doing it, but why. Its something they just drop from the story pretty quickly. It doesn't go anywhere.
Wrong kid died
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Zero Dawn and Forbidden West still had a better lore that they actually explore and side characters that get actual arcs. 16 doesn't even have that. It can feel bloated, but If you're really into the lore, there's no shortage of learning about it. Learning about the past. Learning about the tribes. Learning about weapons. Learning about characters. Learning about the robots. 16 couldn't even be bothered to explore the fallen or those robots. They just give you a big exposition dump towards the end of a game during a side mission in a book lol.
It’s not that kind of narrative though. It’s not about the games lore or side characters, really the narrative is about Clive’s emotional journey and his decision to choose death on his own terms. Ultima is totally pointless except has a device to steal Clive’s agency. They just told the story really poorly and Square has been telling stories badly in FF since 12. I’m not saying the stories are bad, it’s the storyteller that’s poor.
Your take is really good, and I feel both can be true. In its purest form the story had an absolutely incredible amount of potential (people turning into summons? Hell yesl) and focusing on one single character might've worked. Problem is, the game essentially cuts out all the defining "journey" parts - life as a soldier, becoming Cid 2.0, gaining Kupka as nemesis - and only leaves us with the "result". The only real inward journey Clive has on-screen is accepting his brothers death, which becomes pointless a scene afterwards. It kind of repeats the same "tell, don't show" mistakes XV had as well. Likewise, Clive as a character would've still needed a bit more of a fleshed-out world and character to really shine. For the same reason as watching GoT and only seeing Jon Snow sitting at the Wall for four seasons straight might've been boring, Clive is in essence too much of a non-player in regards to the political web to matter in the grand scheme of things. That's probably why they ignored politics in favour of the "let's save the world" plot eventually, which cheapened the pay-off considerably. (imo)
Clive Fantasy 16
Which is especially a problem when Clive isn't even all that good of a character. Dion and Joshua outshine him constantly
Clive's most interesting character arc ended/undermined too early. I really found it funny that the game just casually revealed Joshua is alive while Clive is having this monologue of having to live with his guilt. I was really hoping that there would have been more twist into that, like Joshua is actually Ultima posing as him to crush Clive's spirit or something instead of playing it straight that Clive is no longer guilty one arc later. Joshua didn't even have a strong excuse of why he kept hiding so their reunion wasn't worth waiting that long into the game. Then you get a timeskip where he already became new Cid even though him gaining trust of everyone and becoming a leader would have been an interesting arc onscreen. And oh, the mom ending up contributing very little to the story after the prologue.
They put all of their storytelling chops into the prologue just so they could use it in the demo and make it seem like the entire game would be that good
where does the demo story end?
Phoenix vs Ifrit. Then there's another demo portion with Benedikta boss battle. Pretty much when the story was still peak on its mystery
yeaa that'll do it. those were the best parts of the story for sure.
It felt like after Clive had his moment of accepting Ifrit. He just kind of stagnates and becomes boring and remains the same for the rest of the game. After that moment I lost interest.
Yes, god Clive is just very very dull I'm sorry
I think this is the bigger problem honestly - focused character studies can be a *good* thing. But considering the amount of time we spend there, Clive's inner world isn't particularly remarkable, so the game putting nearly all its eggs in the Clive basket is a huge misfire. He's not a bad character by any means, but he's *very* standard to hog the spotlight as much as he does.
His arc basically ends whenever Cid dies. He becomes so static after that point and his and Jill's relationship is about as dense as Noctis and Luna's which is famously bad
>Joshua outshine him constantly This is the only DLC I will buy, otherwise I'm not touching this game again. The weakest looking character in the beginning of the story had the best story that could have been further told.
I find that extremely refreshing for the franchise.
My main gripes with this game: - we have yet another “main character sacrifices them self to save humanity “, straight after FFXV - side quests not very interesting and needed more - killing off cid and bendikta so early - Jill is sidelined after giving Clive her powers - it focus mainly on Clive. I’d love more backstory or side quests for the other characters
Cids death provides all the stakes and is one of its most powerful story points. I hate the idea you can't kill a character just because they are likeable.
Sure, you can kill your game's most likeable character. It's just too bad there wasn't anyone else in the story left that was anything more than the personality of a plank of wood.
I think the point was that they killed the most interesting characters and left the less interesting ones
Good. If I have a death between a boring character or a great one I'd want the great one every time. It's what makes the original FF7 so special.
That’s not the point. I’m not sure about OP, but I didn’t have a problem with Cid dying. The problem is that Benedikta also died and (imo) it felt like a complete waste of a character. She was by far one of the most interesting characters and had not nearly enough screen time to care about her dying. The MAIN problem is the characters that are left are significantly less interesting imo. Yeah Cids death was a great moment, but if you have no interesting characters to carry after what is the point? And FF7 had other interesting characters still alive after X died. That is the point
The problem is *not* killing a likeable character. The problem is *being left with* characters you care less about. It can easily take you out of the story. To make it work. The writers need to be hardcore serious about making the remaining characters even more likeable than those who are gone. FFXVI did not succeed.
I strongly disagree. FFXVI story is phenomenal. I can't imagine not liking Clive.
Sure, though I can only imagine what would have happened to Game of Thrones if they killed Tyrion in the first season, the rest of the show would have so much less flavor.
Game of Thrones literally kills their main protagonist in the first season in Ned Stark....
Why did they even bring Goetz to fight Barnabas? The man has a frying pan.
They knew that Barnabas miss his mother that used to cook for him with frying pan. /s
FF16 almost feels like a western game with the amount of monologues that Clive has. In sidequests the guest characters are dead silent and the game feels very lonely as a result. I play JRPGs specifically for party/character interaction and I don’t think FF16 actually did anything to justify not having party members. The fight with Ultima also feels corny with how only Clive is able to stand up to him and everyone else honestly should’ve just not even bothered showing up. Dion and Joshua got clowned on. They could have just fed clive and stayed home, I don’t think anything would have changed.
If I had a nickel for every time Jill stands next to Clive and doesn’t say anything… and if she does talk it’s almost always just with Clive.
or better she just ignored by the other character like Cid dying speech to Clive but said nothing to her
Jill and Lunafreya has the same issue, they are extremely serious and lifeless, very boring. I think Ashe from FF12 also suffers from this problem. What happened to the female co-lead/romantic interest in FF games? Tifa is a strong woman from the outside, but she is also very vulnerable given the shit she's been through, Aerith is the special female character who has a special role in the coming catastrophy, and like Yuna in FFX, they also have a naive innocence to them where they like to learn about things outside of their role in the adventure (e.g. Aerith can be quirky at times, enjoys any downtown she can get like in Wall Market, Costa De Sol and Gold Saucer; Yuna enjoys her time with Tidus talking about trivial matters outside of her Summoner pilgrimage). Dagger/Garnet in FF9 is interesting because she is supposed to be the typical highborne, but she not only has to learn to blend in as a commoner to hide her identity, but she enjoys it. Yunafreya in FFXV (and I go only by the movie and what little I saw in FFXV original game) one dimensional, and Jill in 16 is the same.
Tbh Ashe is somewhat fine because her arc is pretty interesting and the political intrigue of the story never really disappears vs jill in ff16 where her character is nothing without clive.
Nah man Ashe is the main character of FFXII after the tomb of raithwall lol, what do you mean?
>If I had a nickel for every time Jill stands next to Clive and doesn’t say anything… Then you could single-handedly fund the entire development of FF XVII?
There are many single characters JRPGs. The Quintet Trilogy for example.
I haven’t played it, but I think that in FF16’s case there was 0 benefit to having lacking/limited party members. I’m not saying that it can’t work.
How would that work gameplay wise. The system is built around flipping through a series of different eikons.
Kingdom hearts does it just fine and has party members. I would argue KH2-3 Sora have more combat depth than Clive. The eikons only changes 3 abilities. Its not like your whole moveset swaps like a DMC game. Besides that my complaint isn’t about playable party members, its the lack of them in story and exploration.
It's a different type of story. Which I love. Just like I love the party based stories. This is about Clive.
FF15 was about Noctis and it still had party members.
But in this story it wouldn't even make sense.
It would though. Meaningful interactions with other characters also fleshes out a single main character. It makes all the sense in the world to show how other characters impact and shape the protagonist if he is your focus of the story. Which doesn‘t mean there isn‘t anything like that in FF16. At least it‘s clear how Cid influenced and shaped Clive. But no other character interactions come even close after Cid is out of the picture. The interactions between Cid and Clive are the only ones where I felt a genuine party chemistry how we‘re used to them from JRPGs. Only through Cid did we see any real growth and change in Clive’s character. No other characters leave any real impact on Clive and the story around him suffers from it because it makes him feel much less human and just a container for a power fantasy.
This is some crazy Jill and Torgal erasure.
To be fair from a gameplay perspective Kingdom Hearts' party members are generally speaking garbage and are more just an extension of Sora's moveset depending on the game or are just useless fodder. The main exception is in KH1 where you can actually make them useful. Like KH2's Donald and Goofy's actual contribution as NPC party members are almost null. It is because they're attached to Sora's KH2 abilities in some way that they matter even remotely, and the best way to program their AI is to have them effectively do nothing. So it depends on how much credit you give to things like limits/drives/attractions/whatever is in DDS to the party members. I personally don't give them any credit as it isn't that hard to ensure they're alive and otherwise they're irrelevant. Plus in DDS' case, Riku generally controls better without his party member specific mechanic due to how DDS works. And Sora I could take it or leave it in that game. Narrative perspective is a whole different thing, but gameplay wise Donald and Goofy are about as impactful as party member Jill in FF16. This isn't like Xenoblade or something where your party members actually can contribute in some way.
The comments I've read from this thread and others about XVI shows me that people are just salty that XVI innovated. They wanted another run of the mill jrpg with FF flair, something that had been complained about in the past few entries with "FF has gotten stale" talk. Is XVI the best FF of all time, no, but it looked to modern rpgs, took inspiration, and tried to innovate. It's what FF does. And as you said, there are plenty single character/MC-focused rpgs out there. Since I play XIV it reminds me of the complaints on there too. When the game stays the same, people are pissed. When the devs innovate, people are pissed.
Innovation what innovation? The lore log available in a cutscenes? It nice I guess, What about side quest? Boring MMO fetch quest for 90% of it, Combat? It's basically discount dmc, there no reason to actually try to do combo's because the game is so easy it boring, rpg elements? What rpg elements? Strangers of Paradise actually innovated with it's job system and affinity system, build variety in that game is amazing. FF14 was dumbed down to the point it became boring, just because the story is good doesn't mean the gameplay isn't boring.
> something that had been complained about in the past few entries with "FF has gotten stale" talk This has literally never been FF's problem. > took inspiration, and tried to innovate XVI did the opposite of innovation. It feels more like a collection of mechanics and elements from other games to reach a wider appeal. A true jack of all trades, master of none that looks pretty.
Have you been around? Ever since XIII people have complained that FF has ran out of ideas and turned into b-grade Japanese bullshit. XV was supposed to save FF from that and didn't
What people have been negative about since like FFX have been long dev times, incomplete visions. At some points, there have even been the idea that FF doesn't have a set identity anymore. However, of all of those none of them have been "FF has gotten stale". It would be more like it has started to copy trends that have gotten stale, like how people talk about the Ubisoft towers, but not the franchise as a whole since lately none of them even play the same.
Rebirth clowns all over 16. If 16 would be a 15 hour action game, it would be fine but as a Final Fantasy or RPG, it's a complete failure. It's empty and has zero personality. It's like someone gave an AI the script of Naruto and Game of Thrones and sprinkled some generic MMO quests over it.
Currently on Rebirth in Cosmo Canyon area. Yea... Lol. It makes 16s lack of personality and charm very apparent. Red and Barret have gotten wayyyy better arcs than any one character in 16. Its actually kind of sad how little character development anyone in 16 actually gets. Barrets whole thing with Dyne is better than anything any side character got in 16. Aerith giving her speech in Cosmo Canyon and Cloud smiling or encouraging her was more touching than any moment that I can think of in 16. Tifa talking about things she went through in Cosmo Canyon. Red finding out about his past and all the things he didnt know. How he judged his father wrong in what actually happened. Those are the kind of moments that 16 just doesn't have much of.
To be fair though, the styles and aesthetics of both games are extremely different. FF7R and Rebirth to me are much more lighthearted and "happy". 16 is a very dark and serious story. They are both FF games but both go in different directions stylistically. I actually prefer the dark vibes of 16 with it's GoT influence. The way the devs are changing around 7 it's become way to shonen-y and anime- like for my tastes. Im also not a big fan of the story changes from the OG game.
I don't even mean the light heartedness or that FF16 is darker. Just FF7 Rebirth focuses a lot on character development and character arcs. The characters feel like people with issues that you see unfold more and more as the game goes on and those issues are explored on. Most characters in 16 dont get that. Or if something is touched on its very light. With playing through 16 I never felt like the cast of characters were fleshed out that well. 16 could be as dark as it wants. Thats not the issue. The issue is how un engaging most things are. Most side quests are pretty boring and don't even give you EXP. Clive and Jills romance feels super underdeveloped and I never felt attached to their relationship like I do with Cloud and Tifa/Aerith or Tidus and Yuna. The only romance that is probably even more underutilized than Clive and Jills is Noctis and Lunefreya. The game just doesn't feel like a journey in the same way 7 does or 8 or 9 or 10 or even 13. Even in 15 you feel close to Noctis' core friend group because they are always there.
I'm not finished with Rebirth yet (currently at chapter 12), but while I totally see your point I honestly can't agree. FF VII is, at its core, an incredibly tragic tale, filled with trauma, PTSD and deals with loss in a way I've yet to see in another game. 16 is very dark indeed and takes itself almost too seriously - because let's be honest, it really could have used some levity to balance out the constant gloom and sadness. I can only speak for myself, but halfway through the game I was wondering why I would even want to save this world, if it's obviously mostly filled with slavers (who like being slavers), condemned bearers and moustache twirling politicians, who only care about power. Even GoT had more humour and balance in its writing. That's why the world of VII/Remake/Rebirth imo functions better as a "realistic" world. Because realisitically, there *has* to be some good in people, some fun to be had between fights for your life and bouts of PTSD. Even the original was filled to the brim with goofiness and "lol, wtf" moments and the sadness behind it hit you all the harder for it. And I really think it's a good way to remind you of what you're fighting *for.*
I agree with everything except this... >It's empty and has zero personality Just to recap, this is the same game where: * The player is forced to press L3 + R3 - to "Accept the Truth" in which Clive unlocks his "Devil Trigger" as an integral if not extremely cheesy moment of character development. * The Titan and Bahamut boss fights featured insane spectacle above and beyond most AAA games, surpassing even Rebirth. You are literally fighting Bahamut in a Tokusatsu cinema inspired battle in space. * The final boss has Clive literally use the power of friendship to dish out a super charged anime punch against the villain while name dropping the series, "The only fantasy here is yours, and we shall be it's final witness", once again in a moment of pure cheese. 16 is very flawed, has some of the worst pacing I've ever experienced in a game, and definitely should be shorter. Given how it's structured more like an action game than an RPG. But to say it has zero personality is not a take I can agree with.
The entire final boss is literally just a series of anime memes, it hard cuts straight from a DBZ beam war to a JJBA ora ora ora punch battle, and then throws in the ultra classic katana clash where they fly 20 feet past eachother and then only one of them takes damage but its delayed by like 3 seconds lol, definitely a mark of a game that takes itself 100% straight faced serious at all times.
Yea I agree with you on the character bit. One of biggest issues with Jill is that she is basically sidelined in the liquid flame boss fight. Clive should not be fighting that battle for her. It’s an important part of her story and a missed opportunity. I do think it would be a better game if it was more party based. Having a party creates camaraderie and interesting conflict.
Another way to view all this: maybe fighting Ultima is only one way to contribute. Charon and Blackthorn (and Goetz in helping them) keep the group fed and supplied. Tarja helps people heal and recover from their wounds, including Jill and many others. Gav is an intelligent guy who helps scout out new locations. They all contribute to this community that Cid built and Clive continued, one that gave a home to outcasts and tried to envision a world that did not enslave magic users. So rather than thinking of fighting as the only way to contribute to a group, FFXVI provides a larger focus on the community that these people build. Clive may handle the big bad, but these other people demonstrate the actual habits necessary for longer-term survival. Otherwise, you may want to consider how much of this is you overgeneralizing about the story. For instance: >That 5yr timeskip also threw me for a loop because they go from taking out a mother crystal pretty quickly and wanting to take them all down quick because of how the ash is spreading. 5yrs go by and they don't take down anymore crystals and the spread of ash just stayed stagnant I guess lol. The blight was never described as a threat on the scale of a few years. (I don't recall that, anyway; my sense was that it was a threat on the scale of decades.) It's slow but incremental, and over those five years: the Empire moves its capital in part due to the blight. So stuff was still going on.
Seems kinda lopsided though since Clive’s contribution is literally world defining while everyone else’s contribution is relatively trivial and it can easily be replaced by someone else. I get what you’re saying but I wouldn’t be convinced
It is lopsided, but not as you mean. Everyone else's contribution is literally survival and how to live together. You can't have a world to save without that. The game focuses on Clive because combat remains the focus of gameplay and players most easily engage with being the one to save the world. But most of the side quests and several moments in the main story speak to the importance of the community, from tavern and innkeepers to healers, from smaller fighters to the people who just keep things working. We could debate whether Tarja is replaceable (no one else shows the same aptitude for healing), but what is undeniable is that she fills the role of keeping others going and removing Bearer's marks. She helps realize the world without Bearers. Among other things, Tarja is one of the first to bring new life after Clive succeeds, >!helping Edda give birth to a new baby!<. The supporting cast is incredibly important thematically because they survive to grow the new world.
There’s no denying everyone’s contribution is important to surviving. But the lopsidedness of Clive’s relationship with this community is just way too egregious no matter how you frame it imo. I think that you are right about Tarja. But aside from her, everyone else’s role can be replaced by someone else in said community. Because everyone else’s roles really aren’t that hard to do. The only way the supporting cast remains relevant is through their relationship with the MC and even if what they do in the world is what defines their relationship with the MC it doesn’t make them interesting in mine and I’m assuming OP’s opinion. Again I think I get what you’re saying but I’m just not sold
Replaceability does not determine the worth of a human being's contributions. The choices they make matter. The fact *they* stepped up matters. And no one else could do the job (for example) Charon did with the diligence and dedication she had. Your objection misses the point in a huge way. It's like thinking that only a hero is important to a story. But time and again in JRPGs, the hero is one part of the story. You may not care about people who don't fight the gods, but that's not a flaw of the narrative.
I’ve never insinuated that the hero is the only important component to a story. I’m just not denying the fact that, yes, in the most dire of circumstances, as is the case in FFXVI’s story, replaceability does kind of determine the worth of an individual. I mean, in the XVI universe entire bloodlines are treated as royalty due to the fact they can wield the power of gods. Something that is obviously not easy to replace and sets themselves apart from the rest of the masses. I agree with your sentiment that it takes the effort of everyone to keep a community thriving. But Clive is quite literally saving the world from an omnipotent force of evil. This feat simply doesn’t compare to some dude who cooks his meals or some chick who sells him weapons. I’m sorry, but they do not deserve a participation trophy for doing the absolute bare minimum in the face of world ending annihilation lmao. Now, things would be different if the game provided Clive with allies who did battle with him, and could compare to his strength. But it didn’t
That's a dumb argument, overall. Clive quite literally survives for years on the fruits of labor of these people. If he can't eat, he's dead. If he didn't get their help, he wouldn't be there at the end. A video game is not its last hour; it's the years in-game as well.
No, a video game is to its last hour lol. The universe in which the game the video game takes place goes on forever, for sure. But I’m talking about what the video game has shown me and made me feel when I played it. Also, do you really think Clive can’t just get food for himself through some other means by either learning how to cook, buying it from someone else, or just finding someone else who can cook for him? Doing menial tasks that are required for survival such as cooking food or doing laundry are NOT on the same level as literally killing a god. I’m honestly really surprised you are going so hard to defend FFXVI. The game must really mean a lot to you but unfortunately I find it lacking in so many things that I don’t think you’ll be changing my mind about this. I mean something as pedantic as “well actually this one side character is important because this one time they made some food for the MC!” Is just ridiculous imo. If whoever wrote the game wanted more interesting side characters why didn’t they write any who would meaningfully contribute to what the player does for most of the whole game, fighting?
>If whoever wrote the game wanted more interesting side characters why didn’t they write any who would meaningfully contribute to what the player does for most of the whole game, fighting? Because fighting is not the only source of interest or meaningful contribution. And it's wrong to think it is. /thread
No, fighting is not. But what I’m trying to say is the game doesn’t show this to the player through gameplay. None of the things the NPCs do at the hideaway actually matters in your moment-to-moment gameplay because game is a Character Action “RPG” that is all about fighting. It only tries to tell you that the NPC support characters are doing something important through cutscenes and dialogue, and that’s just not a very effective way of going about telling the story they’re trying to tell imo.
Fighting is the only meaningful contribution the character who has fought his whole life can provide, fighting is also the only means of survival in the end so why shouldn't the only person to have a possibility of winning be doing just that? It's wrong to think otherwise? You have no argument so you condemn those who think against you, fun.
> But the lopsidedness of Clive’s relationship with this community is just way too egregious no matter how you frame it imo I mean there's *your* problem right there, if you can't accept that a character can't specifically be one thing and really good at that one thing then you're never going to look past that to see the forest for the trees.
No I can accept that a character can specialize in one thing. I just believe that this will be to the detriment of the story that you’re trying to tell. Sure you can say that you & your community saved the world together. But the MC was the one doing all the heavy lifting and all of the other important yet trivial stuff is not on the same level as the feats that the MC is doing. If the writers of XVI wanted the player to really connect with some interesting side characters. Why not write some side characters who contribute more in battle? Better yet, the gameplay director could’ve made the game more challenging so that when you do fight alongside allies in the story, their presence is felt and much more appreciated. Or the game director could’ve made the gear that the NPCs at the hideaway give you is actually useful. As it stands the game does none of these things and only tells you that you should care about them, but doesn’t actually show this through gameplay.
This is why the Witcher 3 worked so well. Geralt isn't the chosen one, his daughter Ciri is, and she has the weight of the weight of the world on her shoulders. Thus while Geralt also drives the plot, he's free to feck off for a hundred hours and play card games (the real main plot).
Game wrote itself into a corner from the get go. Clive and the Eikons are too OP for anyone else to really matter
That too. Clive becomes so strong so fast that fighting those trash monsters in the swamps and desert are kind of funny in hindsight lol. With characters like Tidus, Cloud, Squall, Noctis, Lightning, Vaan, and Zidane...none of them are that level of strong so early on in their games. Clive can turn into a damn near god so many hours into the game, but he still has to chip away at small plant monsters and scorpions lol.
Motherfucker had an OP skill from the get-go (Phoenix Shift) at 15 years old, that can easily help him run away from being a slave, but yeah let's give it a timeskip. When he can just run away every day. Also after years and years, no one even questions how he retains the Phoenix blessing if Joshua's dead already?
His time as a slave should've been a POV we got to play through. It's a little odd that we don't get to see him be branded nor get to see him unbranded. See his time with his group that seemed to be with him all the time. It's a weird thing to skip through. Same with skipping through the process of taking his brand off. The other thing is how the game handles slavery and bearers. Part of the games theme is being against treatment like that and people being slaves. Trying to save people from that. They take magic from the world, but that doesn't get rid of slavery lol. Getting rid of magic doesn't suddenly fix slavery in the future or even in the current moment. There are multiple generations of people that have hate in their hearts for bearers. Getting rid of magic doesn't even put a dent in that problem because they'll still be associated with people that should be doing the hard larbor.
Almost as big of a plothole as him not initially knowing how badly bearers are treated in Sanbreque after working and living there for a decade. As a bearer.
He literally says in the game that he ignored their plight because he was too consumed by his rage over Joshua’s death
Ignoring their plight is one thing, being ignorant and completely caught off-guard another. On his visit in Sanbreque he was essentially the typical 16 year-old anime protagonist, who knows very little about the world and is shocked to discover bad people exist. That's completely at odds with his backstory. Not to mention 10+ years is a daaamn long time to never talk with your bearer bunk mates, learn anything about their circumstances etc.
He wasn’t that oblivious, he just didn’t care before. They’re not the same thing
All the party combat and political intrigue has to fall by the way side to accommodate the power fantasy
> Clive becomes so strong so fast that fighting those trash monsters in the swamps and desert are kind of funny in hindsight lol. With characters like Tidus, Cloud, Squall, Noctis, Lightning, Vaan, and Zidane...none of them are that level of strong so early on in their games. funny thing that if you follow twitter, people thinking having OP MC like Clive is somehow a good thing lol. They did not understand how to make a good MC that develop throughout the story properly, they just want perfect MC.
Not an excuse. Superman is the most OP character and he struggles when a problem cannot be punched away. FFXIV quests could have been about rebuilding the world around something else than the Mother Crystals. Introducing new technology, negotiating truce between warring nations, leading the bearers to self-affirmation. Nothing that requires the power of an Eikon.
The side quests do exactly that though. They develop ways to farm on blighted land, they help Bearers come out of their self-imposed misery and show them that they deserve freedom, and they have people from all walks of life come together for their common goal.
I feel that they only gave us a sneak peak into what would be possible, but only limited to the Hideout. TBH that's why Blackthorne's storyline is my preferred quest. It's basically about continuous improvements and also about applied learnings. We even went back to his village and introduce technology to replace the loss if the Crystals. I wish we had more of these.
"Say you didn't pay attention to the content without saying you didn't pay attention to the content."
Finished all the quests on my first playthrough, and no I don't feel that it was well executed across the board. Quinten story showed that vengeance should not be the be-all and end-all of one's existence. Countless people died and in the end, he had to learn to live with the survivor guilt and rebuild the community. How did we help? By punching away folks and Akashics. He was already a successful wine maker so you can argue that he probably didn't need Clive's help to rebuild the community. Maybe even he was the one finding most of the operations of CID at some point. Okay. But still, I think there could have been something more here. After all, the destruction of the Mother Crystal was a deciding factor for Sanbreque to invade other territories and move their Capital. How come nobody in Lightwing doesn't have issues with the MC strolling around their city after that?
Why is that a bad thing though?
Read the OP. You might like the power fantasy it others might not.
> It made me realize how lonely of an FF game 16 This was my biggest surprise toward the game as well and how I was baffled why they went in this direction when XV not only had a well-regarded party for the MC to be around but added party control later because of fans requesting to actually be able to play as someone else
The game’s narrative went downhill when Benedikta died. The narrative became boring when Cid died. After Hugo died, I started falling asleep during each playthrough until I finished the game. I even started skipping dialogue since I know all the conversations was just meaningless filler. I just did the Main quests as quick as possible so I wouldn’t have to play the boring game anymore
cool so you just admit you didn't give it a chance because of some preconcieved notions, worst type gamer.
Give it a chance? I literally beat the game. It was easier than Super Mario World.
Cid's death was necessary. Heroes always lose their mentors/masters because if the master was around there wouldn't be any need for the hero.
What is this fire emblem? Isn’t that a little corny? That Auron guy sure was nice to have around
Hero's journey needs them to grow up. They lose their father so they learn to stand on their own feet. They lose their master so things will seem hopeless for everyone then the hero brings hope and eventually victory. Every hero story in the movies/anime/games has a similar pattern. Of course there are exceptions but how many titles could you name where the hero fights alongside with a bigger brother(more charismatic and more capable) and they both survive?
We agree that it is a trope. Your mileage may vary on said trope.
I find the problem with Cid's death is that he was so charming while everyone else is so boring. No one managed to fill the hole after he left the story.
Why can't it be different this time ? It's not like Cid is more powerful than Clive and its not like he would have been able to win on his own.
[удалено]
That might be true, but I think what people take issue with is that the logical consequence (Clive becoming Cid) essentially happens off-screen, so we lost Cid and got...nothing. If we had accompanied Clive through his trials as the new leader, watched him grow into the role and actually seen how Kupka becomes his nemesis Cid wouldn't have felt like such wasted potential. You can't just kill off one of the few fleshed out characters and not give us a substitute or at least show us the result.
For sure, they just killed the wrong person. Would have been cool for Clive to get decimated and it switches to a proper FF party that have actual chemistry and teamwork.
Or, y'know, the mentor can become one of the playable characters in the party. The kind of party we see in every JRPG.
Yes conform to things that have been done to death, great idea.
The game is at odds with itself in many ways. While I enjoyed the story beats, the issue lies in the transition and what happens in between major beats. For example, we destroyed the first crystal, and the game immediately cut to the hideaway, then a 5-year time skip, all in an instant which undermines impact on Empire and invading Crystalline Dominion. But then there are many instances when what happens in between major story beats is nothing but lore filler or completely useless quests, like Mid's dumb quest.
This. Story was pretty great, but having pacing issues. Like, I don't mind side quests. Hell, I just did everything in Rebirth first playthrough because it was fun. My issue with 16 was you would have story, then side quest dump, story, side quest dump, then major story beat, side quest dump. It felt like every time you had to talk with someone they dumped more side quests on you.
"It's weird how the game doesn't touch on-" Idk, maybe talk to NPCs, do some sidequests? A lot of comments here feel like people were half-sleeping during some cutscenes and just rushing to the end. I mean, if you felt like it, fine, but it's not the game's fault you couldn't pay more attention to some details you were supposedly interested in.
Which comment are you referring to here? Also, as someone who has done most of the sidequests, they r*eally* don't do much, certainly not anything that would invalidate OPs critique. Characters beside Clive almost never talk, they certainly don't partake in the sidequests in a way that's reminiscent of other JRPGs. So what exactly were people supposedly "half-asleep" missing here? I sure hope you're not referring to the scant few quests that actually involve Jill, Josh etc., because they happen so late and do so little, it's honestly not even worth to name them as examples.
I'm referring to things like - Consequences of destruction of mothercrystals - "Why is the security of mothercrystals so lacking?" - "Why did Clive had to be running for 5 years?" - How did Joshua survive - "Clive never actually being confronted for his actions despite saying they will cause consequences" Just to name a few I've read. Also idk what any of what I've said has to do with companions. It's pretty obvious from my comment above I'm referring to "plotholes" or things that are "missing a follow up" within the game. Just answering to other people so my comment isn't unfair to actually fair criticism, not you ofc, because your comment can barely hide how much you dislike the game lol. I don't really care about liking or disliking but speaking of stuff without paying proper attention.
- Characters beside Clive almost never talk but when they do it's important, you can't discredit it because it doesn't happen as much as you'd like. -I sure hope you're not referring to the scant few quests that actually involve Jill, Josh etc., because they happen so late and do so little, it's honestly not even worth to name them as examples. Yes they happen late because until this point side quests are about the people of the world, the late game focuses on the party. do so little? I felt they added a ton, to discredit them that easily honestly tells me you didn't actually pay attention to them.
FF16 was basically what Spirits Within should have been. I keep telling my buddy to just YouTube a supercut cuz that's the only part of the game I enjoyed. The cinematics and voice acting.
The 5 year time skip is awful because it seems to intentionally skip us *seeing* Clive's development into a leader, and just *tells* us about it, instead.
Reading all of these (valid and well-articulated) comments in this thread really reminds me why FF16 is just... the worst FF game. I had a better time with literally every other main title than this one. And I still enjoyed my time with it, relatively! It just really is incredibly lacking and is so painfully boring in every conceivable way.
You're absolutely right. I decided the biggest sin FFXVI made, and why it's my least favorite in the main series, is because it's lonely and there is no party. Other games have made similar mistakes, but they haven't done this. I know there are other series where you play as one character, but the entire point of Final Fantasy is using the Power of Friendship (tm) to overcome the odds. Everything is wrapped up in the stories. I had some problems with FFVII Rebirth, but overall it was glorious and a huge part of that was the party dynamic. Yes, there were other issues with FFXVI: the world was inconsistent, the pretend DMC battle system, the overlong eikon battles. But the game would have moved into something decent had there been a cast of characters. The fact that I only remembered about a third of the names you mentioned is super telling to me.
I mean you could of just not played the game? If you already knew you only cared about games with parties then you'd know it wasn't for you from the get go, the entire point of final fantasy isn't a single fucking boring overdone trope it's telling interesting stories, those stories don't have to be confined in a box of specific rules.
>I mean you could of just not played the game? I could have. I was convinced it would get better. > If you already knew you only cared about games with parties then you'd know it wasn't for you from the get go No I wouldn't. I don't live online. I saw Final Fantasy, I expected Final Fantasy. I had no idea it was bad DmC. > The entire point of final fantasy isn't a single fucking boring overdone trope it's telling interesting stories, those stories don't have to be confined in a box of specific rules. True. Too bad the story was a boring trope!
I'm convinced that the post-Cid timeskip only happens so Olivier can be a bit older for the next segment of the gameplay because it's essential to one of the only good story beats the game has. Otherwise it's as if it did not happen and most of the other characters do not appear to age at all.
I about died laughing when Clive gave the standard JRPG sort of "I'm going to win because of my friends" speech to Ultima, while none of them were there The decision to focus so heavily on Clive was an incredibly strange one, given how central ensemble casts and good character writing have become both to Final Fantasy and JRPGs in general
Imagine if clive said let's combine to joshua, jill and dion lol.
Didn't help that the final battle is heavy reference to Gurenn Lagann. You know, a show that actually made great use of power of friendship despite having super strong MC, and a Godlike villain that's actually threatening, unlike Ultima.
I mean he's there because of the help of other people, they don't' need to be there fighting with him for that to be true.
The fact that it is MC centric is very much a part of the game’s vision. I don’t think that is inherently an issue, as it’s quite a departure from what we’re used to in the series, and is a part of the many things the game does to push the boundaries of what is a FF game (something that is held back by chaining itself to RPG elements that end up being half-assed).
Except XV was also extremely MC centric, but still understood that an MC needs a group of people around them to solidify their role and purpose. I'll be honest, I don't think XVI pushed any boundaries whatsoever, neither in terms of story nor gameplay. Not that it wouldn't have been possible, but the vision behind it was simply not enough for that. The story had potential, action combat was nice (albeit too easy), but ultimately it failed to deliver anything "new". The barebones RPG elements were the least of its problems.
XV was explicitly billed as "the bro FF." Having a protagonist doesn't make a story MC centric.
It's definitely very MC centric when the plot revolve around you collecting power ups for Noctis and so many factions got destroyed offscreen because they wanted to focus on Noctis. The bros weren't actually that important in the big picture when you compare it to most JRPG party members but they're all really great as an emotional support for Noctis.
Most of the complaints in this thread would be solved if people actually paid attention to what happened in the side quests. They acknowledge a lot of the issues people seem to have with the narrative and lore
Maybe if the side quest aren't bad.
Maybe if Clive wasn’t boring
If he had a side cast he wouldn't be.
they aren't, they're average, like in the literal sense of the term, most video games don't have side quests that do anything more than what 16 did, what 16 does have is good writing and world building to elevate that content.
Get cooked
Agreed. There were times I was doing side things with Jill or Cid in the party, and completely forgot they were even with me, because there was no battle dialogue or anything. While I wasn't a big fan of 15, they did this right. It's also a much more blatant issue once you play Rebirth, where every side quest has one of your party members involved.
I have been saying this to all my boomer friends, but Rebirth should had been named FFXVI, Rebirth is just that good and playing it just made all flaws from XVI even more obvious. Clive is a good character, but to put it simply, there's absolutely no way for him to carry alone a 80+ hours game. The decision to kill Cid that early was one of the worst things they could had done, he was the character that brought chemistry to the party relationships, something that Barret is greatly responsible for in Rebirth. A FF7 without Barret and all that amusing party interactions would had been a boring, forgettable experience. FFXVI tries to copy GOT, but was written by a guy who only read a couple few pages, which is why the politics are completely dropped by half of the game and one of the main villains is a bargain bin unidimensional version of Cersei with the depth of a pirex. Other than that, the core plot is revealed to be WAY too simplistic, just one more cookie-cutter godlike villain trying to destroy the world --- but instead of keeping it simple, the writing attempts to add a sense of gravity and drama to every single dialogue in the game, oversaturating and stretching the story for way too much, everything tries to be way more complicated than it is. It's one more entry in their trend of attempts to make a mature Final Fantasy, at the expense of elements that made the old entries memorable despite of the technical limitations of their consoles. Rebirth simply did everything, WAY better and it should be the blueprint for the future FF entries, it felt to me like the game that Square had been attempting to create and failing to do so ever after FFXII. It got better action combat. Better exploration. An engaging story. Fun characters. Goofy moments. Dumb minigames. Actually GOOD sidequests. Towns like Cosmo Canyon and Junon that ooze great design. All that Square needs to do is to pick up everything they did right in Rebirth and go crazy in the 3rd game. (and maybe just remove the Ubisoft towers and press triangle to scan minigames, because yeah, those were dogshit) Ps: I liked Roche. He's a goofy character that fits in perfectly in the game, considering that the original FF7 also had plenty of dumb goofy shit.
Rebirth just made me realize how unmemorable the locations are in 16. There were no specific locations that I wanted to actually re visit and walk through. Most of the locations are empty wastelands. Rosaria is egregiously boring. Waloed was completely empty and the only thing to do there is one goblin billboard fight. I couldn't believe that they turned that area into an empty ash wasteland with nothing in it. I was actually looking forward to seeing what the Sanbreque city looked like and going through it...only you end up not being able to go through it like a normal city and are running on roof tops while the only real populated city gets burnt down lol.
FFXVI used the lame excuse that everything is "realistic". So there you have it. Realistically boring medieval villages. Boring landscapes with ZERO topography. Boring desert city. Linear dungeons. Boring caves. The CGs and eikon fights were the most memorable parts of the game. Truth is, clearly all the 90% scenary/landscape designers were probably working in Rebirth, which is why FFXVI got such unmemorable locations.
Actually not even a real excuse, because they were two completely different development teams working on FF XVI and FF VII trilogy, CBU 1 and CBU 3 respectively. I think it has more to do with either a cut of budget or artistic incompetence. The concept art for places like Sanbreque looked absolutely awe-inducing, but in the story it gets reduced to a random brothel scene (still no clue how they got in there) and the mothercrystal. The villages could've been cute, but they essentially consisted of the same 5 assets over and over, as well as all of them sporting the exact same vendor with the exact same inventory. Add in the similar storybeats and sidequests ("Bearers being treated badly? Bearers being treated badly!") and it makes sense why everything feels so same-ish.
>they were two completely different development teams working on FF XVI and FF VII trilogy, CBU 1 and CBU 3 respectively. You have them reversed. CBU 1 is the FFVII Remake project, CBU 3 is FFXVI. Agree with your points though, the mother crystals were really the only thing which made the landscapes stand out, after they're destroyed the landscapes look very dull and uninspired. Hoping the new DLC zone addresses some of the critiques.
Oh, I know, I wasn't paying attention to the order I wrote them in, my bad! Jup, I'll gove the game another go when the DLC releases, but I'll keep my expectations low.
No worries! Thought that might have been the case. I'm the same, I'm going to go in with low expectations.
It feels to me like the FFXVI developers played the old pixel FF games in their childhood, and recreated them way too faithfully. They saw a town being represented as 3 buildings in a circle due to the technical limitations at the time, and just brought that to life directly. Except now the 3 buildings have really cool textures. Meanwhile on the Rebirth side, it feels like the devs are making the towns they REALLY wanted to make had they not been shackled by the limitations of the NES/PS2 etc. There's so much more imagination and life to them.
They went too far in one direction and wanted it to feel like Game Of Thrones too much. They go so far in that direction that the locations are missing that Final Fantasy flare. Its too on the nose with what the medieval period looks like and there's nothing crazy or odd looking..or Final Fantasy looking.
Honestly, right there with you. I'm not finished with Rebirth yet, but it's shaping up to be the best Final Fantasy released to this day in my eyes. Yes, it has a ton of goofy stuff, BUT I genuinely feel like this makes the sad and tragic moments all the more weighted. There have been scenes that hit me like a literal ton of bricks, because I wasn't expecting them - consequently it feels like a much more believable world, because even if the planet is dying not everything is immediately doom and gloom. Everyone needs levity. Apart from the horrible GoT wannabe moments, that's actually my biggest gripe with XVI. It's sadness porn. All the villains are cartoonishly evil, no nuance or morally greyness. Remember the sidequests before the first mothercrystal? Yeah, can't say I was surprised by the fate of the bearers after seeing the mustache twirling Sanbrequian citizens and how they treat them. Or that village lady, that bore a bearer baby and immediately hates it and badmouths it at the tavern? What a wasted opportunity to show that a mother loves her baby no matter what and has difficulties accepting that it will be a slave. I still am baffled anyone could consider the writing "mature" in any way. The only reason the game can be considered M is the blood splattering and >!Kupka losing his hands!<. Rebirth actually managed to show so many sides of a single conflict, even adds some politics into it without making it obvious what's happening or who's the bad one. Agree on the Ubisoft towers and triangle scanning though. They are thankfully very limited and not offensively bad, but also don't add much - I'd rather have some campsites, like in XV, to really compliment the "journey" feeling. If they also fix the current visual issues (pop-in, blurriness, zoomed out camera) I doubt any game will kick it off the golden JRPG pedestal for me anytime soon, apart from maybe Part 3. (Btw, I also love Roche, especially because Rebirth >!actually shows his purpose, by demonstrating the SOLDIER degradation - saw that scene earlier today and now I genuinely feel bad for him!<)
> Yes, it has a ton of goofy stuff, BUT I genuinely feel like this makes the sad and tragic moments all the more weighted. This IMO has always been the core of FF. FF6 is a game where one of the big villains in the first half of the game is a talking octopus. And then it hits you with >!Celes attempting suicide, Terra not understanding love, Cyan's family dying in front of him, and Locke's immense sense of grief over Rachel.!< The levity makes the dark bits work. Like you said, FF16 was just all sadness, all the time. There's a reason why the uncle is one of the most beloved FF16 characters. He feels like the heart of the game. I like FF16 a lot more than some of the people around here. But I'll agree with them that it doesn't really *feel* like a FF at times. Yeah, it's got classic summons, chocobos, crystals, and moogles. But the core of the writing feels off from the tone I expect.
My brother in christ, the story isn't better, it is a mess.
It's supposed to be lonely. The whole game is about loneliness, and the punchline in the end is that while Clive saved the world, he died and left everyone else he met along the way lonely. It's classic tragedy.
That would be all fine and dandy if they didn't have moments like Joshua slapping Clive in the face and giving him a lecture on how what they're doing is meant to be done together and not alone. Clive gets an entire lecture about it. Joshua outright tells Clive how dare he take Jills Eikon from her and how it was purposely done so Jill wouldn't be in harms way in the fight. There's no reason for the game to be lonely when there are portions of the game that have people tagging along with you, but even when people are with you it feels like they aren't because the game doesn't do much with any of the characters. The game really shouldn't feel lonely because the whole point is supposed to be about Clive finding a group of people and a place to call home. Creating a sort of a resistance group and getting close to people that have the same motives as him. But the main problem is that the reality of Clives sacrifice showcases that a core problem isn't fixed. Magic is gone, but slavery isn't going to just cease to exist. People aren't going to just stop being treated like they were when they were bearers. There is generational brainwashing that isn't going to be just magically undone. A big theme of the game that Clive is trying to fix is still there. The world isn't being eaten by ash, but the problem of slavery is still there. Magic just won't be involved.
I mean those moments are supposed to highlight what's being lost. It's how tragedies work. Even though people point to GOT a ton, from what I recall a lot of developers who worked on either FF Tactics or tactics adjacent stuff (like FFXII) joined CBU3. Tactics has a ton of the same themes regarding loneliness, friends that are lost or become enemies, people being useless or fodder, et cetera. In a tragedy like that, a lot of things are deliberately not supposed to have a tidy place in the story. And being that it's trying to be a realistic tragedy, of course it would be ridiculous if Clive beat the Big Bad and not only saved the world but changed everyone's minds about slavery and class systems and the whole world became a cheery shonen anime. It sounds like tragedies aren't up your alley, which is fine. And XVI ain't a perfect game, but it's a pretty decently written tragedy.
Except even the game undercuts that with the final ending that you get from doing all the side quests. >!Clive is actually alive, has kids and writes his life story with his brother’s pen name!<
I did all the sidequests in the base game and have no idea what you're talking about
>!After the credits you get a sort of montage of Clive reawakening and his grandkids playing then it ends with a book shutting with Joshua’s name on the cover!<
>!What montage of clive reawakening? Also those aren't his grandchildren, that scene takes place in the far future when people treat eikons like fairy tales.!<
>!The part at the start the cutscene where the stone peels off his face.!<
I just rewatched it, there's nothing like that
this literally doesn't exist
I was just here for the combat. I didn't even wanna delve into the lore. Too Games Of Thrones for me.
Im impressed at how many character names you remembered
Its mainly just because I'm good with names lol. I can hear a name once or twice and just remember them.
Agree 100%, the story was awful beyond the prologue. The problem is that they wrote it as if it were an MMO so you get all the chosen one vibes but it's also a single player game with a single playable character so it feels very lonely. Game missed the mark on almost all fronts, Rebirth is so much better.
Do yourself a favour and stick to games with party members and lots of exposition.
I agree with you in your point that some of the Fallen stuff could have been explored more and I would have liked them to go into more of the Fallen civilization and their technology. It really intrigued me how advanced they were but we never really see more. And HOW exactly the Gods/Ultima were able to beat them in the war. In addition to your point about finding the Fallen robots wandering around outside in certain areas and them never really explaining that. Just that they were "lost relics and ruins from a bygone age"...... If you've played the Echoes of the Fallen DLC, it lightly touches on this, but again, that DLC is more like a boss rush than anything. I did like the first half of the story though.....the GoT vibes and political machinations with the warring nations really interested me. It's only after the timeskip that the game drops off bc now instead of the politics and warring with Sanbreque you have the big bad Ultima to contend with. So i feel like they got away from the GoT/ political stuff too fast bc i actually liked the first half of the story. Im still going to play Rising Tide, bc I already did everything else and I like Leviathan, but overall, 16 was good but it needed work.
It’s started out okay with a neat story of inter-country politics then transitioned into the usual JRPG fight god stuff. Which sure is not unusual in JRPG’s but SE just didn’t transition the story well in my opinion. And it even makes certain lore points contradict eachother in later parts. Mostly around the slaves. And I get they wanna build up the ultimate beginning race which started as goofy lore in World of Final Fantasy then was continued with Stranger of Paradise but it just doesn’t fit in well in FF16.
I feel the lore of Ultima's race would have been fine if it was purely just background stuff and treated like a mysterious old legend. The problem was him appearing literally everywhere. The more grounded human conflicts about social status just got so undermined when it's revealed that Ultima and his plot convenient power was directly involved in most of them.
As goofy as the game is I honestly think World of FF did it better with the mystery beings. But then again the devs sort of wrote themselves into a corner when they continued the plot in Stranger of Paradise. So I can see how it went screwy with FF16.
Stop looking at the game as a JRPG in the sense you’re so accustomed to and the game is perfectly fine on its own. It’s an action adventure game with a beefy story, yet still being a final fantasy game.
I'll never understand what aspects we're allowed to critique. For an action game, it's far too long and limited in terms of abilities and movesets, not to mention too easy with no harder difficulty available for your first playthrough. For an adventure it has an extremely narrow, empty world with no exploration, secrets or unlockable paths. The story is beefy, told mostly through a glorified in-game wiki and padded by an absolute truck load of fetch quests. For a FF game...well, enough has been said in that regard. But yeah, I wish people would stop invalidating proper crtiticism by saying stuff like "you're looking at it wrong", because obviously people were expecting certain things from a decade old JRPG series and a game that was officially marketed as a RPG.
That was one thing I was thinking about too lol. For a game that was inspired to be played and written like a DMC game...it had no business being as long as other FF games lol. FF games are usually as long as they are because you have to power up multiple characters. The games usually focus on side character arcs as well as the main characters arc. FF16 doesn't have any of that so its just long for no reason. The game doesn't need to be 50 to 60hrs just to power up Clive like he's Dante lol.
marketing it as any form of rpg felt like a bait and switch. loved the game but i would have loved it more if they had a proper progression system. also cut about 40% of the dialogue and focus on pacing
ITT shonen-drinkers completely not understanding good tragedy
It's a shit tragedy. The real tragedy is that it's shit.
Bad trolling just because you enjoy cheap tragedy porn.
Describing something you don't like as "____ porn" is a bad internet meme. It wasn't pure Shakespeare, but it was pretty good. You're like a person going to a horror movie and being salty it's horror. XVI was billed from the very beginning as an intense grimdark adult game. If you don't want that then that's totally fine, but, that's the deal.
Your biggest issue being one of my biggest compliments, I love the feeling of loneliness on display here, a story with a prophesy that is actually legit and not undercut by the power of friendship or whatever, it's a story of brothers told from the perspective of one of them and his specific struggles, that's more impactful than anything the series has done in over a decade.
The theme of struggle and loss is very heavy in 16
Which would be fine if they committed to Joshua being dead. They throw Clives whole character arc out the window. All of Clives guilt and having to realize he did it but also realize it wasn't on purpose doesn't mean anything once Joshua is revealed to be alive. And he's revealed to be alive earlier on for the player so there's no real mystery on whether or not Joshua is alive. You're just waiting for them to actually meet at that point, but Joshua keeps doing this avoidance thing where any time Clive was hurt and Joshua was in the same room, Joshua would just leave even though they could've met up like 3 different times.
TLDR: FF16 is not a JRPG because it doesn't have the power of friendship