games / Reviews

Final Fantasy XVI (PC) Review

October 7, 2024 | Posted by Marc Morrison
Final Fantasy XVI Image Credit: Square Enix
7
The 411 Rating
Community Grade
12345678910
Your Grade
Loading...
Final Fantasy XVI (PC) Review  

I’m going to start this review a bit differently. Normally I dive into the game first and only at the end do I talk about PC performance. Here, I want to reverse that since the actual PC work to the game is pretty great and bears talking about briefly, because of it’s quality. Only after will I get into the actual nuts and bolts of Final Fantasy XVI.

I don’t have the most up-to-date, blinding fast rig or anything but my computer with an Intel i9-13980, Nvidia 4070 and 16GB of Ram was more than able to handle this game. During actual gameplay, it was pretty much locked at 90 FPS set on the “Ultra” graphical setting. It would occasionally dip, but that was usually due to my computer doing something, and it wasn’t the game’s fault. It also looks great, as you might expect.

The only weird hitch is that pre-rendered sequences are locked at 30 FPS. It’s not a deal breaker by any means but you’ll definitely notice it within the first 10 minutes of playing or so. There is some unofficial mod to get them up to 60, but I haven’t tried it yet. Now, onto the actual game

I originally played Final Fantasy XVI when it came to the PlayStation 5. I would be scratching my head at seeing other falling all over the game and ignoring, if not disrespecting Final Fantasy XV. Final Fantasy 16 is by no means a “bad” game, something with its production values could never be wholly classified as bad, but it is a very flawed game.

Final Fantasy 16 places you in the boots of Clive Rosfield, a scion to the powerful Rosfield family who lead the Rosaria nation. He is the head bodyguard to his little brother Joshua who holds the Eikon (Summon) Phoenix within. However, a secret attack catches everyone off guard, with your father dead, your mother betraying the family and Joshua missing, being presumed dead. The game pretty much starts off fifteen years after all of these events, with you trying to overthrow the empire that attacked your family in the past, stop a pesky blight from killing everyone, and if you got time, save the world a few times.

Right from the get go, there are a few really great things in this story. First is, Clive quickly falls in with a rebel group that is headed up by “Cidolfus Telamon” (Cid) and it’s one of the best incarnations of this reoccurring motif. He is able voiced by Ralph Ineson and is a real highlight when you get to hang out with him. Second is the idea of the “Branded”. Basically, people who are able to use magic are enslaved to either be magical soldiers, or house/nation slaves. This is a really interesting hook that the game does set up well, and tries to explore. It might not be entirely successful, but they do try, with the magic that people use eventually killing them if they use too much.

The flip side of the good in the story, is the bad. The story itself is basically a fanfic of Game of Thrones, specifically mashing up the Ned Stark and Cersei Lannister plotlines. In this analogy, Clive is basically Robb Stark, going up against the empire after your father is killed and your little brother goes missing. The twist here is that Clive’s mom is basically Cersei and only cares about her own power, loving Joshua, when he was around, for his own theoretical power but absolutely hating Clive because he had none.

There’s another important element that is bad and that is the whole “Dominant” system. The people who have Eikons within them are called Dominants and each is host to their own specific summon. Joshua has the Phoenix within him, Jill (your adopter quasi-sister) has Shiva, Hugo (one of the bad guys) has Titan, etc. There are only 8 Dominants in the main game, Clive also eventually gets one, with them each corresponding to a famous Final Fantasy summon.

The problem is: you meet 7 of these 8 Dominants within about the first two hours of the game, with Clive being the 8th one. Like, even if you don’t know, initially, that certain people are Dominants, you will eventually. It’s just some real Scooby-Doo type of logic that they couldn’t make any of them actually mysterious, or unknown.

There are a lot of other problems with the story, like how certain characters get pretty punked out early on, or why when a certain character comes back, there really isn’t any reason why they were hidden, etc., but I don’t need to turn this into a whole essay.

As for the actual nuts and bolts gameplay of Final Fantasy XVI, I’ll with a slightly positive “Meh?”.

You attack with the Square button, do magic with Triangle, and have a context sensitive battle button with Circle, with X being your jump button. R1 is used to dodge attacks, L1 is used to lock onto enemies, with R2 being used to do special attacks with a face button when being held down. L2 is used to swap between your Eikon powers, once you unlock multiple sets.

One of the core tenants about FF 16 is that it basically isn’t a roleplaying game. It’s meant to be a character action game, in the vein of Devil May Cry or God of War or half a dozen other franchises. It’s just awful at it.

Combat isn’t bad, but it’s incredibly underwhelming. While my summary above might make it seem like you have three attack buttons with Square, Triangle and Circle, realistically, you only have Square. Magic in the game is utterly pointless, leaving you wide open to attack when you go to charge your spells. Even when you change elemental schools, like going from fire to wind, the magic remains the same: ineffectual, at best.

The circle button “Eikonic Feat” is fairly situational also, depending on what Eikon you have equipped. Your starter one, Phoenix, lets you teleport to the enemy and quickly attack them. The next one you gain, Garuda, either pulls enemies toward you, or pulls Clive toward them, depending on their overall size. The next one you get, Ramuh, gives you a first person mode with a cursor to highlight enemies and send lightning attacks to them, and so on. Each of the Feats might have their place, but it’s far easier to just hammer on the Square button over and over and over again, while evading attacks, and punishing foes when they do attack you.

I bring this up because it’s a key problem with the combat system. Character action games almost always have a light and a heavy attack button system. Bayonetta has punches and kicks, Kratos (in current God of War) has light/heavy attacks, Nier: Automata has light/heavy attacks, Metal Gear Rising has light/strong attacks and so on. It is almost a base rule for the genre. The reason it’s a rule is because it actually gives the player some space for exploration and creativity with the combat. If I do “Light, light, heavy”, what combo is going to happen? If I do “Light, heavy, heavy, light”, what will happen? This is extremely basic stuff here.

In Final Fantasy XVI there is none of this. At best, the longest combo chain you can do is five hits, four sword swipes and finishing off with the magic attack. Now, it is possible to combo/chain together your Eikon abilities and such, switching between three Eikon schools, and really going to town on an enemy. But your abilities have cool downs, so you can’t exactly use them all the time. You might be able to get some 25 hit combo chaining Garuda, Rumah and Bahamut stuff together, but you can only do it once every 30 seconds, due to needing to have all the special attacks recharge.

The dodge mechanic is also kind of busted, but in a good way. You can dodge damn near anything, and the game even gives you a ring at the start to flash a big “R1” prompt when you need to dodge an attack, which then lets you easily counterattack. Even if you don’t use the ring, you will pick up most enemies attack patterns quickly, and can avoid most enemies. The “busted” part is further solidified about halfway in the game once you pick up the “Berserker Ring”. This ring modifies your dodge so that instead of letting you counter attack directly, you slide out of the way and gain a boost to your attacks for a few seconds, imbuing them with Limit Break style fire. You can also chain dodges together, infinitely, if you really wanted to. You can just dodge, attack, dodge, attack, over and over. I literally think my highest combo during one boss fight was like 47 dodges in a row. Once you get the ring, the rest of the game is a complete cakewalk.

Final Fantasy XVI isn’t exactly a long game, either. You can probably do the main quest in about 20 hours, and do most of the side content in about 10 more. If you really want to 100% the game, it might take you 5 to 10 more hours to do.

There actually isn’t a lot for you to do outside the main quest, though. There are around 75 side quests, and most of them fall into one of three camps: kill an enemy (or group of enemies), hunt down resources/materials, or find something. Some of them actually are pretty critical despite being a “side” quest, so you might as well do them as they come in. Side quests typically reward you with materials to upgrade your gear and renown. Renown is a currency you can spend at the renown vendor, go figure, and you can buy certain gear, soundtrack discs for the jukebox, gain ability points and so on. It’s not really a store, more of a “Well, you got 45 Renown points, so you can unlock a Meteorite for Clive to use for crafting.”

The last thing to really touch on is the seemingly epic Eikon fights you occasionally have to do. These are the big fights where two of the summon monsters really go at it, and are meant to be this sweeping/grandiose moments and almost without fail, they are terrible.

The first one involves you, as Phoenix, fighting against Ifrit as you fall though the world of Valisthea. Yes, you are literally tumbling through the planet as you shoot fireballs and dodge attacks. It’s ludicrous, not only because you fall several thousand miles through the world but there’s no real fail state, so if you didn’t actually damage Ifrit enough, you would just fall forever.

All the rest of the Eikon fights are more straightforward, you as Ifrit facing off against another Eikon. The controls are largely the same as Clive, only you move a lot more sluggishly, since you’re controlling a monster that is the size of a building. These fights are also heavily scripted, so I’m not even sure you can lose at them despite you having a health bar, if you’re playing barely competently.

You also basically learn a new Eikon ability during each fight. The first one is a bit tutorial in nature, but during the second you learn to jump, during the third you learn “Brimstone” that defends against range attacks. During the fourth you learn “Spitfire” that is like a fire beam, etc. There aren’t a lot of these fights left and they all just seem so boring because you can’t really lose but you can’t really win, at least until you whittle the enemies HP bar down and do a QTE.

7.0
The final score: review Good
The 411
If I was to review Final Fantasy XVI just based on the game, it’d probably get around a 5 or maybe 6. But with it coming to PC, the port work is an 8 or even 9. So, I figure 7.0 averages it out. This is a pretty stellar PC port job of a somewhat mediocre game. It’s not the worst thing ever but what tries to be an action game just feels kind of bad for a lot of it. The story does have a few interesting beats, aside from the Game of Thrones stuff, though and it sure does look nice on a good computer.
legend

article topics :

Final Fantasy XVI, Marc Morrison