 In 1987 Square released the first Final Fantasy game. It sold well and gave the series a reputation for excellent graphics, but playing it as a kid, I recall thinking that it was kinda boring. As I got older, I ended up really liking RPGs, but always in spite of their gameplay and not because of it. I really liked Baldur's Gate, but when I watched YouTube's series Retrospectives, it always puzzles me when people look back fondly on turn-based combat because it was tactical. In my experience, there's not that much tactics in a turn-based CRPG. They either rely almost entirely on stats or very simple rock-paper-scissors systems. I recently watched a video on the Dragon Age series and had argued that Dragon Age 1 had interesting tactical combat. My opinion is that the combat in Dragon Age has always been a tedious slog, which is the same feeling I get playing Persona. And while I appreciate that others may enjoy that kind of combat, I think it's now pretty obvious that the average player finds turn-based combat really boring. The last two Final Fantasy games were 15 and the first part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake. Both games took tiny baby steps toward an action combat system, but also tried to keep the tactics feel of the turn-based games allowing you to kinda control your party. Both of those games have enough spectacle to make the combat fun to look at, but both of them also try to do two things and as a result, do them both pretty badly. Neither of them is a good action game, but they're also not very good turn-based RPGs. By trying to thread the needle between the old and the new, they do neither system very well. A couple weeks ago, Final Fantasy 16 released with a ton of hype, with much of that hype centering on it being the first Final Fantasy game with a full-on action combat system. Well, the reviews are in, and it's sitting at like a 90 on Metacritic with people praising its world, story, and that new combat system. It's the kind of game that seems destined to be talked about as a game of the year contender. Well, I finished it last week, and I noticed my shock some of you, but I'm actually a little bit conflicted on the game. Final Fantasy 16 has a lot to love, and in its best moments it is one of the better games of the generation, but it's also a very inconsistent game that has a lot to criticize, as well as celebrate. So today, let's take a look at this new action-focused Final Fantasy game, and talk about all the things it does really well, and all the things it does not so well. If you like my video, do me a favor and like, share, subscribe, yada yada yada. Final Fantasy 16 after the logo. Fantasy May Cry The general consensus seems to be that FF16's combat is a massive improvement over previous games. And while this is absolutely true for me as well, I have a suspicion that it's not true for more than a few people who are long-time fans of the series. For all of its history, Final Fantasy has been a game that was all about party control and turn-based combat. Although I've only played the games from the 80s and early 90s, probably the first four or five, as well as Final Fantasy 7 and 15, all of those games still revolve around controlling your party members in some way. And this system has always been more than just a mechanical system. One of the compelling parts of old CRPGs is that controlling your party in combat creates a connection to your companions. By making FF16 an action game where you do not control your companions beyond using your dog as a combo finisher, the developers risked the attachment you feel to your party members. The combat in Final Fantasy 15 was a pretty significant overhaul that had some action elements, but because the combat was very, very simple and you constantly cycle through your party's abilities, it managed to retain much of the classic CRPG companion feel. FF16 took a bold step by creating a straight-up action game. For most of the game, you will only have your dog, Torgul, or him plus one other party member. It's very, very rare that you have more companions than that. And the times it happens are very brief. On top of this, you have zero control over any companion other than Torgul. And even with him, the combat's so fast-paced that the only time you use him is as the fifth hit in a standard combo or to occasionally have him heal you. I thought it's just important to touch on the fact that this is a tremendous departure from the series and probably has at least some long-time fans feeling kind of conflicted. So the game's now an action game. And a bunch of media talked about the fact that a former DMC developer helped with the system. And when you read reviews of the game, the combat system gets pretty universal praise. But I think all this praise fails to talk about a few issues I think the combat system has. At its very best, the combat in this game is really quite excellent and it's very rarely terrible. But it does have issues. So let's go over how it all works. The core of the combat in this new game is a four-hit sword combo with a magic finisher. When you add in the dog attack, this means you will press X, X, X, X, Y up on the d-pad. This would get extremely boring very quickly. But the combat in the game is greatly improved by the mobility you have as a player. Most fights are horde fights. So you'll cycle through that core combo and then use the special abilities you get and then like dash to another enemy. You start with a long-range gap closer that works with every different icon set by pressing X and square. Once you unlock three classes, the combat starts to feel like an action version of an MMO almost. And what I mean by that is you're basically running a rotation most of the time. By under the game, you're running through that regular combo, cycling through six different cooldown abilities and then repeating. At its best, that combat is really good. It feels great to move. You have a ton of mobility. There's at least some skill involved in actually properly pulling off the combos and balancing the cooldowns is very fun. But I find it interesting that they didn't implement one of the most important systems of a DMC game. There's no combat score. While a bunch of stuff pops up on the screen to let you know that you timed your combo correctly, there is no combat score. I understand that implementing a combat score might make it feel a bit too much like DMC, but there is so much combat in this game and the encounters are extremely similar to a DMC game. You travel a corridor until an arena is locked down and then you defeat waves of enemies until you can move along. I honestly think having a scoring system that gave more or less XP depending on how stylish you were would have improved this game's combat quite a bit, but that's just a small nitpick. The actual serious issue with the combat has nothing to do with game feel, which is fantastic, or abilities which are great, or even challenge which is acceptable if not perhaps a bit too easy. The problem with Final Fantasy 16's combat is entirely down to enemy design and variety. Here's what I realized pretty early on in Final Fantasy 16. If an enemy with a yellow health bar is on screen, the combat is going to be fantastic. If there are no enemies with a yellow health bar on screen, the combat is going to be pretty boring. And it's important to note again that the core of the combat feels really good, so even normal fights against a bunch of regular mobs feel good, but you're so insanely strong and the enemies all stagger on every hit, so pretty soon you'll find that every single fight just plays out the same, like this. You'll lunge to an enemy and then just lock them down with the regular combo, jogging them up until they die, and then dash to the next one and repeat. You'll never have to dodge, you'll never have to use a skill, you kind of just like, you know, wail on them until they die. And wailing on them feels good, but for how long? Every single encounter with the normal enemies plays out exactly the same. And I find this really odd. You're given a ridiculous amount of tools, including a bunch of excellent crowd control tools, but you almost never actually need to control a crowd. You've got these really awesome elemental skills, but the elements don't actually matter. No enemies have weaknesses to one element or another. No enemy needs to be killed with fire. No other one needs to be stopped with ice. As a result, the skills are entirely interchangeable. They're really just flair, and this is a major flaw in the combat. These red bar mob fights would be so much better if you had to take into account which element you were using against them. If when you were fighting kind of the robot enemies, you had to use electricity to finish them, or if you had a mix of robots and animals and had a cycle between electricity and fire, it would greatly improve the combat and really help with the boredom of these encounters. And that lack of crowd control is also another big problem. 95% of the game's enemies will just take turns and let you kill them one at a time. The other 5% of the time, you'll have one major enemy and one minion. I find it so hard to understand why they didn't code the AI to attack you in groups. I've got all of these amazing tools that lock down multiple enemies and knock them down, and instead I'm just slamming them to death one after another. Only a tiny handful of enemies feature ranged attacks, and those enemies also very rarely attack while you're already engaged with an enemy. Eventually, you do encounter enemies who heal or buff their buddies, but because of the way the AI works, this adds nothing. Right at the start, you just instantly nuke those dudes down while their friends watch. And that's a real shame. Because when you're fighting an enemy with a yellow health bar who cannot be spammed to death by stun locking them down, the combat proves to be really extremely well done. Most boss fights, with the exception of a couple that we'll talk about next, are when this game is at its best. It requires precision dodging, careful management of your cooldowns, effectively using a rotation, some strategy about which skills to use and what order to use them in. It's so great that I never once passed by the opportunity to fight a mini boss or boss. But by about 15 hours in, I was always riding past any enemies who are normal mobs because it's so boring and easy that it feels like a massive waste of time. And this is one of those situations where the normal ways that games do difficulty simply doesn't matter. You could triple the amount of damage that normal enemies do and it would not change a thing because the issue isn't damage values, but rather how the enemies are designed. If an enemy does 10 times the damage it normally did, but allows me to stagger them to death and no one else will attack me while I'm doing that, it doesn't matter what kind of damage values they have or how much health they have. Then there's the enemy variety itself. If you made a list, you'd probably find that FF16 has a pretty good variety of enemies, but that number is kind of misleading because in reality, there are practically speaking only a handful of enemies. There are the yellow bar enemies that require you to learn their movesets and use your skills, and then there are red bar enemies that you stun lock to death. Enemy movesets do not matter if enemies never get to use their moves. Red health bar enemies stagger on every single hit. They can all be juggled or grapple hooked back to you. So no matter what they look like, it doesn't matter. A knight with a sword or a flower that shoots poison or a lizard or an orc may all be different models, but they all behave exactly the same and you deal with them all exactly the same. Just these two things. The fact that all normal enemies stagger on every hit and the fact that no enemies will attack you at the same time makes the normal combat encounters really boring because they all play out exactly the same, which is a problem because they're seriously like 20 hours of killing these normal enemies. Every single quest sends you to a location to kill a bunch of red bar enemies. It's such a massive issue that I find it very odd that the combat has been so praised. Yes, at its core, the combat feels good and against tougher enemies and bosses, it proves to be fantastic. But for the vast majority of the game, you're not fighting those tougher enemies or bosses. Whenever you're fighting the fodder enemies, which is most of the game, the design falls apart a little. For the first 10 hours, this doesn't matter because the game feels really good in your hands and looks and sounds so flashy. But eventually, the shallowness of the regular combat starts to wear thin. And I found myself thinking about how much better this game could have been with just a few small tweaks. Make some enemies only stagger after three hits. Make others only stagger after a magic burst. Make some enemies only stagger with ranged attacks. Make some enemies that attack in packs so you're forced to use your AoE attacks. There's simply not enough variety in enemy AI here. And as a result, you almost never actually need to use any of your skills unless an enemy with a stagger bar appears. A huge missed opportunity. The boss fights are where this game is at its best and almost all of them are between very good and great. Because bosses with yellow health bars can't be stun locked, you actually have to be strategic about which skills you use and when you use them. You have to learn their movesets. You'll need to actually heal. The game's still relatively easy to be sure. I think I died like twice in the entire game. But a game doesn't need to be hard to be engaging. I hardly ever die when I play Sekiro now and that game is still engaging. In fact, I'm playing it again now. The boss fights in Final Fantasy 16 have you paying attention to patterns, balancing cooldowns, keeping your combos timed correctly and managing your health through Torgul, potions, skills and limit breaks that allow you to get your health back. It's more than good enough to keep you interested even though you are very rarely going to die. The times when you transform into Ifrit and do the Kaiju battle boss sections are amazingly well animated and add another layer to the combat. Early in the game, these sections are basically glorified QTEs but eventually this opens up and becomes an entirely new combat system that looks and plays unbelievably well. The production value in these sections is so high and the encounters are so memorable that these parts alone would make the game worth playing. It's basically like playing a cutscene and for that alone the developers deserve a ton of credit. In fact, the boss fights are so good that there's only two in the entire game that annoyed me which is quite amazing because I'm annoyed very easily. Unfortunately, however, those two are the final two main bosses of the game. Odin and Ultima both are visually stunning fights and they both have very good Kaiju sections that are the best part of the fights. Sadly though, both fights suffer massively from A being a total visual clusterfuck of particle effects and animations so that I have no idea what is happening at any time. I mean seriously, look at this. How am I supposed to read what the hell is happening here? I understand it's the end of the game so everything needs to be ramped up to epic levels but dude, maybe tone this shit down like 140%. It is impossible to actually see what's happening which means you're basically button mashing and just tanking damage because it's such a mess. And more importantly, B, almost no game in the history of the universe has made an enemy who teleports that isn't the worst shit in the world. I can think of like three enemies in the history of games who teleport who I do not hate. The Lothric Princess in Dark Souls 3, Minotaurs from Destiny and that's actually probably it. So two, a classic example is the Taken Captains from Destiny 2. They're just horrendous awful trash. What am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to do with the teleporting arm monsters from Elden Ring? What am I supposed to do with these two bosses? How is it fun to chase a fucking boss all over an arena? I hate it. Who thinks it's fun to hit something twice and then I have to spin my camera and chase after a coward? If it's still at the fight last longer then just give the boss health I guess? Give it more health? I don't understand. These bosses already have preposterous amounts of health as it is. These are like 15 minute fights man. I just hate it so much and by the end of the game I was literally saying to my wife like alright I'm good now. Can this asshole just die? Like why does it have to go on so long? Also by the end these bosses have attacks that feel like they're impossible to avoid and are there just to suck up your potions? It's a shame that the final two bosses are the worst in the game but it is what it is. Overall the combat is simultaneously the best action combat the series has ever had but also flawed in a bunch of ways. Let's move on to the other part of the game that's excellent at times while also being massively flawed. Story and quests. Okay so as usual when I criticize something that everyone else thinks is the greatest thing in the world let me preface this by saying yes I agree Final Fantasy XVI story is quite good and as far as epic AAA video game stories go this one is good but the gap between bad and good is just as big as the gap between good and great. FF16 has a good story but it's also a story that could have been great and instead never quite reaches the heights it could have for a variety of reasons from plot to pacing to the core focus of the story. Before we go any further I want to point out that if you have read the song and Ice and Fire novels by George RR Martin there are a positively distracting amount of similarities here. I had seen all the press that the new story feels like Game of Thrones. I took that to mean it would be a story that focused heavily on politics. What I did not expect was that it would literally constantly reference the books in ways big and small. The main character is from a super honorable house that's destroyed through political machinations and his father dies tragically. He happens to have a dire wolf that was discovered as a pup when they were exploring the North. He himself is hated by his mother for no particular reason just like the books. There's a very clear Cersei character. They literally say things like little and less. It's not some terrible thing but if you've read the books as many times as I have it is distracting and weird. I just wanted to get that in there. I just find it kind of odd. Anyway, there's two main reasons FF16 story is only good and not great despite all the love it's getting. And the first of those two things is pacing. Think of the best narrative games and you will find yourself thinking of games with tight pacing. Mess Effect is a similar style RPG but it pushes the plot forward with almost every single mission. And during the side quests that don't directly push the plot forward the constant companion dialogue goes a long way to building character death. The Last of Us 1 and 2 are both paced almost exactly like films with story and plot beats perfectly spaced to build and release tension. FF16 has wonderful characters with a fantastic world and even a bunch of pretty good plot points but the overall story of the game is badly mauled by its terrible pacing which is also kind of related to its progression system which is bad. This is most apparent in the appallingly horrendously terrible side quests and the bigger issue with those quests isn't that they're all terrible. The real problem is that they are not all terrible. You see if the side quests were all total garbage then I could have quickly realized they were just chaff and ignored them all. But sadly they're only about 85% total garbage with 10% really good character stuff in world building and 5% important progression quests. Luckily the 5% progression is labeled with a different icon. If the icon is a plus simple you know you have to do that quest but the rest gives you no indication whether it's going to be a story list pointless fetch quest or a barely contextualized combat quest or a compelling story that is important to the world and characters. As a result I wasted hours doing total garbage quests that were a complete waste of time in every way. I wish I had actually stopped doing them early on because the first 10 are so terrible that I was about to stop bothering them at all. But early in the second act I made the mistake of doing one that was actually very good which meant I now could not ignore them. FF16 is already a very wrong game with a tremendous amount of backtracking across maps and until you unlock the chocobo like 10 hours in you have to run across those damn maps. It's annoying enough running across a map for a quest that's interesting but it is just awful to run across the map to find four flowers or get a note that a dog stole or go find a lost merchant or any number of the other garbage quests. FF16 has an extremely long main quest that's full of great characters and super important plot points. So it confuses me that there are all these garbage quests when they're just not needed. In fact, not only are they unnecessary they are actively detrimental to the game as a whole. There were two obvious solutions to this issue. First, you could just look at all the quests the writer's brought to your desk and if they are trash you can just say no. Like you could just not put those ones in the game. That's a thing that developers can do. You do not need to include every permutation of the pointless fetch quest that your designers bring you or because there are a ton of people who seem to actually prefer quantity over quality whatever man you do you you could just rank them and make it clear to the player which is which. You could have had that cross for progression quests yellow for actually good side quests and green for the pointless chaff. Lots of games do this. Spending a bunch of time chasing a dog to get a note back not only hurts the pacing it grates against the story and messes with the tone. That's a big issue that caused me a tremendous amount of agita. I cannot overstate how annoyed these side quests made me. Man, I work so hard in the summer and I am tired of shit when I get home. So when I'm playing a game I just really don't want my time wasted. It's why the horse stable asshole in Zelda annoys me so much. Like I got shit to do man. Why are games so intense on wasting my time? But the bigger issue with the game story is something much more important. The focus of the plot is on the entirely wrong thing. The most interesting aspect of this game is the political situation. The original plot that overthrows Clive's father Bahumut's father Clive's mother and her plots Titans plans in the Republic and all the wars and politics of this interesting world. The least interesting aspect of FF16's story is the big bad guy God Ultima whose motivations are literally a mystery into the last hour or so. The Ultima storyline is fine. It's not bad or anything but it's pretty generic fantasy action stuff. The game could have had an all-time great video game story like seriously an all-time classic if it had focused on its most interesting aspects. They built a complex and realistic world with interesting politics, social classes and dynamics and this is playing out the entire time but it's almost just background noise to the main story of Ultima's big bad guy plans. Ultima is the least interesting main character in the game. He's the least interesting one. So why is so much of the game about beating an enemy we do not understand? Who literally has inhuman motivations and seemingly no emotions? I love this story in spite of Ultima and certainly not because of him. It's so weird to have him be the whole thing when you've got this amazing song of ice and fire story going on in the back that they did really well. Then there's a host of weird little things that feel sloppy or hand-fisted. Why does Joshua hide from Clive for more than half the game? It makes no sense and it's like frustrating in a three's company sitcom style of way like what's going on? Why would he not just go to Clive and be like, hey, how you doing? Here I am. We're both super powerful monster people. Let's work together. I don't understand. At the end of the game, everyone is saying, oh man, how will we ever get up to Ultima? And I turned to my wife and said, three of these characters literally have wings and one of them is a big Godzilla who seems to fly in half the cutscenes. So why is the story pretending it is some insurmountable issue to get to the top of a mountain? They have wings. They literally have wings. And then other weird little plot things like why would the dominance literally not be the king of every single area? Like how would Clive, the original Clive, not have been the king? If dominance existed in our medieval times, they would not just be people leaving an army. But if dominance existed now, they will be the kings of the world. There's no doubt about it. That's a fact. Like I was pretty consistently arching my eyebrows at some totally implausible things like that. Like how the player character keeps meeting people who somehow survived everything blowing up. See, an all-time great story doesn't have you constantly pointing out plot holes and improbable conveniences. Final Fantasy XVI has a good story with extremely likable characters and incredible best in the world style animation and cutscenes, but it doesn't stick the landing on all the little things. And a bunch of sloppiness takes what could have been one of the best stories ever told in a video game and leaves it as a pretty good story that I started forgetting about three days after I finished the game. There's a big difference between good and great. The first two seasons of Game of Thrones were good. The books are great. Final Fantasy XVI is the first two seasons of Game of Thrones. Odds and Ends. Final Fantasy XVI has been held up as one of the best AAA games of the last few years. I even saw an article saying it's what AAA games should be. Hmm, I think that's kind of weird. The game runs like dog shit. Why does this game get a pass for its awful frame rate issues? Why does nobody talk about how horrendously garbage the side quests are? Why do the plot holes not matter? Why does nobody talk about the many boring combat arenas? Why does nobody talk about progression, which is like literally totally pointless, man? You have this like crafting system and it's just so dumb. Why is there even a crafting and armor system? You just get given new armor like through the game. You don't have to do anything for it. You don't end up like having to work for it. You're not questing for it. You just go to a vendor every couple of levels and oh, there's a new sword for me to buy. Oh, and then I go over to this tab and upgrade it twice. It's like really ham-fisted and badly done. It shouldn't even be in there. Or better yet, it should be good. Why is there no talk about how many boring combat arenas against the same few enemies there are? Final Fantasy XVI is a very good game but almost every single system is just shy of great. Performance is bad, pacing is bad, side quests are terrible, progression is bad. Combat is amazing when you're fighting a boss, very good when you're fighting a yellow elite enemy mixed in with fodder grunts, and really tedious when you're just fighting grunts. Pacing is way too slow and the story is good but not great. I find it weird how some games are mercilessly pilloried for every little issue while others are broadly loved while having the exact same issues. Final Fantasy XVI is probably the most I've ever enjoyed one of these games even going back to the late 80s and early 90s but I still found myself wishing it was even better. It's a game I enjoyed very much but will almost certainly never play this thing again. I look forward to the next Final Fantasy game that this team makes because all the ingredients for an all-time nine out of 10 classic were here. The mix is just a little off. So instead of a nine to nine and a half out of 10, you left us like an eight and a half out of 10. It's well above average, one of the better games of the year but this is no all-time classic, man. It's good, not great. All right, 100% my next video is about how I have not played Destiny 2 since the day I finished the Lightfall campaign and why I think I might be done aside from the final shape and that will be it. And it has nothing to do with the story or the ever-versed store. It is much more important core shit to the design than that. That's definitely coming up next. I've already started writing. All right, listen, if you stayed to the end, do me a big favor, click the like button and share and subscribe and all that kind of stuff. Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.