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final fantasy XVI this article will talk a little bit about some very upsetting topics like sexual assault, sex work and misogyny and all the poor ways the game handles these topics. if that's too much for you right now or you can't handle that then please click away, it will also go into pretty major spoilers after a while so be warned. i did not go into FF16 expecting to like it—I'll fully admit this. i went in with the lowest of low expectations. i hated the marketing that made it look like pretty boring and mildly gross game of thrones angry beardman fanfiction. i disliked its vibe, its energy, the designs of its cast and the "generic fantasy" tone the whole thing reeked of, it looked less like a fun new final fantasy game and more like square trying their best to capitalise on the success of the Witcher games and game of thrones, both series i have longstanding issues with (namely their really weird and gross handling of sexual assault and misogyny, though mainly in the former), issues the game does very much still have, granted. i was afraid that it would come out, be successful and that one of my favourite series which has never really had those kind of issues would now be tainted by it going foreword, very few of these fears really came true, thankfully, though some did and it did still hurt the game for me in a pretty serious way, the games primary inspiration is still very clearly and plainly Game of Thrones, though it's other big inspirations are less like the Witcher and more things like DBZ and kaiju movies, neither of which i really like at all, but it's not as bad as it could have been. i do like it a lot more than i ever thought i would though. it reminds me the most of Devil May Cry 5 in ways mostly negative because i find that both fall into many of the same pitfalls; pitfalls that, again, their series rarely had issue with before, I'll be comparing the two a lot here because it helps me formulate my thoughts a little better. this comparison to DMC5 isn't entirely unfounded either. the game’s combat was worked on by the combat director of DMC5, one Ryota Suzuki, who designed Nero's moveset in DMC4 and 5 which is my favourite DMC moveset (4 specifically, i do think Nero took a big downgrade moving into 5) and the game is basically just an RPG character action game, with the focus being on the character action stuff. the RPG mechanics really only boil down to some equipment you can obtain and upgrade and levels you can increase. it's so not a focus that I'm not even really sure I'd call it an RPG when recommending it to people, it's just a really solid and very long character action game. this is the main area where the comparisons to DMC5 are positive. this game has great combat that's super accessible and fun, though it's combat that does take a step back from some prior games, namely stranger of paradise and FF7 remake. how the games combat works is similar to DMC. you have a melee combat combo with square, but weirdly you only have one combo and a charge attack, which leads to it feeling very basic and a little boring. it also doesn't do much damage. a spell which can be used like Dante's gun, with a charge burst attack and the ability to make its way into sword combos at the right time. it’s a little like squalls gunblade attacks in 8, though this always feels awkward and flow-breaking, the damage you get from it isn't really worth it either (and the default controls of putting this on triangle make it very awkward to use at all). you get a dodge that can give you bonus damage and some items like heals to replenish but that's more or less your lot with the default combat system. where it really shines is in the eikon's and their abilities. you have 8 of these in the base game and they all come with their own cooldown attacks and a big gimmick that makes each one play entirely different with the game’s combat system. take ramuh who gives you a KH style shotlock attack, which i admittedly never found useful; phoenix gives you a dash; garuda gives you Nero's devil bringer but less cool and less useful; Shiva has another ice dash that can freeze enemies; Titan has a parry block thingy; Ifrit has a limit break which works across eikons; bahamut gives you a huge charge spell that was too slow to ever be worth doing; and then odin, the best one, gives you a whole new weapon to work with that is a slightly larger sword that charges zanatzuken as you use it, though it comes much too late to really help the combat system much and it's still stuck with the same limitations like a one combo string, though at least it does give the battle system some seriously needed variety, plus the cancel it gives you and the level 5 zanatsuken with being able to take out mobs in one go during later side-quests. i would have preferred if all the others changed your weapon too. give me cool claws for garuda, some dash attacks for bahamut, let me use titans fists like you can in his cooldowns!! it feels like such a wasted opportunity and it ends with a very limited combat systems. the cooldowns do not help this as much as you would hope, they take a while to refresh and you only have 6 of them at once, if you go for the big damage screen clearers it gets even less fluid since those usually don't recharge for longer than many of the games fights outside of bosses, bosses whom are also annoying to fight sometimes because they limit you in their own ways, like being unable to be juggled, which leaves some eikons like garuda heavily nerfed. you can chain them into some fun combos, like garuda's launcher into its claw attack or the two titan attacks chaining well, but it's not really made for comboing like say, Granblue Relink is. it's a bunch of very disconnected attacks you can kind of chain together if you try. it makes for a very disjointed battle system that doesn't feel as character-action as i would have hoped. it's especially disappointing when games like stranger, with its combo system and stagger bar working much better and being a lot more free flowing and FF7 remake which had better managed its combo strings and its magic attacks. these games had already fixed a lot of the issues this game has and they came out before it! granblue relink even does the cooldown thing far better than it does (and with a far larger pool of movesets to boot!!) but you can also kick enemies with your chocobo, and that's rad. one thing i will say though, and this is totally a me thing, this game *hurt* to play with the ps5 pad, the ps5 controller is already probably my least favourite controller and this game really cemented that for me. it took me so long to beat entirely because i couldn't go more than half an hour without my hands hurting. it's not just this game, sure, most ps5 games i can't play for more than an hour because of how unwieldly the controller is, but in this game it just felt so much worse than usual and it led to it hurting the game experience pretty badly. i wish sony would release some smaller controllers because this isn't really an issue with the game and i won't hold it against it, but it is very unfortunate, the ps5 pad really sucks. you do kind of have a second combat system with the kaiju fights though, these might very well be the game’s highlights, which is impressive considering I usually could nooooot care about kaiju stuff at all. the game just does them with such a great sense of style and scale that i cant help but get caught up with them, it's like peak dumb no thoughts all rad, just nothing but the absolute coolest shit for the entire runtime of the fights, like you rider kick a mountain to death and fight a dragon god in space, how is that not the coolest thing ever? the music here, too, is arguably the games best with the eikon boss theme and titan lost being real track highlights. the combat itself in these segments isn't quite as good, it's just the default system, but with only 2 cooldowns that you veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery slowly unlock (an AOE and a laser attack (similar to bahamut's most powerful move) and a better dash which just gets replaced by a rad lightspeed jump, plus claws instead of a sword. though there’s only a handful of these in the game and a few other short instances where you play as phoenix instead which has a space harrier starfoxxy kind of feel to them. super fun segments. you can even replay them all in the game’s little arcade mode for better scores. you can also play all the chapter dungeons and boss fights there! they're the reason i feel like a lot of the people will end up wanting to play them. they're the best showcase of spectacle on the system yet! the particle effects and the sheer scale of them is a real sight to behold. Like, you've never seen anything like this outside of *maybe* Azura’s Wrath, but even then, this may still top that in some regards. personal highlights for me were the bahamut fight, the ifrit fight and the titan fight which is probably the best singular part of the game on the whole. there's nothing else quite like it anywhere else. beyond the combat though you don't really have a ton to do other than the side content and exploring your two homebases, the first a fairly basic and small one set up in some pretty cool looking ruins and a larger one with a killer view later in the game. this one has a little more to do in it. in here you can listen to music you find, talk to some NPC's, claim rewards, look at collectibles in your room, play a DMC5-style training void, shop and read up on lore. it's basic but the place is really cozy, the second one especially, and the music for them both is really nice, though again the second base wins out there. you can also check up on sidequests and collect renown rewards, something the game gives you for finishing side content—basically a reputation system which rewards you for finishing side stuff. it's pretty minor but it's nice to see the messages people in the world leave for you. there's a similar system in your room where you can read letters the cast will send you as you hit checkpoints. there are also some side quests which, while a little bland in objectives, do give you some of the game’s best mini stories and flesh out the world massively, maybe even too much. the game does keep super important scenes and lore hidden behind these that feels like it should have been part of the base-game, especially with the companion quests that give you items for your room. entire arcs finish here and it's weird you can just miss them entirely. there are also some hunts you can do, optional bosses around the world you can find and kill for XP, money and renown—these are a ton of fun and i did all of them the second i could. i die for optional bosses like that; plus, you talk to a moogle to get them! that's rad! there are dozens of them and some make up for some of the games best boss fights, even if they aren't as flashy as a lot of the actual main fights available. i love how a few even make the hunt locations a little puzzle. the game is sadly missing superbosses, though. there are two S rank hunts that are the closest you'll get but both are more or less re-skins of campaign bosses, which is a shame. the DLC does give you something a little closer to that if you want it. the length will run you about 40-50 hours, more if you want all that side stuff and even more than that if you end up going for the DLC's or the alternate difficulties, which is, i think, a little too long. the areas in the game are a little too samey, and the combat is not deep enough to really make the game stay fresh the whole time, even though the story mostly does justify the length well enough and it's also not a super tough game either since it has frequent checkpoints and saves, and it replenishes all your potions after death, too (and if that's not enough you can increase the amount replenished if you do the right sidequests). although the game’s unlockable final fantasy mode, which is like a harder postgame mode, does seem to mix up the game enough to actually justify a second run through, with stronger enemy variety and higher level caps. might try it myself one day, there's also a NG+ with all your stuff remaining unlocked, too, which is nice. the music is one of the areas the game undeniably hits. Masayoshi Soken is here again after 14, and his work is killer. it's not as weird or varied as a 14 expansion’s OST, sure, but there are a few tracks here and there that do something interesting genre-wise. it feels safer, but it's by no means any lesser for it. it's a great OST full of killer tracks. it was mainly done by Masayoshi Soken, who i saw live this year at Distant Worlds Paris! they played a good few songs from 14 and 16 with the original vocalist, even. i was mainly there for the 13, 8, 10 and 15 stuff, and i cried during those songs. his work includes 14 and its expansions, but also the square mario games, the lord of arcana and lord of apocalypse games, dawn of mana and stranger of paradise. Takafumi Imamura, Daiki Ishikawa, Saya Yasaki and Justin Frieden are also credited on the game however, with each mostly working on just this, 14 or 7 remake. some of the games best tracks include things like the latter two hideaway themes, not that the first is bad but it just isn't as memorable as the titan lost music, the eikon fight theme as well as the normal boss theme which might just be the two best boss themes in the whole series. Particular favorites include the game’s ending theme "My Star", the jazzy desert theme, and i love the main forest track, too. the track "our terms" has some major FF15 energy to it almost like cape calm or something from the Amnesia: Memories OST. twilight, where the heart is, founders footsteps, idylls of the empire, into the mire and some of the ruin/ash themes are all also well worth listening too, plus some of the reprisals of series staples like prelude and the FF1 menu theme that pop up here and there during some cutscenes. it's a killer tracklist and there's a ton of it, too. some of the playlists I'm seeing have like 200+ tracks, so there's a lot of good music to listen to there, even if you don't intend on actually playing the game. the game’s graphics can be a little mixed for me. the game has more realistic and, for lack of a better term, "normal" look with it's environments than a lot of the kinds of RPG's I'm used to playing and i find that can be a little hit and miss. some like the forests and some of the game’s nicer towns can look really good, same with a really nice savana-y section in the lategame. at times it just looks like chunks of actual Irish countryside or parts of Africa, and when these areas do come about, they're a real sight to behold. at other times, though, like much of the game’s first half with the dead towns and the grassy beach areas or the area near the veil, they can be very grey and dull. the areas near the port are the best example of this, just dreary and very boring to walk through. and in the game’s final chunk it has some weird pinkish filters over the areas that end up making even the more interesting bits all feel very samey (the second DLC even makes fun of that design choice in its opening cutscene). the area in ash also grows very tiring very fast. cool though it can initially be as a bleak and downright scary zone, it's also entirely grey and muddy and dead, and it's just not fun to explore. it isn't all realistic, though, and when it does go a little more colourful and fun, like with the c'iethy ruins, the various hideaways or the desert with the almost emerald looking water. a lot of the games dungeons also end up being much more interesting than its larger open worldy chunks. a specifically beautiful one set in a volcano, some fun town segments, an especially good one set in a large port town overrun and another set in clive’s home castle which had some neat bits of going over scenery from earlier all destroyed and dead (something the game does later in some of the smaller towns as they get overrun by the game’s not-zombie enemies), and another bit in a very fancy ruin with a huge blue crystal towering over you and some pearly white ruins. the dungeons are a real highlight in the looks department, even if they're not as varied as i would like. that lack of variety is an issue the game has in general. most of the game outside of the desert zone is really just forest, port or town. even the dungeons don't give as much variety as you would want. there's no snow areas or anything really beachy outside of the dreary port zones. it leads to the game feeling very one-note, and that is a big shame. I'd take a lot of the other FF worlds over it. the game’s darkness and more realistic tone aren't necessarily bad, though; it makes it less interesting for me for sure, but it's undeniably the vibe the game is going for and the grey dullness of parts certainly does give it the atmosphere it's going for. it's a darker, deader world, and the greying towns and grasslands work great for that. the landscapes can often feel as bleak as the tone the game is going for. it's another area that's similar to DMC5 in regards to the area's it hits and misses. while it's undeniably pretty like DMC5 is, both games end up struggling to be very interesting at times because of the realism they strive for. in the case of DMC5 it's in its grey-zone streets and big bland demon tree levels, that complete lack of a colour palate. it's a similar thing to many area's in FF16, though i think with 16 it lends itself to the tone in a way that works better. in DMC5 it's just boring because it's boring. However, I'd take the nicer looking worlds of the prior games in both cases in a second. the story is where the game starts to lose me a little, while it's not all bad—and i do want to get into it's positive points in a second before i rush into the negatives—it's also a very flawed story with weird pacing issues, very gross sexual assault themes and a whole *ton* of misogyny that damages the game to the point that, despite all i love about it with the cast and the boss fights and the music, it feels like it'll be a curse hanging over the game any time i think of it at length. it's pretty severe, and if any of those things about the game bother you, i think this may be one best to skip. so know that going in, I'll also be going in pretty heavy on spoilers. regarding what I like, i love the cast (which I'll talk about on its own later), i like the structure with the destroying of all the crystals and with each nation being its own little segment with towns and dungeons and i love how the whole thing, even though it's just a few open areas and dungeons, feels like a huge adventure spanning a globe. it's very impressive. i love the sense of scale with the boss fights, i love how the music makes every emotional scene shine and i love how the game, in the moment, always manages to get me emotional over every fight and every confrontation, the ways the game tells its story and the actual beats of that story are all amazing, especially in its more grand kaiju fights or the eldritch horror boss typhon and the entire crystalline dominion segment, it's like the one of the coolest Shonen anime in game form, it's no bleach or JJK but it's at least up there with the likes of a Fairy Tail or Naruto. i love the entire ending chunk and how the game made me cry multiple times, i love the dumb bookend with a book called final fantasy, i love the end credits themes and my star, i love that they managed to get Kenshi Yonezu for the game. i love the silly banter and the fun moments where the cast all comes together and feel like a real RPG party, i love all the random side-dorks in the hideaway and the best boy Gav. the whole hideaway setup is cool too with them being liberator outlaws, that's rad. i love a few of the random tangents the game has like making Mid a boat, and i think Mid in general is a great character, a real highlight in the cast and one of the series more fun and inventive characters. her sidequests are great too and have one of my favourite payoffs. i love how the side quests actually have stories that matter (especially the one where the slave owners get merked by their own guard dog). i love how well that world is fleshed out and i love some of the idea's it presents and i think the "active time lore" (a wiki you can check at any point) system is one of the best additions to the game. i love how much weight so many of the games deaths had for me. cid and clive’s both had me crying for so long after, even now they're still making me feel emotional. i love the entire drake’s fang segment of the game in the volcano. it's the main section where Jill gets to shine and it's amazing, though it's also a shame it's more or less the only time she ever really gets to shine. i love the confrontation with Barnabas on the tower in the rain. it's the actual coolest thing and the chunks on the boat and in the huge water trench are rad as hell, too. i love how shocking and raw the phoenix gate stuff is and i love the twists that come when you return, and also the chunk where you get to play as twink Clive in the swamp also owns and i wish his final design stayed closer to that than his final version. i love the entire final chunk with the ending that made me cry, the amazing music choices there and the dumbest QTE in the game for punching the final boss to death. i love the crystal stuff really, i think it's a really cool subversion that actually manages to work really well and they're so pretty when you deal with them. i also love how they make the latter half of the game feel like a zombie apocalypse scenario. some really cool scenes in there, and i loved how it almost dived into horror at points. despite my issues with it, there is a lot to love about this story. in its best chunks and moments, it can rival some of the better games in the series, but those moments aren't the whole game and it's downsides are pretty major. now for the negatives: the game has very weird views on its female cast. it's strange, too, since 14 didn't really have the issues this game has. while it could be weird about sexual assault a few times (i have not hit stormblood and i know it takes a nosedive with that there) it's also very much not misogynistic. the game has tons of women who are pivotal to the story, have agency and are rad as hell. yshtola, yda, minfilia, the archer and white mage in the warriors of darkness, two of the leaders of the biggest nations in the basegame are women, and even the expansion has characters like ysele and hilda! 16 does not quite have this. beyond a few characters like Mid and Tharja who are excellent, every woman fits one of 3 whole catagories: love interest (be it to clive or to cid, because of course the game’s two strong fighter women just can't exist without being romantically involved with one of the leads, oh no), sex worker (god does this game love its sex workers, it's gross! it's exploitative! it's degrading! and as a former sex worker dealing with lifelong trauma stemming from it, i think this game’s glorification of it is really disgusting and damaging and we should maybe not glorify an industry built on the exploitation of women? just an idea) or a merchant/service like the teacher who exposits lore or the woman you claim renown from. it's the kind of shit you'd have thought we'd have left behind in the 70's. Fuck, the game even has a transaction of power scene that takes place right after sex, like it's a fucking reward (and of course after this, said character then takes a back seat for the whole game despite being one of the game’s strongest fighters). at times like that, it's so blatantly and grossly misogynistic that i'm not even sure it’s *intentional* because it's a level of gross ignorance that can only really come from not thinking about what you're doing in the slightest. this is another area where it reminded me a lot of DMC5, a series that has historically never been as good with its female cast compared to FF, but it still treated them with much more respect than 5 did. where 16 sidelines and disempowers it's female cast, DMC5 does to an arguably far worse degree, stripping both of the DMC’s main women of their weapons and powers after losing a fight to a male character, making them into fodder boss fights where they then have to be saved, naked, by the male main cast in a gross fanservice-y way and then having them sit in a car for the rest of the game while the male cast does the bulk of the actual work. Dante even being given their main weapons to use because cutting them out of the gameplay as fully fleshed out characters just wasn't quite enough for the game in the same way FF16 does with Jill and Benedikta's movesets, tacking them on to Clive instead of giving them a chance to be played as. both games are content to fuck over the women in their stories just to make the men extra cool, and in 16's case with all its talk of *men* dying in their own ways, it just comes across as so gross and patronizing, especially when the game’s women are never quite given that same opportunities. the focus on men isn’t the core of the issue. there isn't really anything wrong with focusing a story on men. i like that actually, i think that's rad! i love otome games and BL and those always do that and are better for it. i think even in action games and RPG's you can do that very well, like take a look at FF15! A game that does this, it sidelines its female cast for it a little bit, but it doesn't feel outright sexist for doing so because of the reasons why it does it (part of that is probably because it's a game full of fujoshi fanservice with extremely attractive men, but still), it doesn't hate its women and they do at least have marginally more agency than the women in 16. they were even going to be playable in the DLC, and lunafreya even has the movie more or less centred around her, it also doesn't make them weirdo sex objects or attempt to degrade them. they're at least given that much dignity in ways the cast of DMC5 and FF16 just aren't. what I'm getting at is that the issue is when that focus on men comes at the *expense* of women and their dignity, when they *must* be sex objects or evil (usually a stand-in for the fears and dislikes that men may have: see clive’s mom being more or less just a strawman) or damsels, something both DMC5 and FF16 do. both games’ female casts exist entirely as either tools for the men (charon or nico) or as sex objects and damsels, (both in the case of DMC5), so that the game can focus on the men and their desires and ambitions. it doesn't give the women anything to really do because that'd get in the way of the male characters and, indeed, the desired male audience. in both cases it just makes for worse stories and worse characters so frankly it's a lose-lose situation, i mean would *anyone* take these interpretations over say, a playable Lady with her DMC4SE moveset or a playable jill with unique moves and weapons? there is also the even bigger elephant in the room, the sexual assault. now it is thankfully never shown so much as just implied on a few occasions as well as showing you the lead up to it before cutting to said character having a breakdown and going berserk, where you then have to, because having one of the games two warrior women being sexually assaulted just wasn't quite enough, kill her during a sexual assault-motivated breakdown and stealing her powers (where her corpse is then later desecrated for the furthering of a man’s storyline). Jill is implied to have possibly been subjected to it as well. it's gross and crass and cruel and unnecessary, these storylines could have happened without these topics. they could be removed and the game's story would be better for it. it makes the game’s misogyny stick out all the more since it seemingly only happens to the major women in the game. i just, i don't know, i hate this. it makes it harder for me to engage with art and it makes me sad how much it's being forced into media like this, all for just the sake of shock value or to make a world seem darker, and it's all so unneeded, this world is already dark enough. the game does a great job of showing that otherwise. why did we have to throw this in there and ruin all of that? because now it's always going to be a nail sticking out of this game that just can't be hammered down. it'll always remain a sticking point for me almost no matter how far out i get from its release, and i don't want that to be the case. this game can and should be better than that. it's difficult to tell whether it's all on the game’s writers for having shitty sexist views on women and even worse views on sexual assault considering that the kinds of things and types of genres the game lifts its themes from wholesale—things like Berserk or Game of Thrones—the former having some of the most gross edgelord shock-bait depictions of the topic I've seen (seriously fuck everything about berserk), and the latter being almost as shameless about it, albeit to a much lesser degree. it's clear it's mainly influenced by those things and that to some degree, some of its shittyness probably comes from those influences, influences that to me have damaged the fantasy genre almost irreparably to the point it's became a genre I've had to start avoiding. just take one look at many of the more popular fantasy media of the past decade, with edgelord weirdo SA porn garbage (derogatory) like fear & hunger, goblin slayer or redo of healer all somehow getting big. it's effectively became a genre all on its own, and i hate it. we don't need final fantasy turning into that. that's my point above all else, i think even *if* the topic was handled well, which it just isn't, this doesn't really need to be in a final fantasy game. it doesn't need to be in *any* game as far as I'm concerned, but doubly so the game where you ride a vigilante chocobo and rider kick a mountain to death. it does nothing but harm the experience. it for sure has some fucking weird views on female sexuality on the whole even beyond that, like with how benedikta is shamed for being very sexually open in a way that benefits her while the sex workers the game so prominently features aren't, presumably because their existence, as well as jill’s, who is the only other woman here shown in a sexual light, benefits men in ways benedikta's wouldn't. Slut shaming, and furthermore, only for when women take control of their own sex lives. it just all compounds and compounds. DMC5 never quite had this issue, though that game's handling of sex in general is a lot more puerile and immature compared to even FF16's handling of the topic, which in comparison almost feels mature and well thought out. for as much as i dislike aspects of this games sexuality, it never feels as pervy (derogatory) as DMC5. i want to believe it's a case of bad influences over bad writers, that they're just writing what they know and what they know happens to be really, really shitty, but after a point, you just have to admit that there is a chance that they're just a little shitty about women, and that really sucks. it's up to you wether this'll bother you or not. this might even be something i don't associate the game with a few months from now, but in the moment all of this really just gets to me and is inseparable from the game itself. the game’s stances on slavery are also really not much better? it's not as horrifically handled since at least it's *trying* to say something progressive rather than how regressive it was with its female cast, but it's also, just, not great.... I'm not as against this being part of the story like how i don't think sexual assault should be, like ever. i think with slavery you can do it well and you can do things with it, but they just don't. while early on it is used super effectively to get you into clive’s mindset as a person who is heavily discriminated against, and i love that the game is trying successfully to convey points on how bigotry harms others, maybe it'll really speak to the right people who may hold those beliefs and i think that could be very important. that handling of the feeling of being a discriminated class is one of the main things i think the game handles really well, but it's just got so many little weird bits that it does make me wonder if they maybe shouldn't have. most of the actual lore of it, like how the brands work, is locked to sidequests, and if you skip those it's outright never expanded on, and once Clive gets rid of his brand, the game just forgets about it almost. it also exalts clive’s father as being an almost civil rights icon for.... being nice to them?? which yeah sure but he *still explicitly kept slaves*, wether he was doing good work or not, and the game does bring up in side quests that he did *eventually* plan on *maybe* doing something about it, but it's just so weird that "maybe eventually i guess" is enough to absolve him for being a part of the problem, it's just very strange to me. the game also does some weird things with implication of SA among bearers and at times it gets downright torture miseryporn in a few of the sidequests like the one with the wolves and it just comes across as gross (and again sexist as is with the case with the SA, they even imply that jill was at one point which leaves us at 2:2 with the game’s warrior women also being sexual assault victims, fuck that). the game’s ending is also a little weird? with slavery effectively being solved by just, eliminating the differences in the slave caste and making them normal. while it's justified in the story and i think its fine overall, if you read into it more than a little it starts to feel more than a little weird. there are also some pretty major pace issues. many of the sidequests sure can but even in the maingame you have tons of little chunks that remind me mostly of how heavensward would randomly distract from its huge big political dragon plot to help bug people for 5 hours. you have tons of those moments here, helping Goetz or the stuff in the desert city, they feel mostly pretty pointless. even if i do like some of the quests in there and what they add to the world, they just drag a lot, but they're not the biggest deal in the world, just a super mild annoyance, and stuff like the sidequests will really only become an issue for completionists. the cast, however, is a lot more solid than the story. Clive is great, he's a silly dork and he's just pleasant to be around, like a chuuni even though he's in a fantasy world, and his VA does a great job with it, though i wish he had a better design. his design never fully grew on me as much as i did like his rage mode and main armour. while i have severe issues with how they handle her, Jill is a great side protag, and i wish she got to actually be more of one, as she's kind of wasted. at least her arc is kind of complete and she has a great design if you use her alt costume. Joshua is a perfect character and i love him and his design, perfect fantasy BF, the bishie i wish Clive was. the rest of clive’s gang are great too, gav is undeniably the best character in the game and stole every scene he had (and had better chemistry with Clive than jill did, though so did Clive and Joshua). cid is a close second best character in the game with a killer voice, super charming and funny, and again like gav, stole every single scene he was in. he also got some of the biggest tears out of me. clive’s whole side cast is just great in general, the fun uncle Byron, Dion who is amazing and great and i wish got more screentime, all the cool NPC's around the hide away, especially tarja, mid, Viviane and Charon who are probably the best the game handles its female cast, and the game even has tons of background npcs in different towns and stuff that come back and usually have some interesting role to play in the stories and sidequests, it's a nice recurring cast, and i like how even seemingly inconsequential NPC's like the mayor of the wine town or the inn owner have whole quest chains and backstories to them, it's very cool. i do wish the game had these characters in a real party though. there's a chunk later on where a lot of the hideaway gang is under siege in a town and there's some really fun scenes of them all fighting together and it made the game feel at it's most final fantasy, fun characters all getting along and fighting and having fun interactions. it was by a pretty good margin my favourite part of the game and i wish we had more like that. the villains are a little more hit and miss. i love benedikta even though she's massively underutilized and handled poorly. i like the twink underboss for Barnabas, he's fun and campy and i think there's some stuff with ultima that's at least interesting, same with the duchess, though the latter is also wrapped up in a lot of misogyny as is typical for the game, but at least it's interesting misogyny. the rest of the villains are just kind of lame though. Hugo is the best of them but he's pretty one note, same with Barnabas, and they ultimately don't do much with ultima either. he's more interesting as an idea, really. i will say, even if I'm a little iffy on the cast designs overall, some armour looks great even on characters i dislike, but i think the game is a little bit too focused on its beardmen mascmen for me. sure you have a few usual FF type of designs like the silver haired twink who serves Barnabas or adult Joshua or Dion, and i love all of them a lot, but they for sure feel a little sidelined and more like exceptions to the norm here. they're more or less the only members of the cast I'd really call well designed, bar jill, benedikta and my liking of clive's outfits. the rest of the cast is very typical fantasy. lots of generic fantasy men. even when they're good characters its hard for me to get excited when i see designs like Barnabas or Hugo or like most of the games side cast. they just lack a sense of style even though they do fit the world the game is going for. maybe this kind of realism just doesn't do anything for me. but even having those few interesting designs does put it above DMC5 and it's bland and lame redesigns for its cast. seriously what were they thinking with those Nero and Dante designs? and Vergil just looks like literally some guy they got off the street and threw a trench coat on. they hurt my soul with that game’s twink death redesigns. 5 did have some solid designs for the women though so it gets the absolute mildest of praise for killing it with Nico, Lady and Trish's designs, even if i think the latter both looked better in DMC4. if you want to play the game, you have a good amount of ways to do it these days. while it launched as a ps5 exclusive it's since been put on PC and xbox if if somehow that's still your platform of choice, it was even on gamepass i think, though I'd say the way to go is still the ps5 version since it's the only one with a physical release, which has dropped in price significantly and can pretty easily be gotten now for about 20-25, with the DLC running you maybe an extra 15 since it goes on sale a lot too, though i feel like you'd be waiting a while to get the base game for so cheap on a digital platform. the game had some post-launch patches, letting you do things like changing the controls that at least makes things like the magic spells more usable, and two DLC packs, echoes of the fallen, which is a huge new dungeon with some extra bosses like omega. it's basically a super dungeon combat gauntlet and you also have the rising tide, which is a full expansion with some new eikons, a new overworld to explore and a whole story focusing on the lost eikon, leviathan. these are both pretty cool but I'll go over them on their own separately, just since i have a lot to say about them. Clive also appeared in tekken, weirdly. it's not super relevant but i found that kind of rad, it's one of my main reasons i want to play tekken 8, he even gets phoenix gate as a stage! it was the first real big AAA game by the team too, with their only prior projects being the two dragon quest builders games which seem neat enough, even if the combo of dragon quest and Minecraft just isn't appealing to me at all. Although, i do own one of those two on vita. for a first time making a project of this scale it is very impressive, i have to say. while yoshi-p often gets credited for directing for this game, it wasn't actually his gig at all. that would instead be the role of Hiroshi Takai, long time square alum who worked on games like the bouncer, the last remnant, ps2 romancing saga and much of FF14. it fits that he directed the last remnant because that is the game from square that this reminds me of the most—fantastic game, too. Yoshida likely did play a large role in the game since he'd done a lot of press and was an overall producer, but this doesn't seem as much his project as i initially assumed myself. to bring it around to the DMC5 comparisons one last time, i don't dislike either game, in fact i like both a lot, they're fun and charming and both have killer OST's but they're also just, the low points of their respective series in a lot of ways, thematically, stylistically, and in terms of their representation, issues with sexism and in going overtly edgy and crass when neither really needed to, both don't even play as well as many of the previous games in their respective series. in both cases they ended up making the games themselves far worse overall for these changes. both had all the potential in the world to be something special, but threw a lot of it away in chasing a newer audience, much more toxic audience at that, that would have considered the older games too weird or niche to be worth playing, and while that worked fine for DMC5, sadly, it didn't work here, which is interesting to me, the game was by no means a flop but it also wasn't a hit no matter how many times square tried to push it, it's also interesting that people were so much more willing to accept DMC5 despite all it's issues with tone and style and yet FF16 was a step too far for them, it's very strange. i would ultimately recommend you play both games anyway and make your own mind up, i went into both games expecting to dislike them and i came out of both still enjoying them. even with their issues, they both have wonderful points, and i love them both. i think it's a testament to that that i *can* talk at this length about both even when I'm talking about their negatives, because there's so much there to love and i know they can be better than they ultimately are. i think in the end I'll remember the game’s good things more than i will my issues with it. i think it's important sometimes to play things you might not like because then you can figure things out for yourself, to better understand yourself and how you feel about the things you like and dislike and maybe even come away from them with something new to love that you might not have had before. but above all that, i think it's better to be informed fully instead of just taking an opinion on face value, especially the opinions of others, no matter how overly long their writings on it are, which is something that goes for both me and other creators. never take what i say about a game to be a fact. always take it as a jumping off point to go and experience a game yourself. please, the last thing i ever want is for people to parrot what i say instead of going out and experiencing it for themselves, and it's always something i worry about any time i go more in depth in talking about a game like this. the words of others are never, and will never be, a substitute for the real lived experience, so go out and give this game a try for yourself.