I’ve been playing Final Fantasy games since I was a kid. I’m no stranger to the franchise, even some of the ones with… questionable quality. With that in mind, I was very curious to see how Final Fantasy XVI fared after the logistical nightmare that was Final Fantasy XV’s development. Final Fantasy XVI is a game that gives me a variety of conflicted feelings, for better and worse.

Before we get into the meat of things, I want to clarify something because I can already hear the comments rolling in. I have some very clear issues with Final Fantasy XVI’s gameplay. However, it has nothing to do with the fact that it “isn’t turn-based” or “isn’t traditional.” The Final Fantasy franchise has undergone so many changes over the years, it didn’t surprise me that this one took a more action-oriented turn, especially after playing (and enjoying) Final Fantasy XV.

With that being said, my standards for the gameplay mechanics themselves are relatively high. Additionally, my review took so long because I ran into some very real issues with the game’s lack of accessibility. Final Fantasy VII Remake and Final Fantasy XV both showed that you can have an action-focused combat style in a Final Fantasy game and still make it accessible and enjoyable to fans and newcomers alike.

In a few different ways, I feel like the development team responsible for Final Fantasy XVI (Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit III) learned nothing from the last few years of RPGs produced at the company. Before I dive deep into my complaints with the gameplay though, let’s get into what Final Fantasy XVI’s premise is.

In Final Fantasy XVI, you play Clive Rosfield, the first son of the Duke of Roseria. Without going into spoiler territory, you play through parts of Clive’s teens, twenties, and thirties, and experience a sprawling tale surrounding the fate of the world of Valisithea itself.

I really like the way the story is presented in Final Fantasy XVI. While there have been comparisons to Game of Thrones in terms of its worldbuilding, I think it is more apt to say that the development team went back to the basics of the franchise. Many of the better Final Fantasy games (specifically IV, VI, VII, IX, and XII) dealt with political factions and the concept of warring groups with varying agendas.

I’d also argue that Final Fantasy XVI has gone back to the concept of having a theme. Outside of the entire franchise sharing the “people coming together to defy fate” theme, Final Fantasy XVI deals with strong topics like the bonds of family, wealth inequality, imbalances of power, and more. In a lot of ways, I think the plot is where Final Fantasy XVI shines most, though in some ways the franchise still suffers from sausage-fest syndrome.

The storyline has a darker tone than most Final Fantasy games, yet it is engaging and intriguing as you progress. Even during my frustrations with the combat, I found myself wanting to keep playing just to experience more of the plot. Each new character that came on screen made me want to know more about them, their motivations, and their goals. Luckily, there’s an “Active Lore” system in the game that allows you to pause cutscenes (or read in your menu) to refresh your memory on terms and connections between characters.

Getting into gameplay, if I had to summarize my feelings on Final Fantasy XVI’s combat I’d say that they’ve leaned so far away from the franchise’s roots that if you gave FFXVI a different name and branded it as a Fantasy-Action game, it wouldn’t feel out of place. The combat is action (and combo) oriented, with Clive being able to dodge, attack, cast magic, and use various “Eikonic Abilities” all with different buttons or button combinations.

Without spoiling the circumstances, eventually, Clive will gain access to abilities from other Eikons aside from the abilities you start with. You can switch between Eikons on the fly and can utilize their abilities in conjunction with one another. They don’t share cooldowns either, so you can use all of them in succession if you would like.

Going back to the RPG elements being stripped away, aside from changing Clive’s gear and a “leveling” system where your stats increase as you gain XP, you gain ability points to put in a skill tree. The skill tree expands as you progress, but it feels less like customizing Clive’s abilities and more like choosing which inevitable upgrade you might want next. Of course, you can also invest ability points into skills to upgrade them, making them more effective.

The movement away from deep RPG elements wouldn’t be such a problem if the elements they replaced it with weren’t frustrating or annoying. For example, the dev team clearly took note of the success of Souls-likes and tried to cram the concept of limited-healing items inside. You can only carry a certain number of potions, high potions, and other consumables. Each item has a cap, though you can increase the cap somewhat by doing various side quests.

This wouldn’t be a problem if enemies weren’t damage sponges. Non-Fodder enemies have a “will gauge” which is essentially armor. By depleting the gauge by half, it stuns enemies for a moment, and by depleting it fully you stagger them until the bar refills. This makes fights with enemies you’ve fought before (that aren’t boss enemies) take forever, and if you aren’t careful about dodging at the right time it’ll cause you to lose health and need to use a potion.

You can’t travel back to town unless you leave a region, so if you’re in the middle of a dungeon and you’re out of potions, your only option is to die so that when you respawn your potions will be refilled. Personally, I think this is a ridiculous idea. Why not leave traveling vendors at the entrances of dungeons? Or even a moogle?

Torgal has a healing function in battle, but he can only heal a percentage of the damage you’ve taken. Additionally, there are battles where Torgal isn’t available, not to mention the fact that other “party members” are mostly useless in fights except for doing small amounts of damage. Without giving Clive himself a cure spell, it makes the problem of a lack of steady potions all the more obvious. I understand why people like Souls-likes, but FFXVI is not a game that benefits from these mechanics.

My frustrations with this were compounded by the fact that boss fights also have will gauges, which means that boss fights also take a long time. Because of the action-oriented nature of the combat, after fighting no less than three boss fights in the span of an hour, my hands were hurting so badly that I had to stop playing. I’d only played for two hours at that point. The bosses had so much health that between them and the QTEs (I’ll get to that later) I had button-mashed myself into hand-cramp city.

In fact, Final Fantasy XVI is easily the most inaccessible action game I’ve played in years. They recently added a motion blur option in an update, though it baffles me why that wasn’t included at launch. Additionally, there are a lot of other missing options. They do have backgrounds for subtitles, subtitle sizes, and a variety of text-based accessibility, but it is strange to see a game missing so much in the field of accessibility.

A big example of missing the mark on accessibility is the prevalence of QTEs. The team behind Final Fantasy XVI made a point to mention that QTEs were there to “enhance the experience” and yet wouldn’t be required to succeed. That assessment isn’t entirely accurate. Without spoilers, there is an Eikon battle early on that is timed. The game doesn’t tell you it is timed, but if you don’t defeat the Eikon fast enough you’ll get a game over and must start halfway through the fight again.

The trick of this is that if you miss even a single QTE in this fight, you aren’t going to be able to button mash to attack fast enough (at least I couldn’t) to damage the boss enough to win. In more standard boss or mini-boss battles, the QTEs (called cinematic strikes, cinematic evasions, and cinematic clashes) either cause you to be damaged if you fail or it will make the battle last longer because you won’t deal that extra damage by winning the clash or strike QTE.

Cinematic Clashes are frustrating because it is yet another instance of “mash the square button repeatedly” which is an inaccessible type of QTE that I thought was being used less and less. News flash, it doesn’t make things more cinematic when my thumbs are cramping.

For those of us who have issues with muscle fatigue, Arthritis, hand-cramping, and other physical problems, a difficulty option would be necessary here. The “Timely Accessories” might look like an accessibility option at first glance, since they allow you to execute perfect dodges, parries, and other actions more easily. However, upon further research after my article on the Timely Accessories, I was informed that they were never meant for accessibility at all.

FFXVI’s director said this in an interview about the Timely Accessories: “This being a Final Fantasy, we understand that a large portion of our audience likes the turn-based systems because they aren’t good at action games. I know what to create for them…[but] you have a whole audience of players that are maybe not used to this actually.”

He went on to mention that they wanted to make FFXVI appeal to action game beginners as well as veterans. Further on during the promo for the game though, when they talked about the Timely Accessories a bit more, they mentioned this – “You’ll need to choose which assists you need the most and prioritize them. Even then, they’ll be taking up an accessory slot that you could normally use for other equipment, which the team hopes will gently push players toward removing the rings as they get more comfortable with the combat.”

This is a major problem because, without accessibility options that either provide difficulty options or auto-complete QTEs, it leaves a lot of players without access to elements that make the game more palatable for them. I’ve played a lot of action games. I’ve beaten Hades as well as Bayonetta 1 and 2, but FFXVI is so demanding on my hands that I can only play a few hours at a time, less if I’m facing bosses back-to-back. By punishing players for using tools you made *for them* (reducing your equipment options), they’re basically enforcing hostile game design.

There are also accessibility options that attempt to make things better for some people but are wholly inaccessible for others. There is an option that provides visual cues on screen if sounds are going on at the periphery of your vision, so you know whether there are attacks coming in behind you, etc. This is meant to be a great option for deaf people, and I’m sure the option is very useful, but I noticed a major problem.

The visual cues are green and red, which means that if you have a deaf or hearing-impaired player who is also colorblind, they may not even be able to notice the cues in the heat of combat. It honestly feels like accessibility was an afterthought, or at the very least was undervalued here. It is a shocking and disappointing problem for a AAA game these days when games like FFVII Remake, God of War (2018), and other popular action titles and action RPGs have a whole host of accessibility features.

This is why I feel so conflicted about FFXVI. I really like the story being told, and the characters (for the most part) are well-crafted and believable. The visuals are gorgeous, the world-building is stellar, and there are so many things to experience in the world of Valisithea. Even the side characters seem interesting. Though with the issues surrounding the combat, the AI of party members being terrible, and the lack of accessibility features, I find myself feeling disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, the combat is flashy and fun in short bursts, but the enemies take so much damage that it feels like you’re fighting a wall. It really does feel like they missed out on including things that actively would benefit the game while trying to incorporate elements from other series that are popular.

Overall, if you like Final Fantasy games and you like action games like Devil May Cry, the Bayonetta franchise, or other “character-action” games, then FFXVI is a great option for you. However, I do not think this is the shining next step in the Final Fantasy franchise that the developers want it to be. In a lot of ways, it is a step backward, not forward. The story is great and the characters are interesting, but the gameplay, accessibility, and combat systems need serious work.

A PlayStation 5 Review Copy of Final Fantasy XVI was provided by Square Enix for this review.

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Final Fantasy XVI

$59.99 USD

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Great Story and Premise
• Interesting Characters
• Beautiful Visuals
• Lots of Side Quests and Content
• Eikon Battles are Interesting

Cons

• Very Inaccessible Combat
• Limiting Healing Items is Frustrating
• Too Many QTE's
• Lack of Common Accessibility Features
• Terrible Companion AI