Not trophy related - Game opinion

[Icerunner45]

On 8/12/2023 at 10:43 AM, VenlafaxineHead said:

My honest thoughts: (Also, it's been about a month since I beat it so I can't recall some things...) 

 

I'm a 45-year old man. I know this sounds irrelevant; however, I believe there is some relevance as I'll later espouse on. 

 

I preordered FFXVI after reading rave reviews. I didn't want to watch any gameplay because I don't like spoilers. I haven't played a FF game since X so I'm pretty out of the loop. I play a fair amount of games and have my whole life. I don't play every single game that comes out and some of them I get to years later...but for FF I was pretty excited to see what the buzz was all about. 

 

After playing through the entire game and completing all the side quests I have to say my experience was.... fairly empty. If I had to rate the game I'd give it around a 5/10. Here is my rationale....

 

Pros:

- Beautiful, cinematic cut scenes and quick time events - some of the best I've ever seen. 

- Sometimes interesting combat/special moves/power ups that can make for interesting combos and fun. 

- Overall main story was pretty good and kept me interested. 

- Active Time Lore was a really cool feature that I hope other RPGs implement in the future. 

- Nods to older games in the series that were appreciated. 

 

Cons:

- The open world is dead. It felt very (cut and paste) with assets just being added for no reason. 90% of the time you came across a house/building/structure you couldn't go inside at all. It was just added for decoration. 

- Felt like a PS3 game most of the time with invisible boundaries, inability to climb/mantle anything. 

- Side quests were abysmal. Extreme waste of time fetch-quest, boring nonsense that added nothing to the game. 

- Combat was too easy. While it could be fun to mix things up with varied abilities; I found myself button-mashing most of the time and easily winning any fight. I died one time in my entire play through - playing on normal difficulty/combat-focused.

- Crafting system was a joke. Bare-bones, ridiculous stuff. 

- Nothing seemed balanced as far as resources/gil was concerned. I always had more than enough money than I even knew what to do with and an abundance of resources that were never needed. 

-NPCs had one line of dialogue that they would repeat over and over and over and over again. 

- Dialogue during quests would drag on and on. I understand the need for story...but there would be time (if I didn't skip over it) you could sit for 45 minutes not doing a single thing. 

- No reason to explore anywhere. There's just nothing around. No reason to ride off into the distance to check anything out... it's always the same.... nothing. 

 

These are just the things that popped into my head spur of the moment. I don't want to sit here all day and do a "deep dive."

 

Being an older gamer I've seen how games have improved by leaps and bounds. I would actually make a comparison with FF to the rebooted GOW.... however; GOW was miles ahead (in my opinion) from FF by having a great open world with which to explore and have fun with outside of the main quests. To me, it felt like Square put 80% of their effort into the quicktime cut scenes and cinematic scenes while glossing over what makes a game....a game. 

 

Overall, I had some fun with FF... but it was far from the masterpiece, or even what I would consider a "good" game to be. 

 

That is pretty spot-on for the pros and cons. I thought the game was good, but I’m also biased toward liking the FF games. I thought X was by far the best, then VII. Some of these others I wouldn’t have even played if they didn’t have final fantasy in the name. This game just seemed to have put all the emphasis on the cutscene graphics and eikon fights.

My biggest complaint is how complicated and poorly told the story is until the very end. In my first play through, I actually watched every cutscene and didn’t skip chat. It took forever and I tried to get into the story, but I was completely lost. I had to google the kingdoms, which is how I found even the development team didn’t understand it, so they created the active time lore to help.