FFXVI is a confused game.
Mechanically the strengths and weaknesses are fairly well-trodden at this point. It's fun if somewhat basic to play, which is par for Final Fantasies, but the core gameplay struggles to support the RPG elements and leading to issues like chests full of crafting glurge. This is the least compelled to go and explore and fight superbosses that I've been after finishing an FF, I don't think I'll ever enter NG+.
'Aesthetically' I thought it was mostly a success after the opening section, up until but not including the finale. Before playing I was lukewarm on the medieval fantasy elements (it's not my favoured style), but some of the design is quite well-done and they draw an effective contrast with the strange and futuristic ancient world. There is one moment in particular - after the destruction of the first crystal heart, when Typhon claws its way out of a hole in space and the music transitions to startling EDM - where the game sings and I was ready to be swept away into its fantastical world. But the promise of that point is never really followed up, despite some good individual sections. The battle with Titan is an escalation that stays just on the near side of the line. Barnabas is a compelling late opponent. In general the late game with Odin is very strongly drawn and the last areas in Waloed and even moreso in Stonhyrr reminded me of nothing so much as Demon's Souls (2009) Boletaria, a rare tone to manage. Unfortunately Stonhyrr is the last time the game is good.
When it enters the finale the game's aesthetic approach basically breaks down (the narrative doesn't fare much better). Ultima stops being a weird alien and instead starts to fit into the broader setting, to the detriment of a character who had been one of the highlights so far despite always threatening to not really make sense. In particular he takes on the form of Ifrit, and brings out a basic aesthetic and narrative clash in the construction of the game: Ifrit is introduced as basically a monstrous crime against nature, which fits its return to a thoroughly demonic appearance after FFXV's divine figure, but by the end he's actually just ultima's true form, and ultima turns into a blue Ifrit for the finale, and none of this seems to have anything to do with either Ifrit's or Ultima's previously established aesthetics. Does Ultima even have a fire theme? Why fire? This incoherence is mirrored in the plot which I'll get to in a moment, but first we need to talk about Jill.
The game is somehow worse at handling its female party member than the game that didn't have one. Aranea in FFXV was a fairly obvious compensation for an unfortunate result of the male-bonding-themed main party, and while this move was extremely unsubtle, it did work. In FFXVI Jill has to shoulder the role of female lead in a game whose narrative cruelly prevents her from doing so. The Iron Kingdoms is 'her' section but means not very much in terms of the narrative at large. In Rosaria Hugo's scheme for personal revenge against Clive is rendered through Clive saving Jill from Hugo. The climax of her romance with Clive consists of her giving him her powers and all but leaving the cast in favour of a come-lately attempt at a brotherhood theme with Joshua. The climax is executed with a team of Clive, Joshua and Dion for some reason even though both Phoenix and Shiva can fly. This is 'have you heard of Anita Sarkeesian?'-level stuff. We've really fallen far from FFXIII.
The plot is not nearly as coherent as it would like. Ford mentioned Joshua hanging around ominously in cutscenes later in the game but there's also a more basic logical question: who is the hooded figure that Clive sees in Phoenix Gate just before Ifrit appears for the first time? Later there's a whole thing about Joshua sealing Ultima inside himself which has so little effect on the later plot I thought it had been plain forgotten. It should have just been excised, and the amount of clear surgery scars in the plot we do have make me wonder how late in the development these problems were still being dealt with that they weren't able to do so.
The opening made very deliberate gestures toward the Game of Thrones style of dark political fantasy, but this inspiration is mostly insubstantial in the finished product, and this is honestly to its detriment. There's some tense negotiations and a high-profile betrayal in the opening, but then Clive joins the Returners and jets around Valisthea doing missions. There's a lot of scope in the basic setup for some real political manoevering inside Dhalmekian and Sanbrequois politics and instead we get nothing. Oh the crown prince and light-element dominant is noble and troubled by his evil stepmother? Rad. Instead we get dozens and dozens of uses of 'fuck', of which you can count the good ones on one hand. Everyone is pleased-to-wary to see Clive 'the Outlaw' despite him basically destroying the world from the perspective of almost everyone in it. Even the sidequests suffer. Many cases where compelling developments like Quinten's botched revenge or L'ubor being run out of town are glossed over with excruciating triteness by the inexorable weight of happy endings.
I spent much of the middle section of the game feeling like my scepticism had been unwarranted and I was basically on board with the creative vision despite a couple of dud notes, but the more I reflect on the game the more I feel like that vision was actually very weak. There's an evil empire, there's a resistance, Clive goes on a series of quests to collect stickers for his mothercrystal workbook. The 'dark fantasy' consists of some superficial aesthetic trappings and the fact that sometimes you go on a sidequest to rescue someone and they're dead by the time you arrive. The finale is reminiscent of Endwalker in its sweeping universal theming but is considerably worse executed on basically every level, down to comically undermining itself in important respects. Why is there a 'work together' theme in the most single-character focused FF in the whole series? Why does Ultima announce that actually he's just going to kill everyone when the game is trying to do a free will theme? Did you come up with this two hours before printing the discs?
Like Ford said, if the objective was to have a Final Fantasy with a well-handled development they failed. But unlike the last three games with clearly troubled developments (XII, XIII, XV) there's not enough to motivate putting a rug over the holes and focusing on the good times. Nothing of XII's first third, XIII's visionary setting and good cast, or XV's charming exploration, characterful incidental mechanics, and compelling finale. There are good elements I've not yet touched on - charismatic side characters like Vivian and Charon, compelling sidequests like Blackthorne's sequence or the quest with the Undying and the Akashic in Waloed, but with the exception of trying to isolate and extract the feeling of Typhon's first appearance, I'm unlikely to spend much imaginative time with this game in the future. And that ability to command the imagination is the most important overall judgement on a game of this kind.
I have a few minor observations that didn't fit too well into the above. The first is that the treatment of Bearers is an unusual case of 'magical people are oppressed' that actually makes quite a lot of sense. Given that non-Bearers can use magic but subject to the economic constraints of crystal availability, it's both technically feasible and economically logical for bearers to be made an exploited class. It's unfortunate that the game never engaged with this sort of material explanation even in its secret history of Bearer oppression, which remained very idealist (in the marxist sense), but maybe not everything needs to be spelled out. If I were to critique the handling of bearers I think the most important point would be that I don't think we see or hear much of Bearer resistance. Every slave society lived in fear of slave revolts, and used this terror to legitimise its mistreatment. In Valisthea everyone just hates them for no real reason and we instead get the incongruous sight of free men and women teaching the bearers of Eastpool to defend themselves.
The second is that, particularly in the context of the game's troubled relationship to women in general, it's annoying that they've taken 'Ultima' and overwritten the name of a female villain from one of the more beloved games in the broader series with a guy in their new headline release. I like FFXVI Ultima and think he's among those underserved by the broader flaws of the narrative, but they should have taken five minutes to think of a different name.
The third is that early in the game, when I found statues of Greagor as a woman with a massive halo standing on a dragon, and remembered the weird dragon-based naming theme of the mothercrystals, I figured they were building up to her as a final boss. I felt rather pleased with myself for noting some environmental foreshadowing even. I suspect this was the case early in development, or at least they were considering her for a meaningful role. They may have rejected this idea as too obvious, which isn't unfair, but it ends up feeling like another hanging thread to be snipped away with a lore entry somewhere.
