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Story
So if you’ve been under a rock, the game is produced by YoshiP, the same dude who works on FF14. In fact a lot of the FF14 staff worked on this game and if you’re a 14 player you will see it immediately. Not only are some of the models of the monsters similar to 14, but you got DJ Soken dishing out the freshest beast in Valisthea. A lot of the music had a massive Heavensward vibe with the choral arrangements. Following the XIV tradition, the story was fucking SAAADD. People will die. Characters you think are awesome will die. I mean bad guys die too, but maaaan why did you have to kill all of these people YoshiP!!!!! Anyway by the end of the game I was wiping tears off my face and blowing my nose. I didn’t expect to cry because to be honest, the characters who died had a massive death flag pinned on their heads for most of the game. Still the way they did the flashbacks, the camera work, I suddenly found myself teary eyed. (´;ω;`)
If you pull up the credits for FFXVI, it’s basically like “the people that were involved with FFXIV in the ARR/HW era”. So if you’re one of those preverts that loved Heavensward (moar like HeavensTURD), that’s the crew here.
Direction
So one thing I wanted to talk about was the choices in this game that I honestly didn’t really expect the game to take. I didn’t play the demo, and I mostly avoided any news articles or reviews because I kinda like going into games blindly. With that in mind I really didn’t expect all the nudity, implicit sex scenes and all the gore. Like okay fine I can deal with seeing a butt or a side boob but maaaan I didn’t really wanna walk into a village of hanging dead people. That was so morbid. Multiple people got t heir heads chopped off and I literally started crying when Clive’s chocobo got hurt at the start of the game. (´;ω;`) I guess it’s no wonder that the game had a “mature” rating on twitch which you basically have to “agree” to before you watch anyone’s stream of it. The other thing is it was controversial about how there’s no POC in the game but the game focuses on slavery…that could have gone down south real fast.
My “joke” while I was playing this game was “this is basically like if the FFXIV team put a Final Fantasy branding on top of something like The Witcher.” Partly “dark fantasy in a world where everything is shit”, and partly “tons of gore and sex and profanity.” But yeah, when I saw that this was M rated I thought it was more on the “eh, let’s err on the side of caution with the rating” rather than “oh they’re going whole hog here.” A lot of people were complaining that this makes the game “not a REAL Final Fantasy”, but it’s got a lot of the usual stuff here:
Crystals
Chocobos
Moogles
Eikons
Cid (and even Mid!)
It was however lacking:
airships
Biggs & Wedge
porno magazines
characters that speak Beaver
Characters
So as usual, I enjoyed the main cast of characters. Our protagonist Clive was great, though I do wish he was less hairy because I can’t draw hairy ossans and I’m struggling to draw any Jill x Clive fanart. It’s also odd how a bunch of people aged through the time skip and look a lot more ossan-y, but meanwhile Jill and Joshua look almost the same as they did a decade earlier. Forever 21! 😂😂 I also loved the side character Gav, he was such a bro! I love the bro side chars in FF games they’re always really great. And as usual Kanade was angry that Nakamura Yuichi was cast in yet ANOTHER Final Fantasy game cause up to now we’ve already seen him in like 3 other games lol. My favorite characters were Jill and Clive but I tend to lean towards my favorite ship usually. Still can’t forget ike-Joshua fulfilling the bishounen quota. 👀 Oh and before I forget I really liked Cid. I’m not a huge ossan fan but Cid was a great ossan. Oh and another honorable ossan mention was Uncle Byron. He was like a dad to us!
My rule is that you’re allowed to be in multiple Final Fantasy games as long as they’re minor roles. So fine, Uchida Yuma is allowed to be Young Clive because that’s like just the opening hour of the game, whatever. But Nakamura is in too many of these games!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He’s in 13, 14, 15, 16, Type-Zero, and even Chocobo Mystery Dungeon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Voice Acting & Localization
The one thing I wanted to mention briefly is the game was made with English in mind. That means the game was written in English, dubbed in English and then LOCALIZED into Japanese which is the opposite of what they tend to do in Japanese RPGs. So unfortunately because of that, some of the scenes with the Japanese dub looked like a badly dubbed 1970s Kung Fu movie. Still though, I preferred the Japanese script because it was very straight forward. I’ve never been a fan of the roundabout colorful way they described things in the English text. Sometimes the Japanese localization would even have direct phrases like Jill telling Clive “I love you” but the English one being like “We are one” or something along those lines. I get it, it can be seen as similar, but I guess I prefer more direct text. The other reason I preferred Japanese is the insanely colorful English swearing that gave me flashbacks to Nier Replicant. So for example something big is happening, Gav looks up at the sky in Japanese says “what is that..?” and the English would be like “Oh..fuck..” lmao. Okay then. 😂 I know it’s nitpicking, but eh I just found it unnecessary. I feel like those kind of little translation differences can truly change how one sees a character. So needless to say, Clive was very snarky and sarcastic in a lot of his English lines, but in Japanese he was very serious and straight forward. Sorry Koji, but I prefer the Japanese localization once more!
Nope nuh uh sorry, the Japanese loses way too many CRITICAL nuances. “まずい!” is NOT an accurate translation for “Great Greagor’s Gash!” Anyway, it was kind of like the opposite problems that most games have where the English version is trying to hard to be Japanese that it sounds terrible, but this time the Japanese was almost not really even trying to feel like the English “base.”
System
Because it’s a modern game that isn’t Star O-shit, FF16 system was really great especially for people like me who just want to focus on the story. The game had a specific story mode so enemies died quickly. The quests were great and easy to see on the map. While the game wasn’t technically open world, there were “open fields”. However there were these aetherytes everywhere so when you needed to go to a specific map to do a quest, you could easily teleport to the nearest aetheryte. I pretty much did every single side quest except the one of this zako in the field who was like “hey asshole do my side quest” and I promptly told him to fuck off. 😂😂 There was a lot of ATM button pressing during all the cinematic battles and I have the reaction of a sloth so I asked Kanade to handle those for me. The upgrade system was easy as you just went to the Blacksmith man and he would have the latest and greatest items for you to upgrade. Because of that I pretty much only ever used my gil on buying Orchestrions (which none struck my fancy unfortunately.)
Buying gear/weapons from the normal shops was pointless because they were usually inferior to whatever you got from the main story quest to create at the Blacksmith. My favorite part and the big gimmick of the game was of course being able to control 3 primals of your choice. As you went through the story you unlocked all of them but I ended up using Shiva, Garuda and Phoenix. I didn’t really like Bahamut (mainly because I just mashed □ and it auto attacked for me) and I didn’t want to reset all my points to try Odin. I did use Titan for a bit which was pretty decent. The reason I preferred Garuda though is I loved the hurricane. It would basically suck in every single trash mob and they wouldn’t be able to do anything except spin in circles for a minute while you fried them all with Flames of Rebirth 🤣🤣. So overall no complaints about the system except maybe I really hated the ship hideout because I always got confused on the different layers where things were. Kinda reminded me of Camp Drybone in FFXIV. Oh and one minor complaint – sorry but the photo mode SUCKED. Coming from Horizon’s photo mode this was a massive downgrade lol.
System-wise yeah, this is your typical AAA game setup. On-screen prompts for everything, quest logs and markers, stat comparisons, respec options, fast travel, etc. The only time they make you actually work for it a little is with the hunt marks where you need to figure out where exactly the monsters are from the general vicinity in the hunt bill itself. My main beef here is that I was constantly handed the controller and told to do the boss fights, which often were SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG. They weren’t just long because bosses often had multiple phases, but more annoyingly because they were constantly being cut up and filled with QTEs. This was also extra annoying because sometimes it was hard to tell when you were in a cutscene, so I’d press a button to try to do an attack and then whoops, you did that while a QTE prompt had popped up and now you got blasted by the boss! I went back to the stream backup and the Titan fight lasted over 20 minutes. That is TOO LONG!
My favorite feature in this game is the incredibly detailed codex. Or rather, I should say the THREE incredibly detailed codices. There’s a “normal” codex that lists out characters, places, concepts, etc. in case you want to see like “oh wait what is The Blight again?” You can even pull this up during cutscenes using the Active Time Lore function to get little explainers about who the characters are in the cutscene. The really useful innovations though were the character web and the world map. The character web shows who everyone is and how they interrelate at any given time in the story (which matters A LOT based on all the shifting allegiances!), and the world map shows what each region or faction is up to at a given time. It can be hard to find this stuff out sometimes using the normal codex when your thought is “who was that guy that was talking to Odin in that last scene” but using the character web you can physically see that person’s portrait in the section of the web for that faction.
Shipping
As usual I want to give a little section of all my ships in the game. Obviously the most explicit one is Jill x Clive but I had this minor soft spot for Joshua and Jote too. The game even had a canon gay ship! I won’t say who it is as it’s kind of a surprise but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an FF game with an explicit gay ship. 😲 Usually it might be implied but yea there was no doubting it. Good to see that they’re being a lot more open with these things now.
Everyone was like “oh please, there’s been plenty of gay ships in Final Fantasy before” but like it’s not like YuRiPa was actually literally YuRiPa’ing it up on screen like they did in FFXVI!
So overall I really enjoyed the game, even if the ending left me sad and unsatisfied. I am also hoping secretly that the graphics for XIV will be upgraded to those of XVI but that might be an impossible longshot lol. I played the game on my PS5 but apparently now you can buy XVI + PS5 bundles right on Amazon. The struggle of getting a PS5 last year and just buying the Horizon bundle…! However I played many games on my PS5 before XVI so I don’t really regret not getting the XVI bundle. The real shit was the skinned edition Japan got. Anyway I think if you’re a Final Fantasy fan, you should definitely play this one as yet another addition in the series. If you’re a new FF fan I’m not sure I’d recommend it because I swear the other FF games have much happier endings! But also I think if you’re an FF14 player, you should definitely play this because hey it’s the same team and you will definitely find enjoyment because of it.
Overall? Probably like the top third. All the modern design elements help it a lot in the rankings even if say, I wished it wasn’t so dour the whole time or thought that the combat wasn’t as good as Stranger of Paradise.
And now I leave you with all my Clive x Jill moments from the stream.
Bread Master Lee 
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