What do you want to be, Final Fantasy 16? You tell me! Because I don’t think even you know what you want out of yourself. You play like a character-action game that seems almost annoyed by your roleplaying roots. Which is fine! Final Fantasy has a long, long history. You’re saddled with a lot of baggage on that Chocobo and you want to shake it off and show the world that you, Final Fantasy 16, can be something entirely new. You’re not like other Final Fantasy games. You’re the cool one.
The good news is, you’re a great character action game! Except you still sort of want to be a roleplaying game. Or at least you want to show me numbers that go up every so often but seem to make no discernible difference in what happens on-screen. But since you’ve got numbers, that probably means you have a lot of equipment to balance and shift around to maximize my combat potential, right? Nah, guess not. You sell me a new sword every two hours and let me craft a new sword every three. I’m allowed one weapon, one belt, and nine-thousand bags of crafting items.
I’m not saying I need turn-based battles or some shit to make this an RPG. We’re all playing Diablo 4, baby. Action RPGs are great or whatever. What I’m saying is that you don’t seem to know if you even want to be an RPG at all or if you’re just wearing math on your shirt like it’s a tie your grandma bought you for Christmas. You want to impress all the classic nerds with leveling up while bringing in new nerds with the whole Game of Thrones thing. But which game do you yourself want to be?
I mean, do you even know what your story is about? I’m not saying that rhetorically. What the fuck is your story about? You have an entire in-game explainer feature because your own development team kept getting confused. Your creators said you were largely influenced by Game of Thrones, but all I can suss out from that comparison is that characters fuck, they say “fuck”, and there’s a big bushy wolf-dog. Outside of that, I guess… fantasy violence? Bad, gross sex stuff? I’m not sure Game of Thrones invented those tropes. It’s definitely not beloved characters dying because we’ve been doing that shit since Final Fantasy 4.
So what is your story? Is it some ill-defined political struggle between ill-defined nation states that seem to be loosely based on real stereotypes? Or is there an ill-defined curse affecting these ill-defined nations? Or do you just want to be about Clive, an adult man who has to learn over and over again that slavery is bad? Really giving Square Enix credit for taking the stance of ‘We refuse to have non-white people in our game about discrimination’. Hold for applause. No notes.
And I know you said you didn’t want non-white people in your game because it was based on the reality of medieval Europe. One, there were non-white people in Medieval Europe. There just were, buddy. You know how countries and cultures can interact, trade, and merge in Sid Meier’s Civilization? Believe it or not, the same thing has happened on the actual Earth. Two, your game has magical people who can turn into giant mythological creatures that shoot fire and lightning. The fuck are you talking about, ‘reality of medieval Europe’? If you’re going to make your game realistic to medieval Europe, just have every NPC talk about their kids dying in childbirth.
Like, I understand what’s going on in the game - but what do you want me to care about? You got some great characters! I’ll give you that! None of us are ever going to be mad at a hot guy named Cid. But what do you want me to care about overall? The most compelling story right now is how good everyone’s tailor is in this time period. But what do you care about in this game? Your story doesn’t have narrative twists so much as it simply teleports to the new thing it wants to talk about like a drunk guy rambling at a party.
I’m not saying you’re complicated. You’re convoluted, but you’re not complicated. Despite saying you were inspired by prestige television, we’ve been doing ‘The Holy Nation State of Garbelsmash fights the Imperial Empire of Valeriebertinelli’ shit since at least Final Fantasy Tactics. I recognize that Final Fantasy’s version of world building is often ‘weird country names that all have one central social issue’, but I’m not even sure if you know what you’re trying to do here with that blueprint. I don’t need this to be high art. I just want to know that you have some sort of plan.
Don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy 16, I’m still enjoying you. I’m still playing you. And I paid money for your deluxe edition. You got my money. You’re good. But I just wish you didn’t seem to be confused by what you are or, worse, embarrassed of yourself. I wish that I didn’t feel, dozens of hours in, like you still didn’t know what game you wanted to be or story you wanted to tell. My best guess at this point is that you think you could be an anime version of The Witcher. But, baby, that already exists. We literally got an anime Witcher. Just be Final Fantasy. Love yourself.