So the demo for Final Fantasy 16 is out and we can finally play the latest from the good folks at Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit III. That’s the dev team’s division in the company. It’s in the credits. Creative Business Unit III. I get we’re talking about a legacy video game company entrenched in tradition, but Creative Business Unit III should only be the name of a college class you skip most of the time and still get an A in. But after playing Creative Business Unit III’s new demo on Sony’s Interactive Fun Games Computer V, I’ve come to two very important conclusions.
One, Final Fantasy 16 feels surprisingly like a Final Fantasy game to me. I had my doubts since every description of the game had emphasized that it would be like other, different games. Zero confidence in the Final Fantasy series itself, lots of confidence in Western games that have nothing to do with Final Fantasy. It was like if a restaurant was like, “You have to buy our new all-beef cheeseburger. It tastes exactly like sushi!” That could be good! But I dunno!
Good news: I was wrong! It is very Final Fantasy. The music has got enough riffs from different games to make me smile like the drooling jobbernowl that I am. The feel of the world has a good swords-and-magic-style Final Fantasy weight to it, especially with references to eikons and dragoons. Even the gameplay feels more in line with the rhythms of the Final Fantasy series than the many comp action titles journalists had mentioned.
Is it going to be a good game? I don’t know. The demo is two hours and mostly cutscenes. Am I going to buy it? Sure! I had a good time! In other words, I already preordered it because I’m a fucking merry-andrew who’s cartwheeling through life towards oblivion. Still, the demo sold me that the game could very well be something I love. Which I’m grateful for, because Final Fantasy is a series I love with all of my heart, except for the parts I hate with my entire soul.
Here’s how ‘Final Fantasy’ the newest game in the series is: the main character is a goth dude whose catchphrase is a worried sigh. That’s about as Final Fantasy as you can get. The second conclusion I reached playing the demo for Final Fantasy 16 is that I can safely say that it might end up being one of the funniest games of the year. Maybe ever. As I watched eight or nine story-driving tragedies happen in a row, I realized that this could possibly be the stupidest, silliest, most self-serious game of my dreams. Everything about it is so ridiculous.
I’m a little split here on avoiding spoilers. So, spoiler warning. But also, this is a free demo for the first two hours of a video game. You’re not going to find out which character who clearly will become the bad guy suddenly becomes the bad guy. “Seriously? The stern, overdressed character who only appears to give ominous, yet vapid exposition? Can’t believe they turned out the way we all knew they would from their first scene!”
These are only impressions of a demo so forgive me, but the demo does go pretty hard. A falling rock crushes a soldier to death. A sudden invasion leaves a city dead. A king is slaughtered in front of his prepubescent son, who then himself apparently also gets ripped to death while transformed into a Phoenix. I bet that’s not the case. Knowing Final Fantasy, this kid is alive as some “damaged monster” we’ll have to kill later anyway.
It’s all hilarious nonsense. When the developers said they were inspired by Game of Thrones, they really did mean it. There’s a castle. There’s blood. There’s a beautiful queen who turned out to be a bad lady working for bad people. We got our game! We got our thrones!
But mixing Final Fantasy with Game of Thrones produces some truly hilariously weird moments in the demo. The fan service that makes me happy is also what makes me go, “Wait, what is happening right now?” One of the most dramatic moments in the demo is finding out a high-jumping knight is a dragoon. That’s told in a way that’s supposed to be like, “UH OH! TROUBLE NOW!” But it’s so goofy knowing the guys who leap high are a major threat. We’ve seen them. They’re silly.
And fuck, the use of swearing is so funny. Don’t get me wrong: I swear a lot. But I swear for emphasis and because I lack talent. The main character Clive Rosfield (Resident Evil-ass sounding name, btw) is all “Ah!” and “Uh!” until one of the tragedies where he shouts - for a good 15 seconds - how he’s going to fucking kill someone.
Yes, in context, it makes sense he’d be angry. A mysterious kaiju has just killed his kaiju brother. I also suspect Clive is somehow the mysterious kaiju in some weird roundabout way, but whatever. But Clive shouts “fuck” again and again in an increasingly high pitch. It’s not that it’s an unrealistic reaction to a horrifying situation, it’s that it’s the anger equivalent to the Final Fantasy 10 laughing scene that broke an entire fan community. It doesn’t land.
By the looks of it, this game is going to go so hard into grimdark territory. For a lot of people, the appeal of Game of Thrones was less about the political machinations that drove the narrative and more about bad beautiful people doing bad things to other beautiful people in a sad world. And that’s what we might get here. Except instead of frost zombies being our goofiest monster, we’re going to have goblins and giant RPG plants.
I think what makes me laugh about it is the stretch you need to make for this to work. Final Fantasy games can certainly be serious. But they also need a counterbalance so they don't feel like a high schooler’s story idea notebook. You need an element of levity or calm or your world is going to feel more like Hard to Be a God than even Game of Thrones. Note: Make a Hard to Be a God game.
If Final Fantasy 16 is just a series of bloody battles meant to show how ‘real’ and ‘gritty’ the series could be, it’s going to be hilarious. I’ll enjoy every second of nonsense just like I enjoy a lot of Final Fantasy’s nonsense. I’ll laugh my ass off whenever the game struggles to shoehorn in Cactuars and Tonberrys with a quasi-medieval story based on another quasi-medieval story based on a real English civil war.
I’m probably being dumb, man. Final Fantasy stories are usually pretty great. And so far a game I expected to feel meh on has actually excited me to play. I’m sure that a lot of this corny violent soap opera shit is just setting the table for a deeper, more nuanced story. But if it’s not, we are in for a comedy journey through fairytale land. And fuck it, I already gave them my money anyway, right?