@nodima: Agree 100% about the active time lore system, or, as I like to call it "Shit they should have put in the story but didn't."

I mean, they could have worked all that information in the cutscenes themselves so you didn't need to pause the game constantly to keep up. The same way they could have put labels on the map so you actually knew where all these things were taking place. They could have made the codex accessible from the menu rather then demanding you hoof it over to a random old man all the time.

So many of the systems in this game feel like they got about 2/3 of the way done designing them and then just ended up saying "fuck it."

@efesell: I realize it's not the cleanest comparison, because you're right that was pretty much always a portal into a side story that enhanced or established character motivation (though in several cases probably was just a convenient wedge for a joke). But just often enough those ATE moments did one or both of those things while also further explaining why you cared to be where you were in the first place, especially during side missions that could retroactively be likened to Mass Effect's loyalty branches.

I've definitely noticed that plenty of scenes don't involve lore the game has new information for, unfortunately as somebody who probably spent an extra two or so hours "playing" Guardians of the Galaxy out of fear that if I walked too far forward I'd cut off dialogue I was usually, but not always, keen to hear, even typing it out loud and hearing there's a more general lore dump menu in the near future likely won't be enough to stop me from pausing after almost every significant sentence or scene break to check if some new exposition waits in the ATL crevice.

It's a sickness, and I suppose what I'm really saying is that it would have been nice if the font next to the button icon weren't always yellow, implying new news. Or a very small icon would appear in the same lower right corner when something new's in there (they're already marking things I haven't read before, dang it!). Maybe at some point it becomes more contextual, I have to hope so, but if it doesn't...like I said, knowledge for me is rarely the key to the door of doing. I'm a guy who's replaying Spider-Man a third time and still insists on both listening to Peter describe the contents of each collectible backpack and then reading the menu entry about that backpack.

So this ATL feature is, in lieu of a miracle, infuriating in the most minor and self-inflicted way. Especially when there's some woman that seems quite important to the scene, and I know who she is and why she's currently lying there, but I can't help but wonder if the game might want to explain why she's lying there as opposed to her purpose when she wasn't.

(The worst thing of all just happened, by the way - I got to the next cutscene after the fight, after this post, which I'd paused during the intro cutscene only to find a useful anecdote while writing this post...and in that following cutscene, there's a blue dot on her ATL entry! Fuck! Because again, I'll admit when I first saw Joshua ATL index comment about carrots only to later hear characters note his distaste for vegetables in a cutscene, I could tell this might not be the most important thing in the world. But somebody wrote this shit and I'm compelled to read it. Although in this specifically unique instance, it was useful because in pausing to write about how worried I am about how much I'll be pausing to read lore in this game, I'd forgotten who I was fighting and why. So kudos to the Time Lore after all!)

Which I guess is all to admit this likely isn't anywhere near a significant problem with the game's design, but given my misgivings about this game after playing the demo (and some of the more general, arcane design choices) I can't help but think of this thing as an early, looming exemplar of this game attempting to be bold by doing something very dull.

Maybe you could just say that codex you speak of will behave like Dandelion's journaling in The Witcher 3 and I can try my best to behave. But even then, that game had the goodwill to wait until a cutscene was over and you were back in the open world to inundate you with "character entry updated" notifications attached to a never-disappointing sound effect. Now that's video games!

Good ways into the game right now. Overall I really like it!

It does feel really, really dated though. Its like a less polished Dragon Age is what it feels like to me on the gameplay side of things. There doesn't really seem to be much point at all to the RPG side of things. Has anyone even needed to sell items, buy items, do crafting? It seems pretty redundant since the game gives you items that are better then what you can buy/craft at the prescribed intervals AND when you kill a major boss they drop an item you can craft into a better weapon usually... so why not just give you the weapon upgrade right out of the gate? Seems weird.

The game should have just been a really tight linear fight'em up.

My enthusiasm seems to wax and wane dramatically based on the imaginativeness of the locale I'm exploring and the overwhelming audacity of the action set pieces.

The production of the cutscenes and main story content is satisfying enough. Really fantastic soundtrack.

I'm a little surprised at how well it seems to be critically received, but maybe I shouldnt be as I havent fallen off yet and its rare for me to put more then 10-15 hours in any game these days but I'm still chugging away with enthusiasm.

I'd probably give it a 7 out of 10. But a really strong 7 out of 10. I think it needed stronger writing to really punch it above its class, but what's there is serviceable enough to make the Dragon Ball Z action hold your interest to the next plot beat, and the next.

I really like the Active Time Lore. Kind of a cool thing to hit every once in a while when I'm curious who a new main or background character is.

Some of the set pieces in this game really call for a "Final Fantasy XVI Presents: Best Moment or Sequence"

@junkerman: It absolutely feels like the equipment and crafting is there because they felt weird making a Final Fantasy without at least some of the normal RPG mechanics. It's fine and I don't mind it but yeah they could have just leaned all the way into making a really good action game. There's room for Final Fantasy to just be that as well.

I feel like I'm approaching the other half of the demo. The combat is definitely quite fun, and I'm enjoying how much this game can feel like cutscene editing and NPC conversations peaked at Final Fantasy X. I definitely understand the God of War comparisons more and more as well.

Having spent real time with Cid, it's not getting any less hilariously weird than it was in the demo that they put Ralph Ineson's voice behind Bradley Cooper's face. Maybe somebody at some point in the thousand year history of humanity has sounded like that while looking like that, but Cid is so silly.

Edit: LOL, I hope there's a lot more sexposition like that first attempt at it. Wow.

I can't overstate how charming it is for a video game to make up for astoundingly poor cinematography with damage number pop ups and health bars. I'm starting to think my fears about this game have both born fruit and been fascinatingly charming. At the very least, while I can't tell if this game's in on the joke, it's about as consistently funny as the best Yakuza goofs.

Most happily, the sound design rips, as if somebody from Kojima Pro had a hand in it (I dunno).

And if that opening Eikon fight is the outlier I hope it is, I can't wait to see how many ways this game subtly shames the modern God of Wars for isolating mondo sense of scale to everything but the bosses themselves. Yea, I'm coming around.

And still constantly pausing, like an ass.

@junkerman: I have definitely been enjoying my time more with it about halfway in thinking this game is a great callback to the 360 era RPGs. Even if it took me a while to get there.

On a separate note, being a XIV subscriber for about 10 years of my lifespan now, on launch week I was almost crushingly disappointed with the game trying to treat it as the next great project out of CBU3. It's not that game, and now with the time I've put into it I think it was actually pretty unfair of me to expect it out of the game given the extensive uhh... "relationship" I have with their previous product. XIV changed my life, this game will probably not have the same impact whatsover, but I can acknowledge this was something they wanted to do, a passion project of sorts and I'm glad they got to shoot their shot even if I don't think it quite lands the way they maybe want it to.

When Clive says something like "that was the only thing that gave my life meaning" I can't help but insert a phrase like "for a super long time".

I have to think of the callbacks to old Square RPGs as wildly deliberate to massage a lot of the dialogue, especially the lesser NPC cutscenes. Not only because it does seem deliberate for this character to look like she does while extracting memories from the moon, but also because in the smaller, weirder moments I remember being the 12 year old dweeb performing voices for each character in text-based RPGs and it often being hard to find a rhythm, or natural way to express what the script was.

It's all charming, I gotta say again. But I'm increasingly sure this game thinks it's something it isn't. Which is also part of its charm.

@nodima: You are pulling something from it that is baffling to me but hey so long as you're having fun.

I have a lot of thoughts about this game, which I will write up in a separate post, but it is very weird in a lot of ways. The combat is decent but that's literally all there is to the gameplay, which is so strange for a Final Fantasy game. You can fight and you can walk around and talk to people and literally nothing else. Even Interograde, which was just DLC, had Fort Condor in it.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, it has the worst loot in any video game with loot ever. Like it's almost impressive how bad the loot is . The vast majority of it is just the same stuff over and over again and you quickly have more than you can ever use, and the actual upgrades never feel meaningful. Neither does leveling up.

Meanwhile AP (ability points) are useful but you seem to get them at random. For some reason wild dogs give massively more than like anything else, except certian story fights, but not all. You might get 700 for an easily dispatched group of mooks and 80 for the really tough boss (to be fair this game is very easy, so comparatively tough boss) that follows.

All the RPG mechanics feel like they were slapped on at the last minute by someone who had only read a description of an RPG in an old Nintendo Power but had never played one.

Also, and this is kind of a small point, when you are or are not locked out of fast travel is baffling. "Leaving your hideout to go on a journey? Locked out! On a ship in the middle of the sea fighting some dudes? Fast travel away my friend!)

Do I like the game? Mostly. At times at least? I've been both enamored and bored to tears at various points. But I'm definitely on team "it does not feel like a mainline Final Fantasy game." And I know that they changed what that meant with 13 (and arguably 12) but 13 still had parties and character progression and weird stuff in it. This feels a lot less like Final Fantasy than FF 7 remake did.

@bigsocrates: It seems like the fast travel mostly locks when it wants to play a big story beat and then make sure you end up at the hideout or whatever. Cause after all the big missions it's always like no you can't go anywhere else, Go Home and as soon as you load in the restriction is lifted again.

It was annoying the first couple times cause I wasn't sure if I had just locked into doing some very long locked in sequence but then found the game has very clear messaging for that.

@efesell: That seems like it's mostly how it works (though the thing you're talking about isn't actually for being locked into a sequence, it's for something that will change the world state) but it's just another weird and arbitrary choice in a game that seems full of them.

Ultimately it reminds me of those weird Japanese takes on Western 3rd person shooters from the 360 era but instead of 3rd person shooters it's the 2018 God of War, which this game seems to take a LOT from, but in very clunky ways. Those Japanese 3rd person shooters weren't all bad and this is definitely more Binary Domain than Quantum Theory, but it just has a bunch of baffling and weird design choices piled on top of one other.

Why are all the accessories weirdly specific like "increases the efficacy of one specific potion that you literally never find but have to uy at vendors by 30%"? I don't know. Whoever made this game outside of the combat and story/cinematic was drunk and/or insane at the time.

@bigsocrates: Accessories at least make some sense there are enough of them and they direcctly affect the moves in occasionally fun ways.

But the rest of the of the equipment... did you know this game has armor? I forgot for a bit because I haven't upgraded it for like the last 20 hours.

@efesell: I have remembered the armor, but it makes sense you forgot it because A) the game is easy so it's not like you need an edge and B) the upgrades are all miniscule and never feel like anything.

The game also has stats outside attack, stagger, defense, and HP and they all....directly affect attack, stagger, and defense. So why do they even exist? Who knows. And there are no items or abilities or anything that affect them.

It's all just weird to me because FF-7 Remake felt to me like a very smart blend of modern realtime combat with old JRPG concepts and worked really well, and then FF XVI comes along and feels like they wanted to make an action game but felt it was time for another numbered FF so they added a very thin RPG gloss to it.

I've complained a lot and I truly do not think it's a bad game. The combat is decent (though not spectacular) and there's a lot of spectacle and the story isn't bad. It's not even as grimdark as people make it out to be, there are moments of humor and some pretty good relationships. I'd say that for a JRPG that tries to be somewhat grounded it may have the best character writing of any I've played.

But there's also a lot of filler and a lot of mechanics/concepts that don't seem to need to be there, and at times it feels like it would be better off as just a linear action game. It doesn't even have as many RPG elements as something like Nier Replicant, and most people barely consider that an RPG.

Without being as long winded as I've been, I think the tone of the game has found a coherence at this point it was lacking for a lot of what I guess we could call the first act. I see a lot of Kingdom Hearts in what's going on, for better or worse, but...let's see where it goes, y'know?

As for my complaint from the demo about how monotone the environments were....it's less a complaint than an observation now. There are still an awful lot of stretches that lean hard on grey, but as I've kept noticing that pretty much everything, from villages to conversational cutscenes to dungeons, is cast in an explicitly duotone palette, it's obviously intentional. I was worried it was purely a crutch, but it seems more intentional now. Whether it's visually interesting is something else, but at least it's an artistic choice.

The menu I'm staring at right now makes it clear to me just how weird some of you further in the game have found the loot/gear/etc. systems though. This shop is telling me I can spend 26,000 for a tassel that increases limit break generation by 3%...but for 24,000 I can buy a similar tassle that has a SIX percent rate? I think I'm more than fine with the base rate as is (especially in lieu of sacrificing my damage boosts on special abilities) but still. Odder than odd.

Motion Blur patch release, and now all is well.

Also some extra control schemes I guess, if you weren't playing on C for some reason.

I've never felt especially perturbed by motion blur and even I can admit the game is a bit less weird to look at cranking it down from 5 to 3.

I've always enjoyed the idea of meeting a game's control scheme on its own terms, but I've also heard a lot of people having trouble specifically with R1 being dodge (I still, for what it's worth, am shifting to Phoenix 15+ hours in to use my "dodge" ability that doesn't dodge at all, but that's on me) so I'm happy more options exist.

Unless I have no idea how big this game truly is I'm still really confused by the number of people I've seen downplay the Game of Thrones connections. The mission I'm on right now literally feels like "what if everything from Season 4 and 5 of a certain seafaring realm occurred offscreen and instead we just cut right to the revenge for it". I can't really think of a single plot point in this game so far that hasn't either been "hey remember Final Fantasy?" or "hey remember Game of Thrones?" and as I've started saying plenty, I'm not even sure that's a bad thing...but it sure does leave this game in a sort of lumbering state when it gets into the nitty gritty of side quests or home base morale where all it seems capable of is pointing back to FFXIV and shouting "you sick fucks liked running back and forth for 20 minutes right over there!"

Also, I'm not sure if I hope the game corrects for this later or not, but right now it's great fun taking a quick 5 minute sippy break with a beer and an article while Aerial Blast recharges then walking into a room full of enemies and immediately ending the fight. I love the combat, but after several hours of this ability it's never not fun watching everyone in the field either get swept into the air or immediately broken down into a stagger.

@nodima: Secretly, I'd say the real comparison point is Tales of Arise. The major plot points line up extremely closely, but FFXVI lacks the former's over-the-top anime charm and likeable characters.

But in general I agree, it's very Game of Thrones, more specifically late-era Game of Thrones when the writers had outrun the books and everyone realized they didn't really know how to world-build or write characters without those guide rails. It certainly doesn't help matters that FFXVI's main character has all the charisma of a lump of charcoal.

It's just so weirdly put together. I really think that the first 3-5 hours absolutely murder this game, since it was in such hurry to go nowhere that it completely failed to establish the world or why I should care about these characters at all. I can't understand why they waited until basically 1/3 of the way through the game to provide even basic information on what nations control what territory, or who is at war with whom. That seems like basic information they might have wanted to establish, I dunno, in the first few hours so you could have some vague idea of what was happening and where. Instead you just get a very MMO map that doesn't even have place names on it.

People keep saying this game is like Game of Thrones and it's not. If you want to see Square's take on Game of Thrones play The Diofield Chronicle, a game that I sort of liked from last year that's actually about the politics and rivalries.

Instead this game uses a Dark Fantasy background (with some Game of Thrones influences) to tell personal stories, which is what the game actually cares about. I'm close to the end and if you look at everything that happens almost none of it is driven by or ultimately about politics. Without getting too spoilery it's all about other stuff. The driving plot threads are about relationships and ideologies, not power struggles between nations, though they make an appearance here and there.

There's a lot to criticize about the story but it's not trying to be Game of Thrones. It's closer to trying to be Final Fantasy in a Game of Thrones world but it's not realy that either.

It's a weird thing and it doesn't entirely work, but not because it's a failed copy.

The story is an odd beast. It’s paced pretty well until suddenly it’s a mid season filler arc. It delivers really nice quiet character moments and abruptly explodes into outrageous bombast. It’s an extremely straightforward tale that peppers you with lore to make any sprawling fantasy epic blush.

It is overall really kind of a mess but I’m still just really fond of it.

I agree with Efesell's take.

As well as a decades long fan of a Song of Ice and Fire I see literally no connection of semblance or inspiration from the books or the show other then maybe Clive borrowing aesthetically from Jon Snow via a dark, brooding gentleman accompanied by a loyal wolf. There is essentially nothing political about the story at all, which ultimately I've been disappointed with.

Instead the story seems to largely tackle themes of a more ideological nature (and some ham-fisted discussions about equality).

My take is that the overarching plot is largely inconsequential and a bit silly but the game really does character moments quite well and while I have just a scathing amount of critiques for it I -for whatever reason- find myself really, really enjoying it. Like more then most games Ive played in a long while and I have no clue why!

Maybe Im just spirited away by the odd beautifully rendered fantastical location (and oddly a whole lot of really dull, boring ones) and the absolutely stellar soundtrack. I'm also really enjoying a JRPG protagonist that isnt a prepubescent boy. Even when I WAS a prepubescent boy I always wanted to play as a bearded old man. And now that I'm well on my way to being a bearded old man I grow further entrenched in my need for bearded protagonists. My own child just got hurt trying to eat peperoni as I write this... they're not saving the world! Even in a fantasy!

Also anyone else a bit disapointed with how they handled the overworld map in this? I was kind of hoping for a Dragon Age'esque fantasy map with small, tightly designed locations scattered across the world giving you a sense of scale.

Instead we... sort of got that? But also not really... I walk a few minutes and now I'm at the capital of a city and the map markers arent really to scale at all or seem to make sense geographically. Its a videogame, whatever, but again I think it just lends further thouhght to the idea that the game isnt really trying to immerse you in the heart and soul of Storm and its geopolitical texture.

@junkerman: I really agree with your and @efesell point on the overarching story being inconsequential while the character moments are solid. I only have 3 eikons now but every moment where I've gained one has been really enjoyable and cool to see, but the moment it pops out to introduce the next story beat, I start to lose interest. It just goes from really cool set pieces with some excellent voice acting, to incredibly stiff animations and characters talking with no substance. It's just kind of unfortunate. And because of the pacing, I find myself really not able to play for more than an hour before kinda just losing momentum on it.

Originally I was hoping for a similar map to DA:I, but I'm fine with how this is playing out if it means there is still some environmental variety. Like I mentioned, I'm still pretty early, so I haven't seen too much variation, but I'm hoping that might change. So far it just seems like it's either a countryside environment or a castle.

@junkerman: Well, I keep harping on this, but I'll bring it up again. Would it have killed them to put at least some place names on that map beyond the tiny areas you head to? How about just the countries? Or maybe a river? The early hours of the game are bouncing around between all these different places, but the map provides absolutely no context as to where these things are in relation to each other, which makes it extremely hard to care.

Oh, the Kingdom of Wahoo and the Dalek Republic are fighting each other for control of the Bridge of Elementally Named Continents? Well, where is that exactly and how does it in any way affect what the main character is doing? Apparently it doesn't affect me at all because I'm doing things in the Empire of Je Ne Sais Quoi? Which is in a different part of the world? I guess?

@therealturk: ngl it sounds like alot of your complaints are complaining just to complain

"There's no name above a location on the world map" is one of the most nitpicks of nitpicks

Like, the river that goes into the big crater in FF7 doesn't have a name but that's not a big deal? And the Empire and Doma are embroiled in a conflict in FF6 that really doesn't have much to do with your main story but that's not a huge thing to complain about?

@kainhighwind09: To be fair this game spends a lot of time cutting away from your characters to various political scenes and it takes awhile before you fully understand how the world is set up (though on the travel map you see what country various places are in.)

But to be fair to the game...those political scenes are mostly actually about the characters involved and they pay off in various character moments later on, while the politics are a bit of a red herring.

Weird. How about the whole thing where there's a group of pirating Ironborne on the far west of the map who make a strategic play during a power vacuum in order to increase their standing in the kingdom that one of the main characters, who grew up as a hostage-ward of the main hero's royal family prior to their dissolution at which point she was sold to said Iron-loving crew and tortured for years until she can finally escape, at which point she returns to exact her revenge on the man who wronged her? Jill is so clearly a mashup of Theon and Sansa that it's more admirable than wearying, but for some reason people are so reflexive about the Game of Thrones comparisons.

And that's just one quick example because it's the thing I just did - and had a good time doing! But let's not pretend the FIRE AND ICE mission didn't take pretty much all of its inspiration from the SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. Especially if the developers themselves never shied away from the comparisons in the preview coverage. For a briefer one, even Joshua is clearly a twist on Bran, "crippled" and traveling on a secret pilgrimage for a purpose bigger than anything the rest of the world can understand, hoping his brother can hold a great evil off until he can find the key he needs to save the world. Even when excusing for the fact that every story that can be told has been told, these aren't the only two easy comparisons and they're pretty direct.

On another note, listening to the latest Triple Click and Remap episodes discussing the game, they both talk about chaining moves? All I'm doing is square combos, maybe punctuating with a magic, and then focusing on stagger magics until they stagger and then swapping to physical magics then waiting for them to recharge. Granted, Kirk points out zipping around with the rend move charged and I've totally skipped all the basic moves other than the lunge forward but Cado seemed to be implying the magic has chaining functions as well? Maybe I misheard but I'm basically playing this game like Diablo.

@therealturk: Yeah I dunno, this complaint I don't get. They establish countries and locations pretty early and reference them often so I learned where everything was without needing a bunch of labels.

@nodima: I mean yeah you can certainly do more with the system than just Hit Guy. I know there's a specific achievement for using all of Garuda's moves on something in midair without landing. The Phoenix Dash lets you set up decent combo strings by using the charged magic as a launcher.

But a lot of eikon moves are definitely Finishers in that they will either ground something pretty harshly or launch them away in such a way that it's pretty hard to follow up.

@nodima: Fair enough!

I can see why you would feel that way. Those stand out more as just general tropes in my eye (Other then the ON THE NOSE references you mentioned). Culturally foreign island bound raiders/pirates and a sickly hero inherited to a ancient legacy of magic are fairly common and remind me a lot of Robin Hobbs original Farseer Trilogy as well in this case. But I've consumed an entire host of fantasy literature for the last two decades of my life so perhaps I've relaxed my critical eye on the genres many tropes and shared ancestry.

Anyway I see where you're coming from and don't want to belabor a point. I guess with all the Eikons and fantastical JRPG drama and powering up Dragon Ball Z style I havent felt the Game of Thronesy inspiration. I tend to interface with things on an emotional level rather then a literal level perhaps and I havent experienced the soul crushing despair and melancholly I felt while reading through George's novels haha.

Just did the thing many critics have pointed to as both one of the highest highs games have offered in years and I emphatically agree. Despite all the spectacle modern God of War offers, both games (probably, thematically, rightfully) sometimes felt like they were withholding, which this segment very much does not.

That being said, it follows several hours of either confoundingly lame story beats or impressively boring quests, both main and side, and the revelations immediately afterward are…well, I can’t unhear Jason Schreier describing the rest of the story in no uncertain terms as a downhill slalom of silliness, but…

I’m super happy to report the resident FFXVI pessimist on these forums agrees that Bahamut and everything surrounding him fucks, boldly.

Not exactly. The first book was published before FFT came out, and the second was released only a few months after FFT. That, along with the fact that the story in GoT is basically just a fictional War of the Roses with dragons and zombies. I know the books hadnt quiet yet received the reverential treatment the get now yet at that point, but the material and political machinations were out there way before the GoT show became a cultural thing, and honestly might have inspired some of the backstabbing and such in the FFT story