Final Fantasy XVI (16)

I love the voice acting. If you haven't checked out PlayStation Access, then there's some videos of the voice actor of Clive (Ben Starr) playing FF. I may have a man crush on him.

It was one of a rare few JRPGs where I went with the English voice track instead of the Japanese. The last one I cam remember before that was the first Ni no Kuni...

Tidy

With respect, I disagree on it going downhill from the demo. The fights against the Dominants and their Eikons are fantastic set piece moments. I really don't mean to sound hyperbolic in order to sell the point but I am being legitimate in saying that there's one in particular where multiple story threads converge and the sheer scale of everything that happens in the fight constantly keeps going up and up, from stakes to the action to the music, up to a point where Ive had the biggest smile on my face and tears in eyes. It is peak action in video games, one of the best ever sequences. Those who have played it know exactly what Im talking about. And not to forget many others as well. There's some downtime between those segments for sure, but I've said before the valleys of the game are valleys but the peaks are peaks and worthy of your experience if you liked the demo at all.

The opening of the game set its-self up with lots of intrigue, back-stabbing and scheming. As a fan of game of thrones, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is what I was disappointment about. The story beats after the initial opening just didn't meet those same lofty heights. The combat, while very flashy, was extremely basic. The eikon battles looked great, but you mostly just spammed the same attacks over and over to complete them. For me, they weren't clever or even that engaging.

The same can be said about the overall combat. It's like they wanted it to be like Devil may Cry, except the combat in that is far superior to the button spamming game that we got with no depth or strategy.

I am being quite harsh. Overall I did enjoy the game and am glad I played it, the shortcomings though just tarnished the experience for me.

I can see why people don’t like it for the lack of strategy. I think for me I quite enjoy it, because JRPGs by their nature have a tendency to be overly complicated, and having to switch builds/weapons a lot, and if you’ve had a stressful day, I just want to sit down and enjoy the game. If I was 16-21, then yeah I’d probably have that opinion of it lacks depth, but being close to 40 jaded. Just let me have my fun.

Also the story I’m really enjoying, and appreciate I can catch up if I miss anything fairly easily through active time lore.

I get the comparisons to DMC I really do, but to me it's closer to Dragons Dogma. I played 100 hrs of it by the end and enjoyed it throughout, when you get the fundamental things like the dodge and parry right, it always feels satisfying. Plus you'll have quite a few abilities you can mix and match to create some busted builds for freedom of expression.

I noticed that in the second part of the demo (i.e. the non-prologue section), I kept getting onscreen prompts telling me when to dodge, which turned combat into a bit of a QTE-fest - presumably that's something you can disable, if you so desire?

They are accessories you can wear. Essentially they were afraid this kind of game would turn away traditional FF fans as this genre can be perceived as difficult, so the accessories makes combat easier.

I got this back in August and played a little bit, before getting really sucked into BG3. I went back to it just before Christmas, but then got Super Mario RPG and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and have been distracted by those. So, I've not played a huge amount of FFXVI, but I've found it to be mostly just ok. The big battles are incredible, really exciting spectacles and, personally, found them reasonably challenging.

The rest of it is very average though. The systems aren't hugely complex, but even the fairly straightforward systems on offer can be entirely ignored when battling regular grunts and beasts. There really is zero threat from anything.

The story is fairly good, so that keeps it engaging enough. Having said that, I expect the story could be told in about half the time.

Yeah it isn’t a hack and slash, but there’s still a fair amount of button mashing. There’s a lot of switching out materia for different enemy types, but doesn’t feel overly a pain.

Potentially very integral...

Crisis Core and VII Remake saga spoilers follow

I forgot about Crisis Core. I had it on PSP back in the day.