Final Fantasy XVI (16)

Copies are already in some peoples hands and story spoilers getting out there. Just take precaution, the demo wouldn't have hit as hard for me if I knew what was gonna happen.

Bit late to the party but damn this is pretty damn good no. From the combat I could immediately feel the influence of the combat director of DMC5 all over it. Also so pretty.

Checked the bit of the latest stream where they covered the lack of lip sync on the Japanese voices. They started off reasonably enough with some fairly convincing technical and practical reasons (it would ultimately be too much work: since the voices and facial animation is recorded together in english as part of performance capture, they couldn't separate those parts of the animations out easily and when they did tests using automated generation software it looked bad so they couldn't do that). They gave the example of FF14 where the lip movements and expressions are stored as separate animations and put together on playback so that's a reasonable thing to do in that case.

But then Yoshida launched into some weird excuse about the characters not being Japanese and it's a fantasy setting so Japanese style acting wouldn't work and look false - in that case why even record the lines in Japanese? Bizarre reasoning, borderline disrespectful to what is a very solid Japanese cast, and completely rubbed me up the wrong way at the point when I was convinced it was a reasonable decision. A FF14-playing friend says Yoshida's got form for that in that the team will have a reasonable practical reason why they haven't implemented a particular feature yet, and then follow it up with something completely fictional for no reason.

I did get through the demo in the end and very much enjoyed the combat and scale, but I will be waiting for at least a major update to fix the camera/motion blur issues and performance (which they did say they were looking into) and probably a price drop too, if not just waiting to see what happens with the PC version.

There’s another option you can pick from the main menu after you finish the story bit and save your clear save. It’s mostly combat and lets you play around with the system a lot more.

It has the dodge and wolf assist rings equipped by default so do have a look at your equipment and play around with it.

Ahhh, ok, cheers. Will give that a go later.

So I have been shitting on this game for a while now and I have just this second finished the demo. I still think this is a shitty Final Fantasy game.

However, if i forget that and take the game based on its own merits, then the demo absolutely blew me away.

I am a huge fan of dark and morbid stories, things like Game of Thrones which hit hard. I was completely invested after the demo in the characters, the lore and the story. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck prick up at times, especially with the epic soundtrack.

Only downside is that the performance was shit, it didn't look anything special unless there were particle affects on the screen.

I may have to bite the bullet on this one, haven't been that invested in a game after just 90mins in a long time.

I'm sold, I thought it was amazing, it's like game of thrones meets final fantasy and is properly grim. Some of the twists had me agape.

Combat is really fun too, I love the magic melee mix.

Ive gone from thinking I'll miss it to wanting it day one.

Really good demo chunk too, as I said earlier I'm really loving these longer demoes, really helps when you're on the fence.

"We want to promote open discussion and engage with our amazing reader base"



"Wait no not like that"

I like how 16 games in, with each one mechanically or spiritually different from the one that came before, we are still arguing over what makes a true Final Fantasy game or that is has to have a checklist of things to be constituted as one. But that measure you would think FF1 is the least FF of them all.

Eurogamer: The Next Generation seems all over the place today, keen on clickbait and publishing some absolute rubbish, I look at the support only stuff and wonder why anyone would pay for it.

As for that story it was crap, trying to get some clicks then trashing the comments thread is hilarious.

Neogaf seems to have taken issue with the site / article.


www.neogaf.com/threads/does-eurogamer-have-a-diversity-problem.1657934/

Last I heard neogaf was taken over by the sort of people that championed gamergate. Oh and I think the owner had accounts of sexual assault listed

EG have always come across as hypocritical on this. They've acknowledged their own lack of diversity previously (a few editors ago) but have failed to address it in any meaningful way.

Posting shit articles designed to provoke outrage was always going to result in this sort of reaction. The worst part for me is that these kind of articles make diversity seem petty and insignificant. It's entirely counterproductive, assuming that they do actually care about the topic.

Pre-load is up for digital purchases. 14.8 GB for starters, which I assume equates to what we got in the prologue. 90 in total.