TheRealTurk

Too much sizzle, not enough steak. It's not doing anything new, better, or more interesting than the prior entries other than being way too long for what it is. They easily could have cut an act or two and it wouldn't have greatly affected things.

Also, the writing sucks. It's hard to understate that point. It really, really sucks. The best way I can describe it is that it's the video game equivalent of the nu-G4 TV. The kind of thing that's so terrible its badness echoes back in time and makes the original product it was based on retroactively bad.

As long as they don't replace him with Chris Pratt.

The fact that these asshats think that DQXII somehow needs to be "darker" just shows how clueless they are. I mean DQ11, despite being bright and cheerful on the surface, involved:

• The world basically ending
• The implied rape of a party member
• A bloodless if open depiction of an NPC's suicide
• The death of the child party member (technically she's like 22 and magically de-aged, but she looks about six).

I dunno what they think would be particularly darker than that or why people would want to play something like it. All Squeenix is going is risking is making the same mistake as they did with Final Fantasy - make a bunch of poorly though-out, half-baked changes in the name of "modernizing" the series. As a result, Final Fantasy has completely lost touch with what it is (which is probably why there hasn't been a good one since FFXII). On the other hand, Dragon Quest works precisely because it knows exactly what it is and it shouldn't move away from that.

Hot Take #1 - The last good band was Tchaikovsky.

Hot Take #2 - Video game music is vastly more varied and interesting than any crap that's played over the radio/"streaming service of your choice"/whatever the kids are into these days.

Modern pop music to me is basically the audio equivalent of Call of Duty - a homogeneous, indistinguishable mess that inexplicably sells a ton of copies despite being exactly the same thing year after year. I honestly couldn't tell you the difference between one song and another. It quite literally all sounds alike to me. Then I looked into it more and it turns out I was right. Modern music is bad. It's science.

Of course, this is all coming from someone who refused to believe that Billie Eilish was the name of a real person the first time one of my friends brought her up, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Like @mellotronrules, I'll be waiting for the PS5 version. In the meantime, I'm trying to get through the Enhanced Editions to remind myself of what happened. Playing those on consoles is an . . . interesting experience. BG1 and BG2 could already be punishingly hard, but now add a less-than-optimal control scheme to it for that extra little bit of masochism.

Still tons of fun, though. Video games used to be better. Even just going through the tutorial area I already have way more vivid memories of Baldur's Gate than I do of just about anything else released in the last 20 years.

I just realized that I have the Platinum for Fenyx Rising, but I also remember very little about it. All I can recall is that it was . . . pleasantly inoffensive? It was at least a different flavor of map vomit than Ubisoft usually puts out.

Regardless, this doesn't seem like the best news. Gotta love the strategy of "Our current IPs aren't selling well, so we're going to cancel our new IPs to focus on the IPs that aren't selling well. Also, NFTs."

I wonder if it's possible for Ubisoft to skip the "circle the drain for several years before potentially finding a buyer" step and just skip straight to the bankruptcy? Because that kind of feels like where they're headed.

Good write up. I completely agree that this does not feel like a proper mainline FF game and I don't know if I have ever slogged through a FF entry quite like I had to with this one. For all of Square's talk about trying to move the series forward and evolve and change, they ended up with a game that, to me, feels extremely old, and not in a good way. It often feels five or more years behind other, better games. They want to be cinematic, but 90% of the story is told with basic shot-reverse shot camera work and wooden, department-store mannequin character models. That was fine when Mass Effect came out in 2007, but the industry has moved on significantly since then.

I was arguing with some friends who disagreed with me that this was a poor series entry and one of them brought up Yakuza as an example of a series that constantly evolves itself as proof that evolution isn't a bad thing. I feel like the difference is that Yakuza knows exactly what it is in a way that Final Fantasy currently doesn't. Yakuza has that goofy, wacky sense of humor that they manage to maintain regardless of whether the specific entry is brawler, or a turn-based RPG, or set during Bakumatsu-era Japan. I bet RGG could make a Yakuza RTS and it would still feel like a Yakuza game.

By comparison, what makes a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game? Is it big, dumb, particle effect spectacle? Is it the soap-opera story tone? Combat? Chocobos? I don't think that Square knows, and I don't think they can make a good Final Fantasy game until they figure that out.

@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?

@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.