Quick Look: Final Fantasy XVI

I don't know if I'll ever wind up playing this. Character action games intimidate me. I've only ever played about half of the first DMC (on PS2) and all of Wonderful 101, and I have all three Bayonetta games, but I've been too afraid to start them. I just always feel like I'm "doing it wrong" when I play these types of games. (I even watched a combat guide for Wonderful 101 to get over this so I could finish it.)

Besides that, I'm curious about how this game treats women. I watched a playthrough of the demo, and every female character was either a sexpot, a doll, a traitor, or a victim.

@missashley: I can't comment on the treatment of women, but based on my impressions of the demo, I might stay away from this one if you aren't a fan of character action games. Not because I think this is would be too complex, hard, or intimidating, but because I think this is a particularly poor implementation of the genre.

You can see it in several places in the QL, but the battle camera is terrible. A good system manages to focus the player on whatever enemy they are fighting while still allowing them to keep track of three dimensional space. FFXVI absolutely doesn't do that. It stacks enemies way to the side of the screen, which all but guarantees you will lose them the instant you dodge, and I always found the camera rotation too sluggish to keep up with the action. But then it will suddenly swing in the opposite direction and you'll have some sort of canned one-off animation where the camera whips around to the point of it being nauseating.

Also, this is admittedly more of a me thing, but I generally dislike games that rely so heavily on filling a stagger bar. Having to whale on enemies to fill an arbitrary bar just so you can use your same abilities but now have them do actual damage is extremely tedious.

Basically, there are way better games to use to get into the genre. I'd pick up either God of War and just set the difficulty down. Or if you really want a Final Fantasy game, the combat in FFVII Remake was really quite good. I'm actually kind of frustrated that they didn't just adapt that system for XVI.

I've played the demo and a bit of the game after that and so far I really enjoy it. First final fantasy I've ever played though

The game looks like its great time and I plan on playing it in the future. As far as treatment of women goes, according to Gamespots review, there are a few women the reviewer thought was great in the game. The woman who grew up with Clive and another woman who seems to be a sea captain were highlighted. And if you're talking about the woman in the demo who turned out to be a traitor, there is nothing sexist about that. I know its shocking to hear, but yes, women can also be evil and do evil things. And remember this game is influenced by Game of Thrones. Cersi Lannister was one of the most villainous women in modern television.

This is a game i would enjoy, but i do think there's some magic gone by steering away from the fantastical world-building in favor of going for the more common medieval european stylings. Even if FF9 kinda went for that too, that game's colorful cast, whimsical knight outfits, fantastical creatures and airships do help to give a game it's own spin on what a medieval world can be.

This video could just as well be from Dragon's Dogma. Or The Witcher. Or Gothic. There's no world with flying school-buildings (FF8), submerging sand-castles (FF6) or a mystical hawaii setting (FF10). You know, worlds that are almost designed characters themselves and therefore were fascinating to discover because of it's otherworldliness.

I also worry that the 'we're in this together with our lil team against the world' vibe of most FF games is kinda lost without a party. Often Final Fantasies' stories are at their best when the characters in a party interact with eachother.

As for the combat, i think i would enjoy it. Kinda reminds me of Kingdom Hearts even. Or Stranger of Paradise naturally. But the weird mobile-game ish QTE's are a bit much for me in the same way that the slots in Crisis core don't add to the experience. Jan & Jeff seem to big them up as being as fantastical and rad as Asura's wrath did, but all i saw here were some dodges and a few basic slashes after freeze frames. Given they mentioned not having to played all that much further along, i wonder what these Asura Wrath-esque QTE's were. Is this Clive fella going to decapitate 10 heads with a single spin-move and then use those heads in mid-air as stepping stones to get enough air to do a plunging attack on a troll's eye or something? What are we talking about?

I'm not one of the 'FF should be 100% turn-based' guys, but i do think adding unnecessary QTE's fits in Square's everlasting evolution from selecting an option in a menu to 'we need to make FF combat be as cool as we portray it in the cutscenes' - obsession that has been in the media since Final Fantasy 7 became a hit back in te day. Focusing so fully on QTE's with freeze-frames is something that most devs have wisely turned away from, but FF seems to not be able to leave it on the table because pressing a button during a cutscene is more actiony than not pressing a button during a cutscene, and therefore fits in their journey to make Final Fantasy as action-y as the cutscenes ever were.

I think I might hate this game. What grinds my gears the most about it is that it feels so old. Final Fantasy used to be the trendsetter, the franchise you would point to and say "this is what video gaming can be." Instead, FFXVI feels at least 5 years behind the best-in-class of whatever its shooting for. I can easily think of several games, God of War, Elden Ring, BoTW/TotK just to name a few, that absolutely eat it's lunch in the story, gameplay, and world-building departments.

The RPG mechanics are so vestigial that I really think the game would be better if they simply weren't in there at all. There's no party, very little gear, and what gear there is barely makes a difference. There's a massive skill screen, but you can only actually equip a few skills at a time, so you're not really getting any sense of developing a character or the combat getting any more complex. It hardly seems to matter anyway, since elemental weaknesses no longer seem to be a thing so you may as well just pick the most powerful abilities.

On the combat side, the targeting and camera are absolutely whacked. It's basically impossible to target the thing you want in groups and the camera does a poor job of giving you any context of the wider combat space, which is an even larger problem than usual because there are absolutely no warning icons for attacks coming at you from off screen. They also felt the need to include QTEs with oddly long windows just so that they could flash "CINEMATIC DODGE" on the screen. What the hell? My regular dodge will serve just fine, thanks.

As far as the story goes - woof. It's like the devs watched Game of Thrones but all they took away from it was "It's Dark(TM)." The problem in FFXVI's case is that all of that darkness is completely unearned. If you're going to tear a kid to pieces, on screen, while he begs for his life,then you'd damn well better have at least spent some time to develop his character before hand. Instead, you get what's barely a stick figure characterization and the whole endeavor just ends up being misery porn.

And if anyone knows of a worse implementation for game lore than "pause the cutscene and look at this shoddy codex" please, tell me, because I can't think of one.

What's goin on with the video quality for this QL? I know it's a dark demo, but there looks to be a problem with the capture...