(No spoilers)

I enjoyed it. This game for most people will land between a 7/10 to a 9/10. The music, story, and combat were all excellent for me but make no mistake. There are deep deep flaws in this game, especially on the “rpg” side of things.

1. Using FFXVs open world as an excuse to make this game zone based makes no sense after playing it. The benefit of zones is that you get to add dense content to these hand crafted maps but the zones in this game are far more uninteresting and dead than XV since they basically did nothing interesting with them.

2. The party system is just horrible. Yes Torgal is a good boy and all but the parts where you had two additional party members made the game feel so much more alive. Even from a gameplay perspective they took aggro away from you and contributed dps. Having large sections of the game where you’re alone with just Torgal is so bad and even thematically makes no sense.

3. I don’t get why they couldn’t add even basic shit like elemental advantage/disadvantage. FF7R already shows you can do this. It’s just plain lazy and using the excuse of “it makes the game harder” is baffling.

4. Locking the hard difficulty behind NG+ is such a poor way of padding out a game. It’s already statistically proven a vast majority of players don’t even bother NG+ and locking something thing like that behind a 40 hour grind is sad. I much would’ve preferred having a hard difficulty on my first play through.

Ultimately I’ve come to terms that most of the things I don’t like in this game are design decisions they brought in from FFXIV (zones, no elemental affinity, lack of party, most side quests, etc). 95% of the things I did enjoy were game mechanics not from XIV. It’s clear to me that their approach to game design from their time as MMO devs do not compliment this game. The more they stepped away from it, the better it got. But the parts that doubled down on it were very lackluster.

Criticisms aside, this game is still a 9/10 for me and sets up good ground work for their next game. And if it makes anyone feel better here, CBU3 are usually very aware of criticisms and I’m sure they’ll address it one way or another.

I’m only part way through (a bit past bahamut) so I’m not fully qualified to comment on the game as a whole, and I’m avoiding reviews until I’m finished (also haven’t played 14 or 15). So far I’m really enjoying it because it just has that Final Fantasy charm that squeenix are so good at. I love the world, the story is good (if leaning a bit too heavily on game of thrones for my liking), and the characters are likeable enough. Combat got fun once it clicked. That said…

There are a LOT of really obvious things to criticize. Over tutorialized, incredibly boring fetch quests, and progression systems that are wierdly linear and restrictive. It’s frustrating because some small tweaks could make it so much better. Let me explore and discover quests for myself instead of witholding them until the game decides to make them available and then spamming me with notifications. Disable the on-screen quest markers or at least let me turn them off (the “animal instinct” feature is neat, don’t need more than that). Let me upgrade my weapons past +2 and specialise them with elemental synergies so there isn’t just one “correct” gear set to use at any given time. Give different merchants their own unique items to sell. Jill is an interesting character but is underused, that whole descent to the first crystal with Cid, and the cutscene that followed, she was barely given a single line. The titan fights are great ideas but not always fun to play, and too reliant on quicktime events which I thought we’d all agreed kinda sucked several years ago so idk why squeenix didn’t get the memo.

But anyway yeah it’s pretty and sometimes fun and I can pet the dog so it still gets a thumbs up from me I guess 乁( •_• )ㄏ

SkillUp did and got a lot of shit for it, as he expected 😁 He generally disliked the direction the franchise is taking and wasn’t a fan of much besides presentation, which makes sense since he’s more of a gameplay oriented gamer from what I can tell.

I haven’t finished it yet; I think I’m about 80% through and I’m struggling to pick it back up. I agree with all your points. It is super repetitive - Same Big Story Mission vs Different Eikon -> 6 Side Missions -> 1 or 2 Hunts; repeat. I want to like it, but end of the day the cutscenes aren’t enough to carry it.

I thought the main story was overly long. You could remove Mid and everything you do related to her to cut a lot of fat off of it. Most of that feels like an anime filler episode. And yet they still couldn’t find time to let Jill be a character for more than two scenes.

I also thought the gear and crafting systems were some of the worst I’ve seen. Whats the point of a crafting system that linear.

Really fell flat for me, riddled with bad animation, fetch quests, boring dialogue, pointless crafting etc.

I really did enjoy the first hour or so, but tbh even the combat - which people praise - wasn’t even as good as stranger of paradise in depth or complexity. You spent most of your time doing the same combo waiting for cool downs.

Hitting attack or dodge repeatedly isn’t satisfying depth, not to mention the dodge just automatically saves you as long as its timed right the direction means nothing.

Side quests were pretty unbearable, in my whole life I’ve never skipped cutscenes, I skipped them all on the last 12 side quests because the voice/animation were so boring and I knew I’d be rewarded with either gil of crafting materials, both of which I had in abundance and nothing to spend it on.

If you want to lock a “super hard” mode behind ng , then fine, but the “Action focused” mode was so easy that it’s insulting to lock the harder mode out, nobody wants to play a game twice to enjoy it and especially not one that’s 50 hours long.

Overall, very disappointed, after seeing people rave about yoshi I thought it could be good but it was just too close to an MMO in quest design.

Edit: Oh and having no elemental or status effects in a game in which every eikon has a theme and you fight marlboros which do bad breath is just so lazy. The system was oversimplified, not complex, everything the enemy did was just a pure subtraction, nothing else. I just can’t understand how they’ve released such a plain experience.

I would prefer a world where people don’t criticize it because “It’s not Final Fantasy”. Ever since X, they’ve been innovating and going various different directions.

That said, there do seem to be some fair criticisms that there’s no challenge - no difficulty that forces players to carefully consider their options. Even though I don’t go for the hard content in FFXIV (the MMO), I at least appreciate being punished for not recognizing boss mechanics, or for aggroing too many minions.

I’m also not hot on the art style being super dark. It was bad enough that the entire core cast of XV is all-male and just wears black. XVI does seem to have more varied landscapes as you go, but a lot of the early stuff is grim foggy castles at night.

This is not to say there’s not some amazing things about the game - it appears to have a lot going for it. But it seemed to have more going in terms of production budget than creativity.

I get some of your criticisms for the game and agree with a lot of them. But I don’t see a narrow more action focused character and mechanics as a bad thing, FFXVI is basically a Japanese Witcher 3. Now you may dislike that in favor of more blank slate character development and that’s fine. What I do find a major problem in 16 is that the combat system is complete overkill for the standard difficulty as the enemy AI is extremely passive outside of the big fights. So the game doesn’t force you to really make hard choices in terms of loadout and moment to moment gameplay a la DMC5.

Also, the side quests really suck mechanically and slow down the narrative way too much.