final fantasy 16 retrospective
May. 21st, 2024 04:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaFellow Tumblrinas have probably seen me grinding through Final Fantasy 16 the past few weeks and, I gotta say: I did not much like it overall!
Which bums me out a bit, since it seems to have struck a chord with a bunch of friends, who adored it and are having a grand old time with it. I wish I could join in on the hype, but alas, this was very aggressively Not The Final Fantasy For Me.
I'm at the point right before you confront Ultima for the final time, and I have done all the sidequests, but I dunno if I'm gonna actually swing at the final boss (I kinda Need To Be Done With This Game, and making all those sidequest markers go away might be just the thing I needed, much like how I simply Could Not Stop Playing Stardew Valley until I completed the community center), so, I may as well capture my thoughts now while they're fresh.
Starting with the good (there was a lot of good!):
* The gameplay is fun! I played on action mode, and as someone who's got good reflexes/coordination but is generally somewhat "behind the times" wrt modern action games (e.g. the most recent Metal Gear I've played is MGS3; I've played Breath of the Wild but not Tears of the Kingdom; I haven't played any of the Dark Souls games, etc), it was perfectly well-tuned for me—I could beat most encounters on the first try, but not always, and plenty encounters felt like they were keeping me "on my toes" regardless. I'm not familiar enough with modern action games to know which aspects were innovative/new versus just artfully copied from elsewhere (Bird Guy watched with interest at times, and said certain things reminded him a lot of the Souls games), but, yeah, it progressed nicely from "here's how to smash attack to win," into "hmm I'm being forced to learn a bit of this fancier moveset," into, finally, "hell yeah I'm having so fun customizing my moveset!" Sometimes the visual effects on those moves are a little too splashy—in a game that actually cares about timed dodges and parrying, LOTS OF FLAMES AND SPARKS AND SUCH can get in the way of, y'know, timing hits properly—but, given that the difficulty is forgiving enough, that's a pretty minor complaint.
* Cid is a delight. Great character, had a solid arc, voice actor was great, totally solid. Joshua's got some charisma too—though, more on him later.
* Eikon battles were a mixed bag, but when I liked them, I really liked them. The fight with Bahamut was great—interesting and challenging in terms of raw mechanics, and delightfully over-the-top in all the right ways. (The combo attacks with your brother! The rail shooter portion!*) And they're also the sequences where the game felt the most "Final Fantasy" to me, versus, any other generic action RPG. (I mean, okay, what is a "final" "fantasy" is sort of an inherently slippery definition by nature and by design, but you get what I mean.)
* ok yes i wish the controls in the rail shooter portion were snappier but, like, A for effort and A for concept
Anyway, now for Hater Hours:
* The plot is... uneven, at first, but has enough glimmers of promise I was willing to keep along to see where all this was going. (Final Fantasy 13's plot didn't really get cooking until a decent way in, after all, and I ended up adoring that game.)
I don't really have time to write a concise explanation of went wrong with the plot? so a long, rambling one will have to do. Here's a portrait of What Was Happening In My Head Throughout The Main Plot:
1) There's an opening sequence in Rosaria. This part's mostly fine. You know dad's going to bite it because he's nice and mentor-y to you, but, hey, he's a pretty likable doomed-for-death guy. (...indeed, he has a rather more distinctive personality than most of the bit characters we'll meet later, actually, but we'll get to that later.) You learn Clive is a bearer (a type of magic user), and his younger brother Joshua is a Dominant (a special type of bearer that can summon/channel mighty beings called Eikons). There's some hints at larger worldbuilding that I expect to get explored later. (e.g., I did a double-take when I noticed the name of a random NPC was something like "Slavemaster Dan," and it's like, oh fuck we have slavery in this universe?)
2) Fast-forward 13 years, and we gather that Clive's a slave-soldier in an elite squadron of other slave-soldiers, and his little squad is hunting down Shiva, the Dominant of Ice. They find her—and that's when Clive learns that the Dominant of Ice is his childhood pal Jill, and immediately turns on his comrades. (One of his comrades even has some pretty wrenching dialogue while Clive's murdering him—says something about how he picked Clive out of the rabble/generic-soldier-pool for this squadron, and is taking the betrayal pretty personally.) Okay, solid!
3) Then Clive & Jill both get their asses saved by Cid (who's great!), and Cid takes them both back to "Hideaway," the little secret city of liberated bearers.
Around this point, I start to wonder about parts of this worldbuilding. Like, okay, Rosaria treats their Dominants well, whereas the Iron Kingdom treats them like shit, I'm familiar with Dragon Age's Tevinter vs Qunari thing, a-okay so far. But when Clive arrives in Hideaway, he's asking questions like "oh wow are all bearers who show up here in such bad shape," as though he's confused/puzzled, except he himself was enslaved? for over a decade? specifically due to his being a bearer? surely he's aware of how that works, even if he's not jumping to be part of the Bearer Liberation Front? (I was expecting some bit of detail about Clive's life in the army—he was former royalty! he knows what it's like at the top and at the bottom!—but we never learn a single other thing about his service in the military.)
The best reason the game seems to present for Clive's ignorance/indifference is "boy is so focused on revenging his brother that he doesn't care about anything else," but that explanation feels pretty weak on its own (it's implied the empire tends to murder ex-slave-soldiers? surely he'd at least cynically want the protection of Cid's group so he doesn't get murdered before doing his revenge?). I was so confused about the basic mechanics of this universe that I didn't even know whether Clive's seeming indifference was meant to be a character flaw, or I just didn't understand something about how slavery works in this world that would obviously explain his indifference.
4) But, okay okay okay, I put my confusion on a shelf for a bit because Cid's doing some cool stuff for a bit. Then Cid describes his Big Huge Plan—he wants to destroy all five of the mothercrystals—and now I'm confused again.
Basically, there's two ways to do magic in this world: get a shard from a mothercrystal and use that, or be a bearer. Cid thinks humanity's grown "too reliant" on magic, and that's why people haven't bothered developing non-magical technology, and if you nuke the mothercrystals, they'll all have to learn to live life without magic. (It's unclear whether bearers will cease to be able to use their magic without the mothercrystals? Which seems like an awfully big and important question! You get bits and hints that the answer is "yes," much later on, but there's never a discussion—which seems like it'd be a big thing to discuss! Like, if I'm a bearer, I probably don't want to be enslaved, but I may not necessarily want to lose my magic in the process, right?
This aspect of the plot felt like they were doing some weird mixed-metaphor thing with, like, "oh no the mothercrystals are oil and we are ecoterrorists" combined with "oh no the mothercrystals are Evil Things Created By The Gods To Steer Humanity and we must tear them asunder (a la FF12's Venat stuff)" combined with "the big Slavery Is Bad theme the game has going on" and they just... didn't... gel together quite right.
Imagine stuff getting shakier and shakier as the plot progresses and you get the picture. Like—at one point, Dion(/Bahamut) goes on a huge grief-propelled rampage, but (1) even a wildly out-of-control Bahamut still seems capable of... strategic action? very deliberate battle strategies? that calls into question exactly how this whole "out-of-control rage" thing works?, and (2) we don't see the thing that drove Dion into this state until after the battle??? Like I spent the whole battle being like "wtf why am I even fighting this guy, I thought he was on my side, did I miss a scene or something?" and... I mean, yeah, I did, because I still have no idea why that scene wasn't before the battle, jeez. Clive and Joshua are kept apart for nearly the entire game—and the explanation we ultimately get for "why couldn't they, like, reunite sooner, they clearly knew the other was alive" is weak, and we don't get enough tension/anticipation/etc for their reunion? (And when they reunite the dynamic feels... off, like, not the way you'd act around someone you've been separated from for over a decade I think!!!) Jill gets revenge on her former slavers but it similarly feels not built up enough, Jill goes back to not-getting-to-do-anything-interesting immediately thereafter, etc.
* The characters on Clive's side, with a couple exceptions (Cid, Joshua to some extent) all feel pretty same-y to me? Clive's a sort of flat soft-spoken stoic do-gooder guy; Jill is a similarly flat soft-spoken do-gooder chick; the various folks who staff Hideaway are variations on the theme of Good-Natured Do-Gooders with single-adjective personalities (blacksmith = stoic, merchant = bossy, etc). Some of those staffers do get fleshed out in later sidequests... but it's far too little, far too late. (Compare to FF15, where you get a very strong sense of everyone's personalities right off the bat, and that's enhanced with party banter while you're traveling, cheesy "team up" abilities, etc. There's shockingly little banter in this game!)
* But, okay okay okay okay, maybe I am just not appreciating what FF16 is trying to do. Like, while most Final Fantasy games lean heavily into interparty dynamics, maybe this game simply didn't want that, and I should appreciate it for what it is trying to do. Fair enough!
But if they're going for a political plot (which I think is the most parsimonious interpretation of their aims?), they're just straight-up bad at it, I'm sorry. The nations were never more than amorphous blobs in my mind—well, I guess setting aside [Waloed], which I could gather was "the spooky mysterious people across the sea," and it's not like we ever get much more development of them than that. And outside of Waloed: I was never clear which parts of the map belonged to Sanbreque versus the Crystalline Dominion versus Rosaria, and also, I was confused when people referred to "Rosaria" at all, because didn't we see that duchy get utterly routed during the opening sequence? don't they no longer exist? Also both the Crystalline Dominion and Sanbreque seemed pretty empire-y; I sort of thought they were the same for a while? When we find out bearer slavery works the same in pretty much every country, with the exception of "Rosaria's royal family seems to feel a bit bad about it tho," I was so disappointed—that seemed like it would've been a fun and interesting avenue to explore, like, the political economy of So What's The Deal With Slavery In This World, but no such luck.
Compare this all to Game of Thrones, which the FF16 writers are so clearly inspired by—God, I didn't even much like GoT, but I do, in fact, have a pretty strong idea of who the Lannisters are and what they're about, versus who the Starks are and what they're about, as well as a half-dozen other houses, with a good-enough idea of their associated geographies. And I certainly never had to stare at a poorly-marked map to figure any of that out! They just made it clear in the story!
* It doesn't help that the physical environments themselves are pretty same-y. There's Orientalist Desert-Land, vs The Rest Of It, and... there's some subtle distinctions between various subparts of The Rest Of It but none that really gripped me? Again, this compares unfavorably to something like Dragon Age: Inquisition, which, for all its flaws, had a solid sense of setting pretty much everywhere except the Hinterlands. I have such strong, specific sense-memories of the Emerald Graves versus Emprise du Lion versus the Hissing Wastes.
* The "war room"-esque mechanics were also limp as hell. You can receive letters from people, and "alliant reports," each of which sometimes give you little sidequests to do, but there's nothing that makes these sidequests more distinct or flavorful than any other sidequest in the game. Again, Dragon Age: Inquisition compares favorably here—the war table in that game was pretty interesting, with three different advisors whispering in your ear, all with their very different perspectives/opinions, and deploying units to go deal with stuff—that all added a lot of depth! If it's not doing something similarly interesting, why bother...?
* Speaking of generic do-gooder-y stuff—man, where's the narrative tension in this game. There's a point, near endgame, when Joshua punches Clive and yells at him for wanting to be the sole savior of humanity when, really, saving humanity is all of their jobs—which is an interesting idea, but utterly unearned, because it's not really been a prominent theme or point of emphasis before now? and also Clive says "this is the right thing to do" and that... ends... the fight. What. If you're gonna have a conflict, have a conflict! Let some characters be mad each other for a bit! It's so boring otherwise lol. (Compare to FF15, where Gladio punching Noctis is (1) the culmination of a long-simmering conflict the two of them have had, and (2) very obviously follows from a Horrible Thing they've just been through. It hurts! And they have to do a whole dungeon before they can so much as talk to each other again! It's great!)
* Utterly limp environmental storytelling. There's a sidequest near the end where we're investigating a prison where a bunch of bearers were kept and experimented on for the purposes of making/training a big mean monster, right? And the way you find out what happened is... well, literally the first note you read in the dungeon features the text, "The purpose of this facility is [x]." Seriously? Like, come on, where is the tension/fun/flavor in just telling us flat-out like us, jeez.
* The sidequests get soooo samey and tedious after a while? This game only has one verb, Kill Stuff. Even if it's "kill stuff [to help someone make a potion]" versus "kill stuff [to help save a village]," it's still all Kill Stuff and blurs together after a while. (It's actually making me appreciate why, e.g., old-school FF7, 8, and 9 were so packed with minigames. It adds important variation in How You Interact With The World! Doing the little stageplay-mock-swordfight in FF9 feels palpably different than doing Actual Battle! The Fort Condor minigame in FF7 feels palpably different—higher-level, more strategic—than doing Normal Battle! That variety's crucial over the course of a longer game. It's possible to minigame too hard—lots of other 90s games have aged poorly for that—but, damn, did I ever want something that wasn't just another round of Kill Stuff.
in conclusion this game was fun enough for my current brain-state (needed something repetitive/distracting) but idk if i'd do it again hahaha
Which bums me out a bit, since it seems to have struck a chord with a bunch of friends, who adored it and are having a grand old time with it. I wish I could join in on the hype, but alas, this was very aggressively Not The Final Fantasy For Me.
I'm at the point right before you confront Ultima for the final time, and I have done all the sidequests, but I dunno if I'm gonna actually swing at the final boss (I kinda Need To Be Done With This Game, and making all those sidequest markers go away might be just the thing I needed, much like how I simply Could Not Stop Playing Stardew Valley until I completed the community center), so, I may as well capture my thoughts now while they're fresh.
Starting with the good (there was a lot of good!):
* The gameplay is fun! I played on action mode, and as someone who's got good reflexes/coordination but is generally somewhat "behind the times" wrt modern action games (e.g. the most recent Metal Gear I've played is MGS3; I've played Breath of the Wild but not Tears of the Kingdom; I haven't played any of the Dark Souls games, etc), it was perfectly well-tuned for me—I could beat most encounters on the first try, but not always, and plenty encounters felt like they were keeping me "on my toes" regardless. I'm not familiar enough with modern action games to know which aspects were innovative/new versus just artfully copied from elsewhere (Bird Guy watched with interest at times, and said certain things reminded him a lot of the Souls games), but, yeah, it progressed nicely from "here's how to smash attack to win," into "hmm I'm being forced to learn a bit of this fancier moveset," into, finally, "hell yeah I'm having so fun customizing my moveset!" Sometimes the visual effects on those moves are a little too splashy—in a game that actually cares about timed dodges and parrying, LOTS OF FLAMES AND SPARKS AND SUCH can get in the way of, y'know, timing hits properly—but, given that the difficulty is forgiving enough, that's a pretty minor complaint.
* Cid is a delight. Great character, had a solid arc, voice actor was great, totally solid. Joshua's got some charisma too—though, more on him later.
* Eikon battles were a mixed bag, but when I liked them, I really liked them. The fight with Bahamut was great—interesting and challenging in terms of raw mechanics, and delightfully over-the-top in all the right ways. (The combo attacks with your brother! The rail shooter portion!*) And they're also the sequences where the game felt the most "Final Fantasy" to me, versus, any other generic action RPG. (I mean, okay, what is a "final" "fantasy" is sort of an inherently slippery definition by nature and by design, but you get what I mean.)
* ok yes i wish the controls in the rail shooter portion were snappier but, like, A for effort and A for concept
Anyway, now for Hater Hours:
* The plot is... uneven, at first, but has enough glimmers of promise I was willing to keep along to see where all this was going. (Final Fantasy 13's plot didn't really get cooking until a decent way in, after all, and I ended up adoring that game.)
I don't really have time to write a concise explanation of went wrong with the plot? so a long, rambling one will have to do. Here's a portrait of What Was Happening In My Head Throughout The Main Plot:
1) There's an opening sequence in Rosaria. This part's mostly fine. You know dad's going to bite it because he's nice and mentor-y to you, but, hey, he's a pretty likable doomed-for-death guy. (...indeed, he has a rather more distinctive personality than most of the bit characters we'll meet later, actually, but we'll get to that later.) You learn Clive is a bearer (a type of magic user), and his younger brother Joshua is a Dominant (a special type of bearer that can summon/channel mighty beings called Eikons). There's some hints at larger worldbuilding that I expect to get explored later. (e.g., I did a double-take when I noticed the name of a random NPC was something like "Slavemaster Dan," and it's like, oh fuck we have slavery in this universe?)
2) Fast-forward 13 years, and we gather that Clive's a slave-soldier in an elite squadron of other slave-soldiers, and his little squad is hunting down Shiva, the Dominant of Ice. They find her—and that's when Clive learns that the Dominant of Ice is his childhood pal Jill, and immediately turns on his comrades. (One of his comrades even has some pretty wrenching dialogue while Clive's murdering him—says something about how he picked Clive out of the rabble/generic-soldier-pool for this squadron, and is taking the betrayal pretty personally.) Okay, solid!
3) Then Clive & Jill both get their asses saved by Cid (who's great!), and Cid takes them both back to "Hideaway," the little secret city of liberated bearers.
Around this point, I start to wonder about parts of this worldbuilding. Like, okay, Rosaria treats their Dominants well, whereas the Iron Kingdom treats them like shit, I'm familiar with Dragon Age's Tevinter vs Qunari thing, a-okay so far. But when Clive arrives in Hideaway, he's asking questions like "oh wow are all bearers who show up here in such bad shape," as though he's confused/puzzled, except he himself was enslaved? for over a decade? specifically due to his being a bearer? surely he's aware of how that works, even if he's not jumping to be part of the Bearer Liberation Front? (I was expecting some bit of detail about Clive's life in the army—he was former royalty! he knows what it's like at the top and at the bottom!—but we never learn a single other thing about his service in the military.)
The best reason the game seems to present for Clive's ignorance/indifference is "boy is so focused on revenging his brother that he doesn't care about anything else," but that explanation feels pretty weak on its own (it's implied the empire tends to murder ex-slave-soldiers? surely he'd at least cynically want the protection of Cid's group so he doesn't get murdered before doing his revenge?). I was so confused about the basic mechanics of this universe that I didn't even know whether Clive's seeming indifference was meant to be a character flaw, or I just didn't understand something about how slavery works in this world that would obviously explain his indifference.
4) But, okay okay okay, I put my confusion on a shelf for a bit because Cid's doing some cool stuff for a bit. Then Cid describes his Big Huge Plan—he wants to destroy all five of the mothercrystals—and now I'm confused again.
Basically, there's two ways to do magic in this world: get a shard from a mothercrystal and use that, or be a bearer. Cid thinks humanity's grown "too reliant" on magic, and that's why people haven't bothered developing non-magical technology, and if you nuke the mothercrystals, they'll all have to learn to live life without magic. (It's unclear whether bearers will cease to be able to use their magic without the mothercrystals? Which seems like an awfully big and important question! You get bits and hints that the answer is "yes," much later on, but there's never a discussion—which seems like it'd be a big thing to discuss! Like, if I'm a bearer, I probably don't want to be enslaved, but I may not necessarily want to lose my magic in the process, right?
This aspect of the plot felt like they were doing some weird mixed-metaphor thing with, like, "oh no the mothercrystals are oil and we are ecoterrorists" combined with "oh no the mothercrystals are Evil Things Created By The Gods To Steer Humanity and we must tear them asunder (a la FF12's Venat stuff)" combined with "the big Slavery Is Bad theme the game has going on" and they just... didn't... gel together quite right.
Imagine stuff getting shakier and shakier as the plot progresses and you get the picture. Like—at one point, Dion(/Bahamut) goes on a huge grief-propelled rampage, but (1) even a wildly out-of-control Bahamut still seems capable of... strategic action? very deliberate battle strategies? that calls into question exactly how this whole "out-of-control rage" thing works?, and (2) we don't see the thing that drove Dion into this state until after the battle??? Like I spent the whole battle being like "wtf why am I even fighting this guy, I thought he was on my side, did I miss a scene or something?" and... I mean, yeah, I did, because I still have no idea why that scene wasn't before the battle, jeez. Clive and Joshua are kept apart for nearly the entire game—and the explanation we ultimately get for "why couldn't they, like, reunite sooner, they clearly knew the other was alive" is weak, and we don't get enough tension/anticipation/etc for their reunion? (And when they reunite the dynamic feels... off, like, not the way you'd act around someone you've been separated from for over a decade I think!!!) Jill gets revenge on her former slavers but it similarly feels not built up enough, Jill goes back to not-getting-to-do-anything-interesting immediately thereafter, etc.
* The characters on Clive's side, with a couple exceptions (Cid, Joshua to some extent) all feel pretty same-y to me? Clive's a sort of flat soft-spoken stoic do-gooder guy; Jill is a similarly flat soft-spoken do-gooder chick; the various folks who staff Hideaway are variations on the theme of Good-Natured Do-Gooders with single-adjective personalities (blacksmith = stoic, merchant = bossy, etc). Some of those staffers do get fleshed out in later sidequests... but it's far too little, far too late. (Compare to FF15, where you get a very strong sense of everyone's personalities right off the bat, and that's enhanced with party banter while you're traveling, cheesy "team up" abilities, etc. There's shockingly little banter in this game!)
* But, okay okay okay okay, maybe I am just not appreciating what FF16 is trying to do. Like, while most Final Fantasy games lean heavily into interparty dynamics, maybe this game simply didn't want that, and I should appreciate it for what it is trying to do. Fair enough!
But if they're going for a political plot (which I think is the most parsimonious interpretation of their aims?), they're just straight-up bad at it, I'm sorry. The nations were never more than amorphous blobs in my mind—well, I guess setting aside [Waloed], which I could gather was "the spooky mysterious people across the sea," and it's not like we ever get much more development of them than that. And outside of Waloed: I was never clear which parts of the map belonged to Sanbreque versus the Crystalline Dominion versus Rosaria, and also, I was confused when people referred to "Rosaria" at all, because didn't we see that duchy get utterly routed during the opening sequence? don't they no longer exist? Also both the Crystalline Dominion and Sanbreque seemed pretty empire-y; I sort of thought they were the same for a while? When we find out bearer slavery works the same in pretty much every country, with the exception of "Rosaria's royal family seems to feel a bit bad about it tho," I was so disappointed—that seemed like it would've been a fun and interesting avenue to explore, like, the political economy of So What's The Deal With Slavery In This World, but no such luck.
Compare this all to Game of Thrones, which the FF16 writers are so clearly inspired by—God, I didn't even much like GoT, but I do, in fact, have a pretty strong idea of who the Lannisters are and what they're about, versus who the Starks are and what they're about, as well as a half-dozen other houses, with a good-enough idea of their associated geographies. And I certainly never had to stare at a poorly-marked map to figure any of that out! They just made it clear in the story!
* It doesn't help that the physical environments themselves are pretty same-y. There's Orientalist Desert-Land, vs The Rest Of It, and... there's some subtle distinctions between various subparts of The Rest Of It but none that really gripped me? Again, this compares unfavorably to something like Dragon Age: Inquisition, which, for all its flaws, had a solid sense of setting pretty much everywhere except the Hinterlands. I have such strong, specific sense-memories of the Emerald Graves versus Emprise du Lion versus the Hissing Wastes.
* The "war room"-esque mechanics were also limp as hell. You can receive letters from people, and "alliant reports," each of which sometimes give you little sidequests to do, but there's nothing that makes these sidequests more distinct or flavorful than any other sidequest in the game. Again, Dragon Age: Inquisition compares favorably here—the war table in that game was pretty interesting, with three different advisors whispering in your ear, all with their very different perspectives/opinions, and deploying units to go deal with stuff—that all added a lot of depth! If it's not doing something similarly interesting, why bother...?
* Speaking of generic do-gooder-y stuff—man, where's the narrative tension in this game. There's a point, near endgame, when Joshua punches Clive and yells at him for wanting to be the sole savior of humanity when, really, saving humanity is all of their jobs—which is an interesting idea, but utterly unearned, because it's not really been a prominent theme or point of emphasis before now? and also Clive says "this is the right thing to do" and that... ends... the fight. What. If you're gonna have a conflict, have a conflict! Let some characters be mad each other for a bit! It's so boring otherwise lol. (Compare to FF15, where Gladio punching Noctis is (1) the culmination of a long-simmering conflict the two of them have had, and (2) very obviously follows from a Horrible Thing they've just been through. It hurts! And they have to do a whole dungeon before they can so much as talk to each other again! It's great!)
* Utterly limp environmental storytelling. There's a sidequest near the end where we're investigating a prison where a bunch of bearers were kept and experimented on for the purposes of making/training a big mean monster, right? And the way you find out what happened is... well, literally the first note you read in the dungeon features the text, "The purpose of this facility is [x]." Seriously? Like, come on, where is the tension/fun/flavor in just telling us flat-out like us, jeez.
* The sidequests get soooo samey and tedious after a while? This game only has one verb, Kill Stuff. Even if it's "kill stuff [to help someone make a potion]" versus "kill stuff [to help save a village]," it's still all Kill Stuff and blurs together after a while. (It's actually making me appreciate why, e.g., old-school FF7, 8, and 9 were so packed with minigames. It adds important variation in How You Interact With The World! Doing the little stageplay-mock-swordfight in FF9 feels palpably different than doing Actual Battle! The Fort Condor minigame in FF7 feels palpably different—higher-level, more strategic—than doing Normal Battle! That variety's crucial over the course of a longer game. It's possible to minigame too hard—lots of other 90s games have aged poorly for that—but, damn, did I ever want something that wasn't just another round of Kill Stuff.
in conclusion this game was fun enough for my current brain-state (needed something repetitive/distracting) but idk if i'd do it again hahaha
no subject
Date: 2024-05-21 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-21 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-21 04:03 pm (UTC)And now I need to go read your DAI post. Excuse me!
no subject
Date: 2024-05-21 04:15 pm (UTC)I need to come back and address this because I completely agree.
I remember really enjoying adult Joshua as a character. He had a rough go of it but didn't complain. He worked hard and maintained good relationships with the people around him (Jote, the Undying, Dion); he willingly took Ultima into himself to protect Clive!* All signs point to awesome.
* And this had no payoff, I was so disappointed.
So when Clive spends a good third of the game coming to terms with the fact that he accidentally "killed" Joshua in the prologue, it is very unsatisfying that he's just like, "oh, Joshua might be alive? Huh. Cool. Anyway, what's Cid up to?" The game spends so much time and dialogue and energy on Clive's emotional resolution re: Joshua, Phoenix, Ifrit, and his role in the events of the prologue. Then, when it's flipped on its head, his response is... negligible. That's the only way I can think to describe. He and Jill slowly suspect Joshua might be alive, do nothing, and barely react.
That could have worked if the first third of the game was set five years after the prologue, and Clive had a few years to sit with his newfound emotional stability before Joshua started being a thing again. Like, he takes control of Ifrit at 20 and hears rumours about Joshua at 25. But the game condenses all this into such a squished period and goes about it with such tonal whiplash. It's weird.
And I still don't get why Joshua stayed away. The game hasn't given a reason. If he was under the stewardship of the Undying as a minor, that would be one thing. But he was Archduke of Rosaria the second he gained his majority. He had the autonomy to find Clive at any point, he just... didn't.
So, like, I hate death fake-outs in fiction. It's a cheap way to induce drama and emotion without any of the actual consequences. But adult Joshua was my favourite character, so I forgave it in this case. But I have to wonder if the story would have been stronger if he had remained dead because the payoff for his resurrection is minimal and uninspiring.
Whoops, this got long!
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Date: 2024-05-21 11:18 pm (UTC)in this particular case i didn't mind the fake-out death because it just seemed... so obvious to me that Joshua had to be alive, lol. bro is a PHOENIX. their whole THING is coming back. would've been more surprising to me if he'd actually stayed dead (and, you're totally right—that could've been pretty interesting! BUT ALAS)
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Date: 2024-05-21 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-21 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-21 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-22 05:06 pm (UTC)I was expecting some bit of detail about Clive's life in the army—he was former royalty! he knows what it's like at the top and at the bottom!—but we never learn a single other thing about his service in the military.
It's so strange! This guy is fighting to end slavery; you'd think the game would be more interested in his time as a slave!
There's shockingly little banter in this game!
There's so little sense of characters being present! At one point I suddenly realised 'oh, hey, Jill's not in my party any more; when did that happen?' That would never have happened in Final Fantasy XV; you're always very aware of your party members in that game, and, when they're gone, you miss them.
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Date: 2024-05-23 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-23 10:51 pm (UTC)ha, yes, i had exactly the same moment! like, I could tell Jill was there because sometimes icy crystals would drop on my enemies, but that was... the only indicator? which is such a bummer!
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Date: 2024-05-24 01:08 am (UTC)There is a lot of information to take in in this game, but it's actually organized very nicely through three different handy modules: Harpocrates' the Thousand Tomes, Vivian's State of the Realm (which covers plot lines, time lines, and most important, land placement), and the Active Time Lore. Of course I've been obsessed with this game for nearly a year now, so all of this story feels familiar and known to me, so I can't comment in terms of any uncertainty of place you're feeling. Not sure if you checked these out or would like to, but I think they would lend some clarity!
I think the innate simplicity of a lot of these functions in game (like the "alliant reports," which is really just a place to check for sidequests and get rewards -- or you have Blackthorone's blacksmith, wherein there's really no incentive to dungeon/battle grind for materials to bolster weapons except for crafting the occasional Nicer sword--) is a detriment and it should have allowed itself to be niche with them, as it was with the single player, action driven formula it so lauded. Like, I did all these things, but they were bland! This game needs variety for sure, whether its in minigames (though what kind of minigame would suit this grim story I cannot think of lol) or party members to switch between or better sidequest staging or or or whateverrrr -- I think pouring all the attention into the battle system was a weak point and *does* get tedious.
Where I think this game shines the most however is with its cast of characters and story, which I was very charmed by! Every single character interested me, I loved all the members in the Hideaway, and likewise I loved all the characters that Clive met while journeying around the Twins. The voice acting really lent itself well here too in this aspect, as I can listen to these NPCs chatter all day long and eagerly seek them out! The world state is constantly in flux as well, so as Clive journeys around Valisthea, the NPCs always have new information to share and felt like active participants. In lieu of that:
while most Final Fantasy games lean heavily into interparty dynamics, maybe this game simply didn't want that,
I agree! Even though I longed for party banter, I started to enjoy a lot that it's not about a given party, but the community of people Clive surrounds himself with. This story is about scale and class and escaping the system they're slotted into, and it takes the same amount of people to break even with the old. Though I would still throw hands for Joshua and Jill to have banter with Clive.
You learn Clive is a bearer (a type of magic user), and his younger brother Joshua is a Dominant
Not sure how much this will recontextualize Clive's character for you, but he's not a bearer actually! :'D He was gifted magic by his brother, but had no innate magic of his own. His being marked as a bearer and made to serve as one was simply a sardonic punishment from his mother who held him in contempt. During the events of Phoenix Gate, that's where it's first revealed that Clive is a dominant (though he is unaware of this -- as is everyone else -- until obviously meeting Cid and all that).
I would be so curious if you did decide to finish this game how you feel about it in its finality (though it sounds like you're ready to move on haha <3). The end is also very divisive it seems, but imo it really takes the story full circle and clarifies the journey and Clive's intentions, which felt really nicely done. Glad to have read your thoughts!!
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Date: 2024-05-27 08:23 am (UTC)agreed that the voice acting was really strong and i did love the NPC chatter, come to mention it. i remember finding myself wondering if the designers had ever played with the idea of letting you eavesdrop in on whole *conversations*—like, sometimes you'd here three lines of dialogue between two people, and what they were discussing seemed REALLY interesting, and i wished there was more to it than just those three lines? (that sort of thing's probably not super tractable, given it would blow up the budget to have TONS of fully-voice-acted side conversations that most players may not even stick around to hear... but the towns did feel properly lived in and i really liked that.)
it's not about a given party, but the community of people Clive surrounds himself with
that's a really nice/pithy way of summing it up / looking at it. interesting to think about what i'd tweak in the game to bring that theme more to the fore (since i think you're right, that's definitely what FFXVI is interested in)... makes me wish the alliant reports were more game-y, since that really would be an interesting way of bringing you into proper *connection* & feeling that connection with various agents you've got around the world...
i did NOT know the bit about Clive not technically being a bearer, huh! i assumed that the phoenix's "blessing" made him so? but yeah i guess pursuing the fanwiki article says that's not so lol. i wonder how common those blessings are?
if i do go back and finish this game, dreamwidth + you will be the first to know, don't you worry! (i admit hearing it's divisive has got my interest pique lollollol)
thanks for the lovely comment as always~