Critic Reviews
Attack of the Fanboy - Diego Perez - 5 / 5
Final Fantasy XVI is an outstanding achievement. Every part of it, from its characters to its combat, was put there with a purpose. Not only does it deliver satisfyingly slick action RPG combat in between masterfully directed cutscenes, but also a story with real heart. Most importantly, it’s incredibly clear that a team of creative individuals was behind every decision. There’s a human element that permeates every aspect of Final Fantasy XVI, and it’ll end up becoming a lot of people’s favorite Final Fantasy because of that.
But Why Tho? - Kyle Foley - 10 / 10
In a world full of games trying to stand out, Final Fantasy XVI has no problem rising above the rest. Wonderfully fun combat and beautiful presentation help make the excellent story even more impactful in an adventure well worth the price of admission.
DASHGAMER.com - Dan Rizzo - 10 / 10
Final Fantasy XVI proposes a new foundation for finding a masterclass of perfection in action role-playing, and cements a prime legacy founded on past iterations, capitalising on a formula that’s seen inarguable successes throughout its years in this medium, and has promulgated an establishment of extravagance that will indeed be hard to surpass.
Digital Trends - Giovanni Colantonio - 3 / 5
Final Fantasy XVI delivers on the “action” side of its action-RPG formula. A fierce and fast-paced combat system makes for the series’ most exciting stab at real-time swordplay yet, while its blockbuster Eikon fights rank among some of gaming’s most awe-inspiring battles. But there’s a general flatness surrounding those exhilarating highs, as shallow RPG hooks and dated design leave a promising evolution for the series stuck in the past.
GGRecon - Harry Boulton - 4.5 / 5
Despite the weight of expectations from a series full of gaming hallmarks, Final Fantasy 16 stands tall as an outstanding experience that you won’t want to miss out on.
Game Informer - Wesley LeBlanc - 8.5 / 10
When I look back at my time with Clive, his friends, his enemies, and Valisthea, it’s those highs that I vividly remember. FFXVI is very different from its predecessors, but in many ways, very familiar; And it’s still a Final Fantasy, through and through, reminding me why I love this series so much.
Gamer Escape - Josh McGrath - 9 / 10
Stellar and surprisingly customizable combat, a masterfully written and engaging storyline, and a beautiful audio visual presentation. It’s nearly a complete package, but with a few annoyances that keep it from being a perfect game. That said, even with those frustrations in mind, Final Fantasy XVI is an absolute return to form for the mainline franchise, and easily a reason to get yourself a PlayStation 5 if you’ve yet to.
Geek Culture - Wong Si Jia - 9.3 / 10
Final Fantasy XVI is a lot of things. It’s ambitious, gritty, and beautiful, but more importantly, it dares to dream. A sobering tale disguised as a dazzling visual spectacle, the almost-masterpiece presents a nuanced, clever take on all-too-familiar elements, and turns them into fresh experiences that devastate as much as they delight, before delivering the biggest reward – a well-executed emotional payoff.
Multiplayer First - James Lara - 9.5 / 10
Regardless if FFXVI is your first Final Fantasy game or you’re returning to the series, Square Enix’s latest game in the franchise lives up to the hype. Forget about JRPG’s or how action-RPGs nowadays need an open world, side quests that last for ages, co-op or whatever gimmick. FFXVI just throws all that out of the table and proves a tightly woven narrative-driven game –when built right — can make up for all those.
The minor issues the game has doesn’t detract from the incredible experience Clive & Co. bring to the table. Players will be treated to a compelling tale, stunning visual spectacles, and a fluid and fun combat system. What’s even more impressive is, Square Enix manages to make the franchise “grow up” alongside the players who grew up playing the series. FFXVI deals with more mature themes and manages to make it matter without being overly preachy about it.
Those looking for the series’ return to glory, rejoice! Final Fantasy XVI is that game, and this is one fantasy you’ll want to make sure you’re a part of.
Noisy Pixel - Bailey Seemangal - 9 / 10
Final Fantasy XVI is an action JRPG polished to an iridescent sheen. Its well-designed combat system and enemies, outstanding character writing and worldbuilding, and consistently stellar side content make it a standout entry in this legendary franchise. Even when accounting for the weak villains and a lukewarm conclusion, this was a journey that truly gripped me from beginning to end. This is a must-play game of the year and a Final Fantasy adventure you won’t forget.
PSX Brasil - Thiago de Alencar Moura - Portuguese - 100 / 100
Inspired by the past but modern at every turn, Final Fantasy XVI is the overhaul the series needed with unparalleled quality. Driven by a fantastic story and charismatic characters, built on accessible, exciting gameplay and impressive graphics on the PS5, it consolidates itself as one of the best games in the franchise history.
PlayStation Universe - Timothy Nunes - 9.5 / 10
Very little gets in the way of the success that Final Fantasy XVI creates. The strength of combat on top of a compelling, deep narrative steal the show. Despite little need for world exploration and the occasional lower resolution texture, Final Fantasy XVI stats true to the namesake while forging its own path forward.
PowerUp! - Adam Mathew - 9 / 10
I could barely put my controller down during my 57 hours with Final Fantasy XVI. It represents a huge milestone for this franchise, thanks to its bold shift to more adult story-telling (and language), addictive real-time combat, and gargantuan VFX spectacles that are best in class. Marry all that with what the series is already known for — epic orchestral OSTs and phenomenal world-building — and Final Fantasy XVI is nothing short of a must-own.
Prima Games - Jesse Vitelli - 9 / 10
Final Fantasy XVI’s grander narrative takes wild turns, evokes plenty of heartfelt emotions, and has given me a new cast of characters to fall in love with all over again. It’s a bold direction that Creative Business Unit 3 has taken the franchise, but one well worth the journey.
Sirus Gaming - Noel Lontoc - 9 / 10
Final Fantasy XVI may offer daring adjustments, but it is in this spirit of creativity that the genre flourishes. The game is not perfect, yet Naoki Yoshida, the game’s director, held faithful to his promise to deliver a compelling experience and bring Final Fantasy back to the must-have games again.
TechRaptor - Andrew Stretch - 9.5 / 10
Final Fantasy XVI is everything I could have hoped for and more. Combat is fast paced and rewarding as you master combos and abilities. Eikon fights, while not as interesting to play, are gorgeous to witness. All of this is wrapped up into a deep story and fully fleshed out world that you’ll want to be protecting.
Twinfinite - Hayes Madsen - 5 / 5
Final Fantasy XVI is a bold and ambitious new vision for the franchise, that succeeds on almost every level.
gotta wait 6+ months for the pc version :(
And then 5-10 years before anything Square goes on sale :D
I’m just praying they released it in a somewhat optimized state even if it takes longer to reach pc. Devs nowadays seemed to have abandoned optimization for pc on release (Wo Long and Jedi Survivor comes to mind).
Yeah, still nice to know it’ll come at some point. More importantly will it run on the steam deck?
One on hand this is a huge bummer, especially as this is the first Final Fantasy I’ve been excited for in a long time. On the other hand, more time to enjoy TOTK and Diablo! As long as it’s a well optimized release, I have no issues at all waiting.
I’m actually happy about this, as I have a huge backlog of games from this year alone. It’s been a crazy year so far.
Has it been confirmed it will be on PC in 6 months or is that just a hope? I haven’t decided if I want to wait or not.
I don’t think enough people realize the demo is literally just the game’s prologue. It even says if you buy the game it will pick up where you left off in the demo
So it’s not a turn based RPG anymore?
Hasn’t been since at least FFXIV.
Hasn’t been since FFX.
If you don’t count ATB, it hasn’t been since III, with the exception of X.
not counting ATB is kinda dishonest, though, IMO. It’s still turn-based, they just decoupled the turns. IG you could argue that it was “real time” in that you can wait and enemies will continue attacking, but you still have to wait for your turn to move and can’t move and attack freely, in almost every case
Fans of RPGs, and especially JRPGs, make a big distinction between the two. A lot of games are “turn based” - Dragon’s Quest, the Trails Games, Pokemon…
It seems like splitting hairs, but it is just a different battle system. In Trails there is a priority order, and a big part of the game is considering how the moves you are doing will affect that. The game even applies bonuses or penalties for certain terms somewhat randomly, so you have to take that into account as part of your strategy. Plus, certain moves will apply an turn delay to characters. Turn order is also really important in a game like Blue Dragon apparently. In the wider RPG world, this is referred to as an initiative system.
A lot of designers look down on Active Time. Their logic is usually that there is no point to adding time pressure to selecting attacks from a menu rather than putting in an initiative system. ATB lives on a bit in xenoblade and in MMO global cool down systems (GCD), but I would argue that both of those are more structured around a battle system that can be implemented over a network (and nostalgia for it in xenoblade’s case). I personally think that ATB should be taken more seriously by designers, and isn’t that bad. To me, it is like playing speed chess, and having time pressure on role playing. ARPGs are still alive and popular, and the concept of playing dnd mechanics in real time is similar to ATB. So I definitely think someone could make a good ATB game still.
The real issue is that they are just not commercially viable. Square Enix definitely can’t put an ATB system in Final Fantasy and attract the kind of sales they want for that franchise. Making it pure action is a much cleaner break from the shenanigans they tried to pull in XIII and XV (yuck in terms of battle system). I thought the gambit system from XII was brilliant, but square is just not interested in revisiting it I guess.
Damn. Those reviews are way higher than I expected. Diablo might have some stiff competition when it comes to what I spend my time on in the near future…
I’m jumping to FF16 from Diablo. I think I got what I want out of Diablo for now. I’m not a huge grinder and I’ve leveled two characters to T3, so I’m happy to put it down for a while.
There’s so many damn games coming out. Fortunately two of the big ones for me TotK and Diablo are both games that are easy to get back into I will happily jump into a for a weekend here an there. It took me 5 years to finish everything I wanted to in BotW.
As soon as they announced battle passes in diablo 4 it was a hard pass for me. I just knew they were gonna nickel and dime every loyal fan to the very end. FF16 at least seems to be a complete game with no battle passes or seasons, no “surprise mechanics” or buying power, just a standard off the shelf video game made by people who create games for the love of the craft and not to milk you like a cow.
That’s more than fair. I am just refusing to interact with the shop or battle pass and it’s going fine so far, though I will admit, I didn’t get as immediately hooked on it as I did with Diablo 3. Then again, I bought D3 years after launch, so a lot of the shittier aspects had been fixed by then.
I like the gameplay of Diablo4, but the environments and world are just so BLEAK… it’s hard for me to want to keep spending time in the world. I feel like the previous 3 games were a lot more hopeful, with towns that had people just living their lives, not too worried about things.
D4, it’s like everyone is oppressed and depressed and just barely scraping by to survive, and just… I feel sad any time I think about going back in.
Before d4 release, I knew d4 was going to have its three weeks with me before I play ff16. I played d4 for a week before deciding to stop and let some patches roll through with changes I want before picking it back up. Leveling is not interesting to me at this moment.
Ff16 is incredibly fun and I can’t wait to start the game over from the beginning, even though I played the demo.
Looks like it’ll shake out to the best scores for the mainline series since FF12. Curious about
how sales are going to be, was a lot of hype around this and it got in early before a very crowded upcoming release schedule.Sounds like the sidequests are bad, again. JRPGs are way behind on this front.
Interesting to me that this is getting such high reviews. I played through the demo and came away entirely uninterested in playing it any further. The story looks fantastic and I really enjoyed the world, but I felt like I was only in control of my character maybe a quarter of the time; the rest was all cutscenes, QTEs, or rail-shooter. When I was in control, it felt pretty shallow, either button mash, or button mash with correct enough timing to trigger parries/perfect blocks. It doesn’t look like a bad game, it’s just not something I’m interested in spending my time and money to play.
I’d LOVE to watch this as an anime.
I never got around to FFXV but I played FFVII Remake and I found that to be a fun balance for me between the action and RPG element. If this game is similar to that then I think I’ll have a good time.
What a great year for gaming 2023 is shaping up to be.
I watched someone play the FF16 demo and I was struck by just how long fully animated cutscenes make storytelling. I started replaying FF4 the other day, where everything is told through unvoiced dialogue and you can advance the text basically as fast as you can read. If you don’t take the opportunity to wander around the castle poking NPCs, you can clear the opening sequence and be fighting goblins inside of five minutes. I’m pretty sure that an FF16 style remake of that game would stretch that opening sequence into at least half an hour.
And I’m honestly just not convinced that more is actually better. I didn’t feel like I was enjoying the story more because Clive et al. had to talk through scenes in real time. It just felt like it slowed the pacing way down.
FF4 was also from an era where keeping scripts concise was part of saving on costs.
Playing third or fourth gen RPGs is certainly going to make virtually any RPG made today seem slow.
I’m actually working on trimming down a story I wrote, and I have a lot more appreciation now for the efforts of trimming down dialogue to keep things streamlined. And…a lot less respect for Japanese writing, where characters will tend to reiterate the same point a dozen times.
Even just the delivery of the same script could be quite a bit faster. Natural dialog tends to have far more interruptions and casual treatment than their theatrical, fully enunciated approaches.
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You can equip some rings to help you if you’re having issues, if I recall correctly.
Weirdly, I had the opposite reaction—I was happy to find that the combat was more straightforward than most action RPGs! Just attack, magic, dodge to start. No secret hidden combos or abilities that change per weapon. (Though you do unlock fancier skills, more like the Yakuza games; but I like unlocking them slowly rather than discovering them by reading online guides like with Dark Souls…)
Apparently there is a story-focused (easy) mode that simplifies combat down to single-button combos and auto-evasion.
RPGs are not my cup of tea, but I’m extremely interested in getting ahold of this. Just by looking at the combat you could have convinced me this was Devil May Cry 6 - sign me the fuck up
I thought the demo was a lot of fun, so I’m glad to see the rest of the game holds up as well.
