This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Final Fantasy XVI. If you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on Dave the Diver, right now!
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Zero Punctuation Transcript
Well invert my nipples and call me a minigolf course if it isn’t a Final Fantasy game. Mainline, no less, none of this Crystal Chronicles or Stranger of Paradise twattery, there’s a roman numeral on the end and everything. So who’s the iconic hero to be added to the hall of legends alongside Cloud, Squall, Lightning, and several others not named after weather patterns? It’s Clive. Clive. I don’t know how well my reaction will translate, here. I know Clive is a less common name in the US and downright exotic in Japan but in Britain and Australia it’s just a dude’s name. It’s like calling him Bob. Or Norman. Well, there’s a specific kind of person I associate with the name Clive. The sort of person who talks slowly in a Birmingham accent and corners you in a party to drone on about how he’s going to join the army but when he does he drops out after three days after his mum calls his superior officer and asks them not to shout at him so much. But let’s try not to hold it against the game. Let’s just accept the fact that we’re a Clive, now. And because Final Fantasy XVI has an epic story spanning decades of time we get to see Clive in both the larval pretty anime sword boy and glarey anime sword man phases of his Pokemon evolution track.
FFXVI eschews the FFVII brand electropunk bollocks and goes back to straight classic medieval fantasy, so you know what that means – everyone who isn’t nobility has a regional British accent decided by throwing a dart at a map. Clive is the son of a lord who’s tasty in a fight and has a pet wolf but is overshadowed by his more important brother and his mum hates his guts. But when his family is betrayed and his father is killed as a result of the scheming tension between the land’s rival kingdoms – hey, this is all smacking familiar. Medieval fantasy? Pet wolves? Courtly intrigue? Dark, miserable tone? Asshole mums? This is just Game of Thrones! Except where everyone has a pet dragon and not just the dippy white girl with the endlessly renegotiable nudity clause. But why try to be Game of Thrones? Everyone hates that, now. Suppose this illustrates the issue with game development taking so long, you never know when the thing you’re trying to piggyback on will put out a final season that makes popular opinion swivel on a copper groat. Sometimes it feels like FFXVI goes out of its way to reference Game of Thrones. There’s even a bit where a dude gets his hands cut off and replaced with useless metal replicas.
Then he gets all of two scenes brooding over his new disability before remembering he lives in cocking Magic Land and just regrows the stupid things. Which illustrates the unhappiness of the marriage between fantasy gritty realism and anime RPG. One minute it’s doing one of the two kinds of talky exposition scene – courtroom full of shouting advisors or bedroom pre-or-post knobbing session with lots of artfully framed nudity – the next there’s a giant monster kaiju battle full of yelling, explosions and hitherto unrealised final forms, and it’s like you’re in that season’s one episode they were saving up the production budget for. It’s hard not to feel cynical about it when you finally get far enough in for the broad driving forces of the plot to emerge and it’s basically just “go to each of the element themed crystals and fight a boss.” Which is about as stock as anime RPG plots get. And of course it ends with using the power of friendship to kill God. Interesting how Clive manages that even though he’s fighting by himself. He just uses every pause in the fighting to reiterate how much he likes having friends. Yeah, Clive, that really came across in every dialogue scene while you’re glaring at them through a haircut like a depressed sea urchin.
Suppose that brings us to the overlong anime kaiju battle in the room – that Final Fantasy has apparently spent the last thirty years attempting to transition from turn based to real time combat so gradually that no-one would notice. Unfortunately people did notice and Clival Fantasy 16 has weathered accusations of being dumbed down. God forbid, I thought, as the game felt the need to patiently tutorialise quick time events. But I don’t really have a fiery twelve-storey dog in this fight, I don’t think FF16’s combat is condemned by not being in any way turn-based. I think the fact that it kinda sucks does that. It starts out as your basic “mash attack and occasionally press dodge like two horny squirrels trying to have sex in a crowded dog park,” but as Clive acquires more and more magic powers and the enemy health bars get more and more spongey it gets more about waiting for cooldown timers to finish so you can crack off whatever sequence of special attacks suits the current situation, and can be relied upon to knock two millimetres off the health bar instead of just one. I assume the only reason they included a stamina mechanic was because the health bars take so long to chip away they needed to strategically insert piss breaks.
But don’t worry, if it’s a boss fight then once you get them down to the last eighth or so the rest will get sorted out in cutscenes where giant monsters yell and fire lasers at each other for twenty sodding minutes. And whether I’m mashing buttons on the ground or waiting for the mid-cutscene prompt to press Square to make my dude fire a tactical scrotum-seeking nuke that one wonders why he didn’t throw out in the first place, it all feels so knobbing vacuous. Elemental gods are flinging collapsing universes at each other and my eyes are glazing over ‘cos I’ve got no sense of the stakes, I don’t know if anyone’s actually getting hurt for realsies now or if we’re only three epiphanies into a six-stage dick waving contest. But that’s just the boss fights. The rest of the game feels vacuous in a smorgasbord of different ways. It just loves sending you on shitty little fetch quests as part of the critical path to pad out the gaps between the production budget episodes, in a way possibly intended to tempt you into sidequests. “Hey, while we’re sending you back to this dreary village to hand someone a bag of spanners or whatever, inevitably with a painfully slow handing over animation specifically designed to annoy people trying to mash the skip dialogue button,
why not click on some green exclamation marks while you’re there? The fetching bullshit for twats action need never stop.” Yeah, I’m good, thanks, game. It doesn’t help that about 80% of the NPCs are generic white dudes with about four hairdoes between them. And that a significant percentage of them in some way look and sound like Paul Hollywood for some reason. Final Furtygur Fixfeen’s recurring issue is one of bipolarity. Its attempt to keep one foot in anime town and the other in HBO prestige television ville makes it feel all over the place. Its gearbox constantly grinding and lurching as it switches between kaiju battles, intense subtle character moments and dreary in-engine dialogue scenes where everyone stands around Bioware facing at each other like partially paralysed Thunderbirds puppets. And “bipolar” was certainly what sprang to mind when I started the game and it asked if I wanted to play in “story focussed mode” or “action focussed mode.” Which instantly gave me a sinking feeling. I kinda want both, Final Fantasy. That’s what interactive narrative is. Making me pick one or other is basically admitting “Hey, you’re gonna have to put up with at least one aspect of this game sucking ass!” Just one, Final Fantasy XVI? And people call you pessimistic!
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Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
