FINAL FANTASY XVI

I went into FINAL FANTASY XVI half-expecting another identity crisis from Square Enix and came out the other side genuinely moved by its story and frequently stunned by its combat spectacle. That tension between "is this even a Final Fantasy?" and "I cannot stop playing" defines the entire experience, and depending on who you are, one feeling will absolutely drown out the other. The world of Valisthea is built around Eikons, colossal beings of elemental destruction, and the Dominants who transform into them. You play as Clive Rosfield, a man shaped entirely by grief and circumstance, and the writing commits to his arc with a maturity rare in the genre. The story draws heavily from political betrayal, slavery, and cycles of oppression, closer in tone to a prestige fantasy drama than the breezy adventure the series once embodied. Its Active Time Lore system, which lets you pause and pull up contextual world details mid-cutscene, is genuinely clever worldbuilding infrastructure and should be standard in narrative-heavy games. The cast is strong across the board, and the English voice performances hold up under the enormous weight the script demands of them. Combat is where the community fractures. This is not a party-based RPG. You control Clive alone, with AI companions including Torgal, the loyal hound, who you can direct in limited ways. The battle system revolves around equipping Eikonic abilities drawn from up to three of the ten available Eikons, mixing and matching skills like Garuda's Deadly Embrace or Shiva's Permafrost into personalized combos, then exploiting the stagger meter to dump burst damage. The parry and counter timing feels rewarding once internalized, and the spectacle ceiling is enormous, particularly during Eikonic Battles, the Kaiju-scaled Dominant clashes that rank among the most cinematically ambitious set pieces in the medium. On the default story-focused difficulty though, combat skews button-mashy. The real mechanical expression lives at normal difficulty and on New Game Plus, which adds a harder Final Fantasy mode. Build variety exists, but it is shallower than the Eikon count implies, and anyone coming from a deep action game pedigree will find the floor too low. The PC port, released September 2024 as a Complete Edition bundling the Echoes of the Fallen and The Rising Tide DLC expansions, is functional and mostly stable, but carries visible console-port DNA. Cutscenes run locked at 30fps even when gameplay is unlocked at 120fps or higher, which is noticeably jarring on high-refresh monitors. Community mods address this, but it should not require mods. Native ultrawide support is absent. Shader compilation happens at startup and can take three to five minutes on first launch. On hardware that can push it, the game looks excellent and action clarity is much improved at high frame rates. Mid-range setups will need DLSS, FSR, or XeSS to hit stable performance. The two DLC packs add roughly six hours of endgame content: Echoes offers a challenging dungeon with Fallen-civilization lore, while The Rising Tide brings a lighter tropical environment, two new Eikons, and a roguelike Arcade mode that scratches the high-difficulty itch the base game mostly sidesteps. The side quest problem is real and worth naming plainly. Too many quests are fetch-and-report errands with minimal payoff, the exact kind of padding that makes a 40-hour runtime feel like 55. The Hideaway hub area, where much of the between-mission drama plays out, is a place I grew to genuinely love for its character interactions, but getting there through a wall of grey exclamation marks requires patience. If you hate filler, budget your tolerance accordingly. If you loved the narrative depth of older Final Fantasy titles and can accept that the turn-based era is behind this particular entry, what XVI offers in story, Eikon spectacle, and Clive as a protagonist is worth the hours spent.

Monika · Scout Team

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