good parts of this game:
best ever spectacle boss battles ever put into a game, this can't be understated: the singular biggest thing the game brings to the table that no other game does is fully playable and fun action sequences that would usually be qtes in other games.
soundtrack is great
graphics are great
voice acting is great
combat is fine on a surface level
enemy variety is pretty high and they feel like they have the right amount of aggression and the right amount of attacks.
bad parts about this game:
clive feels undercooked at base. he relies on the eikonic abilities to do more elaborate air juggles, otherwise impossible cancels, apply status effects and so on. if clive is supposed to be an iteration on nero it sucks he doesn't feel as fully featured as nero. yes he has launchers but it would be preferable if he had a combo that resulted in a launcher without holding melee or magic. the game would be better if we could use all three eikon skills when an eikon is equipped - how do we do this with the control scheme? eikonic feat needs to change too when r2 is held, simple enough. giving clive a couple more things at base and making this change would do wonders for the combat in my view.
story is lacking in numerous respects. to start:
clive as a character feels directionless after the truth behind phoenix gate is discovered. he takes up cid's life goal yes, but there weren't sufficient seeds planted for this to feel natural. a lot of talk is put on 'a place to live and die on our own terms' as a central goal for the main characters, but the story does not SHOW enough people suffering, truly crumbling under the weight of the world to really sell this. we're TOLD about the treatment of bearers and the expansion of the blight over and over, but we have limited examples shown - this leads to the messaging feeling kind of weak, the player doesn't really care because it isn't believable that the world is so bad a place for the average citizen.
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thematically the game wants to be about clive as a man who was once about himself, his own failure in his youth, growing into a man who cares for others, all of this contrasted with ultima, a godlike being who cares only for his reaching salvation. this is fine, good even as an idea, but ALL of this hinges on the audience seeing clive move from point a to point b in a believable manner and that simply doesn't happen. even as cid is about to die, clive doesn't seem sufficiently close to becoming this person who cares about the plight of the common man. as soon as cid dies the 5 year timeskip happens. this is done to explain away rebuilding the hideaway and clive becoming the leader of it, but it's a huge missed opportunity to show clive actually becoming this man everyone says he is. a HUGE misopportunity.
it's another huge mistake to show joshua is alive before typhon too. why reveal it so early? why not let the player discover joshua lives at the same time as clive? to plant some seeds of intrigue supposedly - how is joshua alive, what the hell is he talking about and so on. but all of that could've waited! as soon as cid dies we're missing a character who knows more about the world than we do. it's at this point that joshua should stop being a third party character and join the party at the hideaway, he can then start explaining what he knows about ultima and so on. it's weird that joshua still stays outside of the party for a long time post typhon... why? because he has to go get dion's help against ultima? why not ask his brother first??? it's very weird.
jill is good, but she also feels a bit flavorless. the relationship between clive and jill is the heart of the game for its middlepoint and it has a good conclusion on the beach but she's written out rather unceremoniously after this, disappointing.
the writers think the strongest bullet they have in their magazine is the joshua and clive relationship, that's why it gets the focal point at the end of the game and it gets the hardest tearjerker attempt scene, but it doesn't really land again because the relationship between the two brothers didn't get enough time to cook. you have the start of the game which develops their relationship brilliantly in a small amount of time and then a bit later when he returns to the party but there was ample opportunity to develop it more if only joshua joined the party sooner. that's my point. there was an opportunity here and it was squandered. sure josh joining the party sooner would've meant sidelining clive-jill, but the game is suffering from a lack of development in its main scenario quest. i propose a reduction in the total number of side quests and more main quests developing clive-jill and clive-joshua.
on another note, the story seriously fails benedikta, hugo, and barnabas. hugo basically does nothing but seethe that his girlfriend who was clearly using him dies. benedikta dies too soon. barnabas is a puppet for the entirety of his screentime and is lacking in personality. benedikta needs to survive the ifrit confrontation but heavily wounded. she has to have at minimum another scene with hugo and another scene with barnabas before her demise. she can still die, she just needs more time developing her relationship with these two characters. dion gets quite a few scenes showing his relationship with his kingdom - we need some of those with these other three characters. it's a shame that such cool characters get so underused.
ultima himself is mediocre. he's talking complete nonsense for most of his script until he finally spills the beans and beans are essentially "remember the ancients from ff14? it's that again". fine - it worked the first time, but it feels so underdeveloped compared to 14. we needed more scenes with ultima's race.
in short.
1. improve clive's action by giving him a pause combo or two in the ground and in the air. preferably a launcher. i understand them not wanting to include directional input combos because they want to make a simpler game and that's fine, pause combos should be intelligible though.
2. increase the number of main story cutscenes with attempts to flesh out the clive-jill, clive-josh relationships in addition to benedikta, hugo, and barnabas. all of these characters need more time on screen and they need to be died to the freedom-imprisonment theme in some respect. yes dominants are used as tools by nations i get it, but they're still demonstratively a group that lives freely - they choose their own masters, they have the ability to completely disobey their orders and so on. an increase in the number of main story cutscenes sounds bad to the average player - reduce the total number of side quests to compensate becuase a good number of them are rancid trash. just completely valueless. replace them with something valuable as far as our main characters and thematic resonance is concerned. ultima needs at minimum another cutscene showing what it is he's pining for like we got for emet selch. would emet be half as understandable if we didn't have an idea of what he mourned? if amarout wasn't in 14 he wouldn't be half the character, right?
3. increase the number of eikon boss battles. these are absolutely the best part of the game and the more of them the better. having benedikta live means there's at least one more boss battle with her, have another encounter with barnabas earlier on where he uses the horse, create another typhon-type character to fight from ultima's race, anything. the eikon boss fights are so good they have me hooting and hollering on my screen and WHATEVER needs to be cut to add even one more would be worth the sacrifice SO LONG AS it didn't come at the cost of clive's moveset or the proposed story fixes.
also the setting needs to be made more interesting. i don't know how, just do it. add more exposition that makes it interesting, bonus points if it underscores the freedom-imprisonment angle. the entirety of the game should be more written around the Hero's Speech clive does at the end to ultima - even with me feeling the game did not EARN that speech emotionally, it still HIT. it felt good. i nodded. i smiled. it was a good hero's speech. but it could've been resoundingly emotionally resonant and it SHOULD'VE been if only the right things were focused on.
what's here is something that is close to something truly great but it isn't. it's just normal great. it could've been godlike. if it needed another year to do that, if it needed to scale back certain things like the size of the playable world sections and so on to do that, it's worth it - those playable world sections are ass anyway!
anyone who says things like "i don't like that there are no rpg elements in this game" is not really judging the game fairly - they're not meeting it where it's at. they're ignorable. you should judge the game by what it's attempting to do - action and narrative - and grade it accordingly. i love turn based ff. and i love certain parts of 16. certain parts are resounding successes. but the whole game could've been a resounding success and it isn't. it's like a half-success.
yeah ultima is not half the villain emet or elidibus is. it's a shame.
I can't get over how the last third or so of the game is dominated by the worst villains; Barnabas and Ultima are a black hole of charisma. I can't believe Barnabas ended up as a megaten law villain
>yeah ultima is not half the villain emet or elidibus is. it's a shame.
To me Ultima literally feels like Barthandelus from FF13 except with a way less cool design.
>his best look is as palette swapped risen ifrit
>in short
they barely did anything with jill anyway, should've brought josh in earlier and just focused on that instead of half-assing both
I don't understand this either
these people discuss air combos as if small enemies don't die in one hit and as if it's possible to juggle larger ones
either that or they're on NG+++
>Knockdown into launcher is about 40% health unless you use Garuda or you're over leveled
>Leaves room for about two or three enemy step combos(stomp on last hit resets enemy ala DMC)
>End with helmsplitter and charged attack
Or you can just use heat rises for the 150th time on normal mobs, but most enemies you can juggle.
Likely instead, you can just jump up and do aircombos on a big guy'ss head while using enemy step, Garuda, and phoenix dash to reset air momentum and speed while keeping yourself safe from ground AoEs
yeah the 2nd timeskip really took the wind out of the sails of the plot. It's a shame because the overarching plot points are pretty interesting, the execution is just off. a little bit of editing and rearranging could have been something really speical.
>Cid gets impaled by Typhon
>Party gets saved by Joshua and ferried back to Hideaway
>Cid is badly wounded but he'll live, like he always does
>Reunion with Joshua, Joshua loredumps some Ultima info
>Suddenly Hugo's team attacks the hideaway, shit goes south and people start dying
>Gang escapes through a hidden exit
>Cid uses all his strength to cast one final judgement bolt to block the entrance
>Petrifies and gives Clive Ramuh, 'passing the torch' and asking him to be the next Cid
>Cid's sacrifice is in vain as Hugo Titan fricking demolishes the hideaway and enemy soldiers pour in
>Clive IFRITS and confronts Titan
>has a character defining moment where he does the same speech at Rosaria where he said that he's Cid and he's the one who killed Benedikta
>fends Titan off in a battle that levels the entire area
We could then spend the next few quests looking for a new spot for the hideaway and rebuilding it and taking on leadership roles. Honestly i don't even see the point of a 2nd timeskip
your proposed idea is definitely better than what's in the final game. i still would keep benedikta alive for a bit longer - have her mortally wounded by clive but still show at hugo's door after barnabas refuses to help her because he ultimately wants clive to defeat her/absorb her. have hugo be enraged that clive did this to her. it's fine. it works.
you can still have the later titan fight.
benedikta should be allied with the party by endgame preferably because she doesn't really have a home to go back to if barnabas doesn't allow her back in
it's strange how in XIV the characters are basically plot invincible but in XVI they die way too quick. the relationships between these dominants could be better utilised to make interesting scenarios rather than them just dying.
>make Barney into a man who is torn between his role as statesman and king and his love of might and vergil anime fights
>When mythos and ultima manifests in phoenix gate he gives up on the former and fully embraces the chaos, becoming Ultima's pawn, but with certain doubts. his role is to keep clive alive for his fated role to take place
>after Ifrit is a thing at caer norvent, garuda is merely a tool for Barnabas to power up mythos
>When escaping Caer Norvent bene gets ambushed by bandits, but Harbard arrives and fricks that up
>Harbard betrays benedikta and primes her for the slaughter
>garuda gets fricked by ifrit but lives badly wounded due to cid's untimely assistance
>imprisoned in the hideaway and mindbroken that Barney betrayed her
>Hugo instead comes to save her and shenanigans ensue
>shit happens and garuda joins the team later and tries to convince hugo to join as well
more good suggestions. ultimately all three of bene, hugo, and barney needed more to do. i think that's agreeable. most people will think the same when they finish the game i'm sure.
it's very hard to say because i think this game excels where the others in the franchise do not. the franchise's primary appeal for a very long time has been the party and character relationships. i actually believe the average ff player does not care that much about turn based or not because ff's turn based gameplay was never very strong, never super involved. when i'm playing a game like 7r i actually loathe having to go into the materia menu and change shit up, i find it rather boring to see 'oh, it's this enemy, let me use fire to stun and stagger'. i appreciate they did away with most of that in 16. i also think 16's combat system as is is stronger than most iterations of turn based gameplay in ff that i've played.
as a video game with gameplay it's among the best in the series. as a story, it's in the middle, closer to the bottom middle. better than shit like 4 or 5 but not better than 7 as a story ofr example.
i've not played 13 or 15 so i don't have a frame of reference there. what i've heard is that those two games are so ass that anything has to be an improvement, so 16 must be better than those. still, it doesn't reach the standard cbu3 has set in their main title, xiv, in several respects and i find that disappointing. it seems like it is possible to do a rewrite so it reaches that standard and it's questionable to me why they didn't write it better when they clearly know how to write a good story if heavensward is any indication. heavensward has thematic wholeness and a party focus, two things that 16 sorely needed. so i agree when people say the party sucks in 16. if those people think the party sucks because it isn't a playable party and not because of the writing, then i don't agree. that's the wrong thing to focus on. this is an action game.
like, let me make it more clear. 16's gameplay trashes on sony's first party attempts to make an action game since ps4. horizon is trash compared to this. gow is trash compared to this. 16 does god of war spectacle better than god of war. so in this respect it's a success. but sony's first party games have better writing than this game is my view. when it shouldn't be that way.
These are my exact thoughts about the game - i want to discuss more it with a like minded individual like you.
If they really wanted to ape western games - they could have done something like Mass Effect and the loyalty missions on how the dominants are developed.
I had initially defended the game ditching party members by saying that the writers could have more freedom to develop the separate characters and give them more freedom in doing the plot without tying them to the MC. All that happened is that the characters just frick off to nowhere and don't interact with Clive, or they just die in 5 hours after their introduction. And even when they do stick with Clive they don't even interact or comment much on the side missions, etc.
I just imagine a version of this game where we get some of the dominants (Dion, Titan, Bene) to join us in our crusade against the crystals, with party banter similar to the Mass Effect series - maybe even a hideaway-building metagame similar to the Normandy.
So much wasted potential man.
I don't like how the Dominants become useless once Clive absorbs their power. I wish it was more like "Clive forcefully obtaining their blessing" like how he has Phoenix abilities from Joshua's blessing.
One interesting thing they could have done is that Clive learns a dominant's backstory/memories/soul through obtaining their blessing. This really could have helped to develop the characters into actual party members.
clive even has a moment like this when he absorb's dion's essence! the full scene of dion's descent to madness is shown to us. that was a great idea! more needed to happen like that.
>it's strange how in XIV the characters are basically plot invincible
Yes, because it is a FF game. Other than Aerith and Galuf no one really dies in FF and they are already going back on Aerith with 7r. Besides that XIV has the biggest body count of party members any FF has.
>Moenbryda
>Minfilia
>Papalymo
>Hauchefant
>Ysale
And yes yes "literally who?" will be your first reaction, but that is the reason you don't kill characters off in a GoT style, because they will end up undercooked. XVI shat the bed bad with it because it started GoT style but dropped the ball and went back to a more traditional style FF feeling entirely shitty. People who enjoy FF games want more of the characters that got needlessly slaughtered in the first half and the other half just wants everyone to get murder raped for shock factor.
Also, Jill is the most basic FF girl I have ever seen, they did almost nothing with her which is incredibly puzzling considering her position ad dominant.
If this was typical FF Benedikta wouldn’t have died and would be a party member.
imagine the wind jobs she unlocks
Yeah she has chemistry with Cid and could've come around after Cid sacrifices himself to save the hideaway and by extension her.
Would be cool to see how that would have gone down, really. She had a lot of emotional baggage to unpack and the situation with Hugo would be really fricked if she joined Clive. But what does it matter she is literal rape bait to make the game seems shocking, get eyes on the product and people to post about it on twitter.
>it's weird that joshua still stays outside of the party for a long time post typhon... why?
My read on this was that he was trying to keep Ultima physically away from Clive for as long as possible
but ultima can still manifest whenever the frick he wants even with josh absorbing him. we later learn the reason this is is because an 'ultima' is stationed at each mothercrystal, absorbing aether so he can cast raise on his deceased race, but that could've been a plot point in and of itself. josh could've seen ultima again after he already absorbed one of his essences and be like 'wait what the frick is going on' and the heroes have to discern why that is.
basically josh's sacrifice was for nothing. that could've been an element of the story that was good and tragic sooner than it ended up being revealed (final hour of the game)
>it's another huge mistake to show joshua is alive before typhon too. why reveal it so early?
Probably because they knew there was no point in delaying the reveal, since anyone with half a brain knew Joshua was 100% still alive.
>since anyone with half a brain knew Joshua was 100% still alive
of course, but that doesn't mean you have to show it immediately after caer norvent! just wait! it's fine! it was totally unnecessary to show him. the only thing it does is allow joshua to say post phoenix gate 'WAIT... IF HE'S HERE THEN... OH SHIT I GOTTA GET GOING!' which leads the player to retroactively believe that joshua has some kind of knowledge of where clive is going to be in the future (sanbreque mothercrystal) that is never explicated later?? what did josh mean by this?
again, cut josh's reveal out until typhon and the story only gets better, not worse.
odin's fight could've used an extra phase but i loved how fricking insane barney's attack strings were in his humanoid form, really fun. it satisfied. i was expecting ultima's fight to be the one to match bahamut and it did, no problems there.
i couldn't help but notice all of the similarities to ARR's structure from the early point of the game
his review is just awful and i usually like the guy. too much complaining about what he wanted the game to be instead of what it is. just completely useless criticism. he should get over it. this game is going to be so polarizing they won't try a genre switch again for a while. i promise the next game is turn based.
>i couldn't help but notice all of the similarities to ARR's structure from the early point of the game
and whether that structure actually fits this game or not really depends on how well the story is done which... see the rest of this thread*
I couldn't agree more regarding Skillup. Just a huge miss of a review. The game is FAR from perfect. But none of his reasons have anything to do with it.
That review was utter trash, the 40 min embodiment of "SOUL VS SOULLESS" shit
and ARR quests are considered a "filter" to new players because of how boring its. They even had to do a overhaul on them to make it more bearable. It
>told constantly "it gets amazing in Heavensward"
>Heavensward is okay, I guess
am I getting bamboozled? I don't fricking see what FFXIVgays see in it. it's okay but nothing that inspires such rabid shilling.
you have to understand heavensward represents an immense step up from arr. the party is better, the pacing is better, the climax is better. heavensward represents a good story told in 1/5th of the time arr takes, that's what makes it so good to the average xiv player.
But I'm still not sure if I'd call XIV "good". The worldbuilding is really nothing special, the combat is no better than ESO or GW2, I still don't know how to feel about the characters and the story which is the part heavily shilled seems pretty by the numbers.
Plus, ARR was just fricking awful. Outside of the Primal fights some of the worst MMO gameplay I've ever played. I really want to see what everyone else does.
Shadowbringers is a genuine standout, but aside from that, hell, including that, XIV's narrative is wildly overrated. And this coming from someone who likes most of it.
From what I noticed, a lot of people who play XIV are people who either only play MMOs, or only play FF games.
OP i just wanted to say that this is an fantastic review of the game, before i the thread gets killed i just wanted to say
Thank you
Seriously from the bottom of my heart, its an amazing thing seeing this at the top of the board
i try babe. i wanna see many more threads discussing this thread in the days to come. don't let me down.
I just remembered margrace-kun said there would be a moment that would make people coom like emet-selch speech. That never happened lol
margrace-kun was a marketer shill and if he returns for ff7rebirth needs to be fricking mocked relentlessly lol
oh.
something i totally forgot in my critique.
the amount of effects on screen during the most significant boss battles significantly impedes visibility/reactivity to boss tells. it's all in service of the overwhelming best-ever-in-a-game spectacle, but some fidelity to action games being readable should've been employed here. for the most part the game is good enough about this without compromising the spectacle, but certain scenes are just such visual messes you're going to get through no fault of your own.
this isn't hugely surprising considering these are the 14 devs. raid fights can be a total clusterfrick of effects if you don't disable certain things in that game, and part of the selling point of this one is the effects. just tone it down slightly. it shouldn't be too hard.
MMO devs = MMO quality = Do not Play
for an mmo dev's first attempt at action game combat they did a good job. it's very close to being great. the problem is this mmo dev is known for having an mmo with a good story and the story here does not reach the standards they set for themselves.
again it makes sense if you consider these are the ARR devs and not the ShB or EW devs. heavensward was good yes but i don't think 16 has the party or the thematic core down as well as heavensward did. which is odd considering 16's writers wrote that too. perhaps the problem is that they ahve to write a story for a game that's 4x as long as the average 14 expansion and don't know how to fill that time. but it feels obvious, apparent to me, a layman, how they could've filled that time intelligently and told a better story. it was possible. firmly in their grasp.
but he uses the choir super well.
listen to this. the choir is used excellently here. it's hype as frick.
who cares. terrence shows up for like three scenes total. it was odd as shit that dion's final meeting with terrence in which terrence understands he won't see dion again doesn't end with a kiss, took me out of the game.
>who cares
kys homosexual enabler
your favorite game has a homosexual in it
unless it's as old and dried up as your mom's puss
Nta but why do you insist on having homosexuals in vidya? Why can't you queers just stick to your daily pride parades and grooming children?
>Nta but why do you insist on having homosexuals in vidya?
me? i'm no developer, you schizoid homosexual
>Why can't you queers just stick to your daily pride parades and grooming children?
holy shit, you ARE not only a schizo, but also a projecting one
>perhaps the problem is that they ahve to write a story for a game that's 4x as long as the average 14 expansion and don't know how to fill that time
Honestly, with Clive being such a consistent weakpoint throughout the whole game writing-wise, I think it's just that they are not used to writing narratives that center on a character instead of happening around them.
Like, in XIV, WoL is functionally a silent protagonist with little to no real agency beyond what headcanon you insert to them. There's attempts to add stuff there, but that's mostly on the latter end, and even then IMO, it doesn't work too well. I saw someone say that Clive is basically just a gruffer, talking WoL, malleable as he is, and I can't get that thought out of my head.
>which is odd considering 16's writers wrote that too.
The main scenario writer is the same but FFXVI never had Natsuko Ishikawa's magic touch. Maehiro cannot write this amount of character relationships that capture the player's investment and he didn't have the writers who can to assist him.
>dumps his boyfriend with a kid and leaves for a suicide mission without even a kiss goodbye, generally spends the whole time ordering him around
dion must have been great in bed for that guy to put up with his attitude
>dion must have been great in bed for that guy to put up with his attitude
Dating your boss is a problem precisely because of things like this lmao. Probably even worse here if your boss is also the leader of your nation.
>soundtrack is great
>generic orchestral choirs 24/7
modern video game music sucks dicks, and sokens is no different honestly. just because he throws a lemotif in there now and then doesn't change that. like this ost isn't any better than 13s ost, probably worse, and 13s ost whilst nice was still just generic orchestral shit. video game music has sucked for nearly 20 years now in almost all triple a titles
>13
>generic orchestra
come on, gay
This is a good post about the game. But this will be buried soon, I imagine. Where would you rank it among other FFs?
I agree on almost everything said here except the treatment of the bearers and the expansion of the blight being limited examples. Not even 10 minutes in at Rosalia where the bearers/branded got told that being treated with respect there is a godsend and you should be glad that you have human rights there. Though if you meant something like "Its not shown enough in the main story" I'd understand, but in the side content its very prevalent.
For the Blight stuff, the world is specifically shown to be dying all over the place. Whole wars started because they kept losing land to it, it was terrible all around lmao and you don't even need sidequests to really get the feel that yeah the world is ending lmao.
>Its not shown enough in the main story
yes, this is what i was trying to get at. i agree there are examples of the blight taking over and ruining lives, i agree there's examples of bearers being treated poorly. what i'm saying is that i need CLIVE to see these things. he has the intreaction with the bearer in the flashback early on yes but the clive we meet at age 28 is very singlemindedly about solving his one problem, getting his vengeance (and that's compelling as a motive for the player because of the brutality of josh's 'death'). what we really need post phoenix gate is clive mourning the loss of his purpose and seeing something, anything that convinces him another purpose is possible, noble, necessary. his turn into cid 2 needs to be chartable across cutscenes. that's what i'm asking for.
the blight stuff is in the game but we don't interact with parts of the game world ravaged by blight. the entirety of the playable area stays untouched by blight for the whole game. if they want to REALLY, really sell it, make lostwing blight-destroyed by midgame. the plan is already to make it defeated by akashic later - let the blight claim that. give us an in-world example. have a main scenario quest about it. kill quentin. stakes need to be established. that's what i'm saying.
there's enough banter in the missions i feel, clive and jill do work well together, they just need even more time. more pivotal scenes that develop their relationship. same with joshua. josh is characterized as kind of a inward-noble boy without much finesse, so play that up, show clive kind of getting him out of that. josh was surrounded by attendants for all of his adolescent life and needs to be taught how to interact normally, they can bond with that. there's opportunities that just aren't used.
Still not buying a PS5 for this. I can't fricking believe they priced this at $570 USD plus tax. Absolutely insane. Inflation amirite?
it's not the god game worth buying a PS5 for so you're fine.
but understand that maybe i'm in the minority on the story being mid. i see a lot of people loving the story, maybe i'm insane.
Even if the story is generally accepted as good, which it isn't, the overwhelming consensus is it has terrible pacing and is told badly.
those are fair critiques. ff14 also has that problem so.
It's been a serious problem since XIII I think. A series famous for it's storytelling can only seem to manage interesting premises, but falls on it's face in execution every time.
I have issues with that flashback as well haha. I think it would simply have been more climatic/cathartic to have that scene actually play out in real time. Maybe even have Jill, Clive and Joshua and Dion meet earlier and assist with the rebellion once Dion finds out that Ultima is in bed with Olivier and the king. We could even have a Dion Dominant fight before Ultima ragetards him culminating in the Bahamut fight
they don't show it in real time because they think there's fun intrigue for the player in seeing dion as bahamut when the previous scene was saw him was him declaring war on the monarchy, leads to the possibly-credible belief that maybe he turned into bahamut willingly to destroy his father's capital. it's a fair choice IF that intrigue was actually good, which it wasn't. i still didn't mind it too much though.
the only way to fix ultima is to show his backstory. he TELLS us his backstory. we need it SHOWN to us. show, don't tell. i liken it to the amarot situation. if amarot was never shown to us no one would think emet had a point at all.
It's weird how Ultima's backstory and motivation is so similar to Emet, but they completely left out what made people like Emet?
i guess there's two reasons people like him: he's snarky and he's arguably right. ultima just has to be arguably right. again, clive's Hero Speech to ultima is really good and one of the few times where i really loved clive as a character in the entire game, but it doesn't feel as good as it hypothetically could. meanwhile something like the scions showing up in meteion phase 2 is phenomenal and feels earned because the entirety of the script was building to that point. it shouldn'tve been hard to do. you just have to reallocate stuff.
Best fight in the game btw
>mythos......vessel........salvation.......will.......aether.......logos
HOLY SHIT SHUT THE FRICK UP
The slavery storyline was so clumsy and beyond the scope of what these writers are capable of that I’d just remove it entirely and have Cid’s conflict be about resource scarcity alone.
if they do that then the freedom-slavery angle ultima and clive are pushing in the endgame lands a little bit weaker. the right choice is to focus on it more, not remove it. freedom-slavery was a fine theme for the game, they just had to show it better.
some citizens born in valisthea have the power to conjure magic of a certain element (called 'bearers', as in bearers of magic). usually, non-mages have to obtain crystals from a mothercrystal and channel them to do this (do this enough and the crystal is inert), bearers don't. easy access to elements of fire, ice, light, and so on has made valisthea regressive technologically - they rely on crystals or bearers of these elements to do things like heat a pot, cut shrubs with wind, and so on. this makes bearers a hot commodity. however, using magic takes a toll on a bearer's body and they eventually are taken by a curse that turns them into stone. dominants have access to corresponding elements and eikons (traditional ff summons) but the curse has no effect on them when conjuring their chosen element freely - only when manifesting as an eikon. manifest as an eikon enough times and you become stone too just like a bearer.
global warming is because the mothercrystals are siphoning away aether from the land and this speeds up a process known as 'blight', which is the land becoming black as pitch, all flora and fauna being completely unworkable. blight would happen with or without the mothercrystals (it was introduced at the same time ultima's god race first brought magic, aka technology, to the world) but mothercrystals hasten it. that's your global warming allegory.
oh, bearers are sold/bought like serfs. i forgot to mention that.
It really is a bit hamfisted. It's even more moronic when most of the nations worship/love the dominants, who are super-bearers, yet hate bearers who cast magic missiles to stop bandits like what Lubor did. Just bizzare
I’m starting to think the intention is that because the bearers can turn to crystal, they are scared to use their magic. This is what makes the masters have their power. If the bearers won’t use the magic to defend themselves, they can be enslaved to use magic for others instead. Unless they are a dominant, they won’t be able to fight off the entire world, and there is an entire system and society set up to keep them down. They are underfed to keep them weak, and it has been happening for generations.
Dominants can destroy everything. People have to respect them as the walking nuclear weapons they are. Standard bearers are no threat unless they rise up as a group and there’s apparently enough normals to keep them constantly in check.
Considering shit like Romusha isn't even taught in JP schools, Yoshi should've tasked the team to actually read up on actual history before trying to tackle shit like this. I'm not even telling them to go as far as to read Fanon or anything, but like, some simple Wikipedia research would've sufficed.
Honestly, the slavery subplot in this game reads to me no different than what I would find in some random isekai/Narou-kei story. Just really clumsy all-around.
How is slavery and global warming shoehorned into this plot? Curious but I'm never actually going to play it.
>certain people, called bearers, are able to use magic without using crystals
>but this uses up their life and causes them to die early
>bearers are enslaved and treated like shit by everyone
>one of your main goals is to free bearers and change society
>also, there is a blight that is corrupting the land and erasing magic
>your main objective is going around and destroying the crystals because they're supposedly the source of the blight
>the blight is causing nations to go to war over the remaining magic and land in the world
Appreciate the thoughtful responses.
The game's relentless misogyny and male centrism has been the major criticism since leaks began, and the full game didn't assuage concerns any. Thought the series wouldn't get worse than FFXV's sausagefest, but XVI really upped the ante and took all the wrong lessons from GoT. Should've read the books.
Kind of hilarious that they insisted that they were going for a particular type of European fantasy setting so had to import the social dynamics you’d expect of that time period, but it’s only used as an opportunity to include things like rape threats for the extra grit. Characters like Mid and Vivian don’t fit that type of mould at all, so what’s the point? There’s also no indication that Dion being gay is a problem. They just pick and choose where to apply the supposed historical realism, like if you want to commit to this type of tone and aesthetic then at least be consistent.
>There’s also no indication that Dion being gay is a problem
eh, the fact that the two intimate scenes dion and terrence have together is by themselves, purposefully away from others seems to imply something but it's not explicit i agree.
I didn’t think the kiss scene was particularly private. They’re by themselves yes, but anyone could and did just walk in on them.
They should've given Ultima a unique accent, like an American VA to come off as even more alien and stiff.
I wanted to hate him but I think overall he was okay, kinda lame he hijacks any character Barnabas may have had.
His plan was ridiculous but it is hard to find holes in, except the emperor dying so perfectly to set Dion off felt too convenient but it could've happened other ways.
his plan is still super unclear. where is this other world that he plans to escape to? is it metaphysical or literal? didn't make any sense to me. he's been stuck in valisthea the whole time so it's not like he can go out into space and search for an untouched planet to start the whole process again on, so it seems like it's metaphysical.
here's my understanding
>ultima and his people invent magic and life
>but this creates the blight, which they have no answer for
>they give up their flesh bodies so they can escape the blight to another place, valisthea (this is presumably all interdimensional stuff?)
>blight follows them to valisthea
>they come up with a plan to create a new world (not sure why this new world also wouldn't have blight)
>this requires a ton of aether, and a vessel that can wield that aether
>they gather the aether with the mother crystals that are actually ultima's kin
>they create humans to eventually breed a vessel, mythos, that they can possess and create the new world with
>for some stupid reason, ultima decides to sleep rather than watch over humans (clive suggests this was because ultima was scared of human potential?)
>without ultima to guide them, humans develop wills and minds of their own, and also societies and wars
So I'm pretty sure Ultima wants to create an entirely new world
Lmao what is this thread, it's filled with essays.
i love final fantasy and i want it to be the best it can be and i have thoughts. what can i say. i want to see some intelligent discussion about this game and very few people seem to have finished it. what else can i do but make essays.
Of the examples shown of the suffering, you have that town after the checkpoint with all the fields. There are three groups of bearers with their masters, and all of them are being harshly treated. Then you go to the super racist town and can do side quests where the slaves lives are so reduced, a little girl is unfazed when her overworked child bearer turns to stone.
There are lots of examples of the hard ships, but you have to do the Side quests to see the stories for them. Some of them are really fricked up.
>the super racist town and can do side quests where the slaves lives are so reduced, a little girl is unfazed when her overworked child bearer turns to stone
right and i'm not saying that isn't a great example of how mistreated the bearers are. what i'm saying is it needs to be msq. some of this stuff needs to be msq to really underscore the point. that it's side stuff means someone could skip through it and i started skipping through most side quest dialogue not long after that very quest because there's just WAY too many sidequests.
like clive was a slave for 13 years so he should have a touchstone for why cid is doing what he's doing, he has personal experience. he asks what's in it for cid and cid responds 'i just frickin hate seeing unfreedom man' but clive doesn't respond to that, he doesn't seem phased by it at all. it's weird that he should have so much personal experience with the problems of the world but still be a little bit weirded out by cid's extremeness. we should've had a FEW scenes showing clive's life as a slave, he could've flashed back to it given some stimuli, it could've emboldened him that cid's cause is the right one. i'm asking for anything, the bearest minimum of anything for clive here. maybe there is some scene i'm forgetting. but i'm not replaying the game again to go find it. rest assured, if i replay the game, my focus will be looking for where the spark of revolution ignites in clive.
right, i think they could've brought in a writer from the character driven ffs with great main characters (ff7r is one of them) to come in and proofread the script. they were so freewheeling asking for help on gameplay but they never asked for someone to check the story, just seems like hubris, riding on the high that is shb and ew's reception without the key factor that made those good - ishikawa. a huge mistake.
So you can die then respawn with full pots and then just go sell the pots?
Seriously, I just can't believe that this guy everyone thought would be a chad turned out to just be a christcuck
i wasnt expecting him to become majima out of all things
if you go back and watch the trailers/listen for barnabas' voice the evidence is there that he's a loser religious zealot b***h. i just wish we saw what he was like before submitting to ultima.
I hate it. From a silent badass that lets Clive live several times to some b***h answering to an autistic wannabe god.
Odin still looked fantastic though and I'm glad he was at least one of the stronger eikons, though the fight was a huge letdown.
I wish they were more clear on the lore of when Ultima started fricking with each specific person. Like it's not clear if Barnabas found his kingdom because he wanted to or because daddy Ultima ordered it.
Barnabas would be improved 10 fold if he was a literal Juan Fantasia character that says nearly nothing and is a complete enigma.
>only background is that he's a murderhobo with a mommy fetish (Venat)
anon, he is Juan Fantasia
He talks too much he should stick to punching his palm and nodding
No you don't get it. Barnabas is Juan Fantasia that represents all of the FFXIV's community fetishes and degeneracy. Think about it.
It's really nice just being able to be critical about this game without being fricking part of the whole doomposting bullshit.
The discourse around this game has been especially venomous. Not just here too.
You can notice yoshi-p let his ff14 mentality interfere with the game design. A lot of pointless MMO Tier fetch quests, even some dialogues could've been trimmed to make it more direct and less boring, this is an issue that ff14 has always had, especially in ARR.
This is a better review and criticism of the game than Skillup's. Well done.
What the frick was Joshua doing for 13 years
fricking Jote
lmaoing at Clive's virgin ass
Jote should have been a more important character, I feel bad that she gets benched by Joshua. She's supposed to be a knight and good with a sword, but she never shows up to help them out? You're telling me Gav is a better fighter than her?
presumably investigating ultima because he was as confused why there was a second eikon of fire.
I can't get over how Joshua has an entire order of devoted knights, down to having one literally writing down his life's story, and it doesn't seem he ever bothered tracking down Clive or Jill. I don't get the impression that he ever believed Clive was dead, so what's with that?
please buy episode joshua to find out
I gotta say i'm liking the story so far, but the game keeps pulling all kinds of shit for the sake of plot convenience.
i see many people saying they like the story on reddit and resetera and again, i might just be in the minority thinking the story's mediocre but i cannot help but think there are some huge missed opportunities staring me right in the face.
>best ever spectacle boss battles ever put into a game
I don't agree at all. It's all poorly directed trash which relies on lots of glowing explosions like a capeshit movie instead of any sort of careful choreography or contextual storytelling.
Remember ExDeath vs Galuf? The final battle against Sephiroth where you instakill him with omnislash? Remember "Draw your sword, Ramza."? Sometimes simplicity makes the best spectacle best.
Anon I hate to break it to you, but everything you listed is marvelshit.
Things I like = capeshit
Things I don't like = good
The spectacle of capeshit isn’t the problem the problem is the disgusting over-saturation of it to where it becomes routine on top of everything else being shit.
those are good moments yes. but the actual cool part of 16 is that we have giant king kong vs godzilla boss battles that are fully playable real time action gameplay. that's the novelty here. i cannot remember any other game that did these sequences as well as 16 and they're so fricking cool. seriously cool. like, cloud vs sephiroth is one menu press. ifrit vs bahamut is two phases that is mostly gameplay and a few qtes. a world of difference there.
the choice to go action was worth it if only because it allows fights like this to exist. if ifrit risen vs bahamut was in a turn based game it would be just another fight. but it's in an action game. you know? it's a world of difference.
xvi is for people who like king kong vs godzilla
while the rest of the franchise is for godzilla fans
So is this the only mention of Leviathan in the game?
Yes, which is fricking beyond bizarre. You don't even get a lore entry for Leviathan or why he's lost. I honestly kept expecting the emergence of a new Dominant to be a plot point.
I expect Leviathan the lost to be related to the literal ever filling crater in the middle of the straight
Leviathan is so lost not even Ultima could use his power lmao
i kept expecting ultima to use tidal wave and was mildly disappointed
fair but they've been in interviews time after time saying 'new direction, new gameplay system' ad infinitum
But it's not just the gameplay system. Straight up action games have systems in them that will make you favor different weapons for different enemies, for example, but the gear progression in this game is so linear that there is never a reason to use weapon X instead of Y, you just upgrade your gear to not be underleveled, the stats are completely meaningless fluff. Not even elemental damage and bonuses, features you'll see in Action RPGs all the time, and even in DMC, the game this one borrows the most heavily from.
That's why I expected a lot more even after being completely ok with it being an action game. People keep trying to pretend it's just like every other action RPG but it REALLY isn't. This is way more barebones than anything else I can remember playing recently.
The very first weapon you get in FFVII Remake after the starting one has a lower attack value, but offers more materia slots. A stat-driven choice in the very first weapon upgrade. How many times have you made this kind of deicsion in XVI?
should have committed to copying DMC and your base weapon and move set change depending on the eikon you have equipped. phoenix gives a sword, garuda a fast but weaker weapon (claws?), staff for ramuh, etc. then have upgrade trees for those weapons. would've fixed the gear progression system and made the combat feel more varied
That would have been so nice.
this is fair criticism with my one note being that yes i can use different weapons for different enemies in bayo or dmc but i don't have to. i usually play bayo with the pistols only for example, there's nothing expressly pushing you to switch. just as there's nothing pushing you to use shiva over titan or whatever the frick. it's about your whims your choice your expression, that's the genre. 7r has that choice because it's an rpg, this isn't, that's ok. i agree it's a worse action game than its contemporaries but i still believe it is worthwhile nonetheless.
You don't have to, but they at least have that. Eikons aren't really comparable to weapons, because your weapon moveset is still mostly the same. They're more like styles or breakers, but with less of a difference between them, with I'd say two exceptions. To be fair, Nero also only has one main weapon, but his campaign does not take 40 hours, and it may have more enemy variety. I didn't count, though, so I could be wrong.
The scenes with Hugo have been utterly fantastic. Such a huge misstep they did with all the characters. The scene where he gets the box should not have been the second time we see of this guy. The only thing we got from him before that was him talking like a Chad to his rulers, making out with bene just barely establishing they had a one sided thing, and fighting Shiva for a bit. And that was all in one scene basically. We should have gotten way more story before they sent him the box and in turn also give poor benedikta way more story too
Uncle Byron saves this game from the black hole of charisma that is Barnabas and Ultima
True, the moments with him ranged from heartfelt to energizing.
>knocks it out of the park with Clive and Joshua, Cid and Clive, Clive and Gav, Clive and Gav
>but somehow fricks up the main romantic pairing
eh, clive and joshua still feels like two autistic brothers and needed more time.
I think they said in interviews, a few times, that they suck at writing romance. What Clive and Jill have is still pretty sweet, even if it is under-developed.
It seems as if you are a fan of it OP, but it's not the game that everyone was hoping for. Do you think CBU3 should have another go with 17 after this, and would you overall recommend it?
i would recommend 16. it's worth playing even with its flaws. the tentpole boss fights alone are worth 70 dollars. but they are not worth 570 dollars.
should cbu3 get 17? idk, i think they clearly have what it takes but 14 and now 16 represent steps for them. if they have EVERYONE that made shb good on board for 17 and keep with action gameplay (iterating intelligently as they go) then yes, i think 17 is likely to be a godgame. but if i'm square internally maybe i don't want the same team doing two in a row. maybe i want nomura on the next one, idk. they want to shake it up every time to keep it fresh.
I really want Nomura to do 17 just because I feel like he still has that hunger.
Knowing his body of work, there's sure to be missteps, but the guy's like fricking 50 and he's still obsessed with whatever he has in his mind of what Versus was supposed to be. For all these fricking years.
I want to see what a person who's had that in their minds for so long and refuses to let it go do with something completely new.
well kh4 is going to have a lot of the versus dna in it most likely. nomura's going to get it all out there. i would like to see nomura and yoship work together before yoship retires, it would be extremely interesting.
no one disagrees arr is dogshit. heavensward is maybe a tad overrated but it's only because it's a brighter shining element than arr. xiv is an okay game with tremendous, spectacular highs mechanically and narratively. i fricking love doing savage raiding and it shows what the game is capable of in terms of gameplay, but you as a new player, just going through the story, can't yet fathom if it's worht it or not.
let me say this. the best has yet to come for you with xiv if you've only played arr and heavensward. cbu3 threads the needle to make all of that effort you put into arr and hw actually worth it, actually pay off in a satisfying manner. when you're paying for the remaining expansions, you're paying for that payoff - and it's good. it's worth playing for. and after that you have pretty fun raids to do if you're so inclined.
xvi is exactly the same kind of game as arr. low valleys, stupendously high peaks. what xvi has somehow done is having lower lows than some of arr but higher highs than basically any other video game i've ever played. it's really remarkable as a video game case study.
>if they have EVERYONE that made shb good on board for 17 and keep with action gameplay (iterating intelligently as they go) then yes, i think 17 is likely to be a godgame.
ShB got entirely carried by Ishikawa who wrote the damn thing. And even then it is because she completely rejects the edgy shit plot they did in SB and went right back to a more traditional FF game story, setting up decent villain motivations and making you like your companions. Basically everything XVI does not.
I don't agree with the action gameplay either, I think the FFVIIr combat is fine, party and all. The stagger shit ever really clicked with me and I don't see myself doing a NG+ at all.
>The stagger shit ever really clicked with me and I don't see myself doing a NG+ at all.
but the stagger mechanic is from 7r. it acts the same way in that game.
i found 7r's combat to be a good idea but needs work, i expect rebirth to improve heavily on it. 16's gameplay is definitely more appealing to me than 7r's.
I just need 7R's gameplay with the physicality of XVI's. 7R is a bit stilted - it feels like a bunch of boxes colliding and damage numbers showing up. XVI's flows really well, the dodges and all the moves are responsive and the have the genuine "action game polish" to it - but in expense of the creativity and strategic element.
Stagger does exist in 7R but it works better there I think.
Every enemy in 7R has a unique solution to get them to their pressure state, and from there, it's on you to capitalize on that to get them to stagger.
In 16, I feel like I'm just wailing on the enemy until the get staggered, but in 7R, you can take active steps to continuously pressure and stagger enemy given you manage your party's ATB well enough.
I feel like 7R's "stiffness" is a bit by design. It's not like Nomura's team doesn't know how to make extremely tight action games, even by the end of it's lifecycle, he managed to drill the Osaka team to get KH3 to play really tight.
I think by having say, Cloud be as nimble as Clive(or Sora), that would completely negate the damage mitigation aspect of 7R since you can just completely avoid it given you're mechanically adept enough.
>I think by having say, Cloud be as nimble as Clive(or Sora), that would completely negate the damage mitigation aspect of 7R since you can just completely avoid it given you're mechanically adept enough.
I actually like the Cloud feels a bit more clunky, seeing the huge sword he has to swing. I really disliked how floaty Noctis was in XV and I kinda dislike that about Clive as well. (constant teleportation is not very cool imo).
No idea why they didn't flesh party members like Jill out a bit more so you could switch in combat between them or have them play differently, Clive doesn't feel incredibly complicated or hard to put together, outside of the visuals.
MMO devs = MMO quality = Do not Play
CBU3 = low quality = low sales
Matsuno will be doing XVII.
Nah, he's too busy with Vagrant Story 2
Matsuno is probably hands full with Tactics remaster. I doubt they would also do 2 similar mainlines back to back. FF17 will be really different.
I would love another game like 12
Don't let him touch the series ever again.
oops, wrong pic
have a nice day kh-kun
Isn't he banished to fricking licensed olympics mobile game hell?
I don't think he's even part of the company anymore.
Tabata's game sold 10m
what is takais game selling
even lower than type-0 in japan
Tabatas latest was a game about the special Olympics
Tabata's latest game was FFXV, the game that sold more than any ff at launch
that's an app not a game
>Tabata's game sold 10m
across all platforms, after 6 years and at walmart's bin price
agreed.
>ultima tries to break clive's will by showing visions of people from his life, from his loved ones to his enemies
>doesnt show any visions of anabella
>anabella gets one last appearance in the ending, in the heartwarming flashback to clive becoming joshua's shield
kind of weird really
Ultima hated the b***h too.
>the scene where Martha bands together the civ Branded in the town to fight against the horde
What were they thinking. Even pre rendered it too. I hate the Branded stuff so much.
>anabella legit thought she was giving birth to the messiah
her audacity is hilarious and i love her
but she did
man she is so hot, I want to breed a woman like that.
Can you feel that? The perfect confluence of conditions....
what the frick was his problem?
His name was sylvestre
I don’t understand why Dion carried out his orders up until after the throne is given to Olivier, and it’s then that he starts throwing out accusations of tyranny. He acts like he didn’t personally conquer Twinside for the empire.
From what I remember, Dion wasn't involved in taking Twinside, he was ordered to stay where he was. But yeah, I don't know how long Anabella was married to Sylvestre for, but he was certainly already an butthole before the five year timeskip. Dion acts like Sylvestre used to be a nice guy. (reminds me of recent fire emblem villains)
i will say, in the pre-timeskip council scene, Sylvestre says that a nation without its citizens is nothing, but then post-timeskip, he says the opposite. So I guess there is some indication of going tyrannical there
Maybe I’m misremembering but I thought one of the ATL entries says that it was Dion and the dragoons who led the taking of Twinside.
FF16 has less actual "RPG" mechanics than games like DMC, God of War (originals) and Ninja Gaiden. It's actually impressive how little depth they managed to add to the combat and progression systems. Name a game with more boring itemization than FF16.
No one can argue in good faith that XVI is a role playing game. It is a cinematic Action-Adventure which is fine, I suppose.
It's not much of anything. They clearly just repurposed an FF14 expansion into FF16 and did the bare minimum to have a functional game. It has barebones progression systems for a video game in general. The 4-combo combat isn't enough to carry a 10 hour game, let alone a 40+ hour game.
>but the story does not SHOW enough people suffering, truly crumbling under the weight of the world to really sell this. we're TOLD about the treatment of bearers and the expansion of the blight over and over, but we have limited examples shown - this leads to the messaging feeling kind of weak, the player doesn't really care because it isn't believable that the world is so bad a place for the average citizen.
Uhh... What? Did you not do any sidequests or something? If anything, the treatment of bearers is comically evil.
>Did you not do any sidequests or something?
i did. what i'm saying is this have to main quest stuff. i'm saying clive needs to have a required cutscene in which he really reckons with how shit the world he lives in is and takes up cid's cause. there's not enough scenes of that type in the msq because they expect you to do sidequests, but as a result the game's order happens like this:
clive is kind of half-assedly going along with cid to destroy the mothercrystal, incredulous about it the whole time
cid dies
timeskip
clive is now a full-throated supporter of the freedom cause
a step was skipped is what i'm saying
The 5 year timeskip is honestly when the pacing just falls apart. Things were moving too fast before the timeskip, but then it just goes completely frick it.
The game should have followed Clive during those 5 years, even if it was just a few stages, showing him rebuilding hideout and adjusting to his role as Cid.
>The game should have followed Clive during those 5 years, even if it was just a few stages, showing him rebuilding hideout and adjusting to his role as Cid.
right, it could've been an hour at most. like, a funeral scene with cid where someone says something that makes clive think a little. anything. it could've been the shortest segment in the world priming clive into the duty.
more like the first 5 minutes, you save Jill and think Clive is going to have to go on the run with her but Cid pops out of nowhere with Torgal and takes you to the Hideaway where you meet everyone and everything is great there forever.
Yeah. That was another moment when I realized pacing was fricked.
They didn't skip anything. The destruction of that one village which housed his mentor's wife was the turning point for him. That's when he becomes a believer.
please correct me if i'm wrong but it's sanbreque that murders hanna's village correct? i don't recall them explicitly stating they murdered it because of bearers living there but i concede you may have a point, it's just been too long since that part of the game for me to remember.
Yes, and I think one of the soldiers even states that they were under Anabella's orders to purge it because she's just a fricking b***h who despises Rosaria and spits on their memory with her Black Shield shit.
right, so not necessarily related to problems of Blight, Bearers, or Unfreedom. that's my point. these elements need to be presented so firmly into clive's face that he cannot look away, must acknowledge their effect on the world, and take on this role that he takes on at age 33. because apparently, he was so singlemindedly focused on finding josh's killer in his first 13 years as a slave that he didn't even stop think 'wow, slavery really sucks and cid is onto something'
But it is. After you win the fight, Gav says they were sheltering bearers and that word must have slipped.
The benefit that all the FF14 expansions had is that ARR already setup the world, and the expansions could just focus on telling their story. FF16 had to setup the world of Valisthea and everything that came with it, so the writing got split between lore and actual story writing.
That’s semi bullshit though because ShB just poops out the First with nearly entirely new lore and history. Granted it’s easier since the world is fricked but still
>dion has executed a perfect coup with no resistance
>just walks into the throne room alone, nobody even tries to stop him
>anabella still acting smug
What the frick was her plan? If Olivier hadn't been Ultima, it all would have been over for her.
She's just a baby-making machine. Her planning begins and ends at getting creampied.
She's a woman. She thinks "ok I gave birth to the future emperor of the world, I've already won" and nothing else will make her think she's not safe. She'd have been so sure she won even if Dion threw a spear straight through her heart. Pretty much the only thing that might break her is if Dion actually successfully killed Olivier in front of her in the throne room.
Holy frick I found another one of Barry's Twitters. If he already has 2 ace attorney accounts why does he need a metroid one too
Dion barely appears in the game and is the best character of the game. He deserved more screentime.
the crystalline dominion gets absolutely shat on in this game, which is funny because in another game, they'd have been the secret masterminds
wow I didn't even know it was called that, I was just calling it the place the empire randomly moved to
such a weird plot addition, they could have postponed the emperor wanting to move until after they lost their mothercrystal, or just not moved at all and removed the blight threat
it's like they designed sanbreque and just had to include it, then there were cuts that caused the dominon to just get populated as sanbreque 2
and I'm guessing leviathan was from there as well and just got literally lost in the jumble
yeah the only important character from the dominion is vivian, and you don't meet her until after the timeskip when the dominion gets conquered offscreen. its weird
dion and joshua are really friendly for only ever having met twice, and once as like eight year olds
i wanted them to frick
Joshua is for Jote and Dion is for medicine e-girl.
Dion is just so noble and good that everyone falls in love with him instantly.
It felt like the scope of the game of the game was way too ambitious and they didnt have the time/budget to work on it. The way they found to minimize this problem was the loremaster and other side activities.
I guess the yoshi-p MMORPG mindset didnt help either, in a MMO you have way too much time to do proper worldbuilding and develop the character and story, i mean...the ascians saga lasted 4 expansions.
right. the game wants to deal with humongous issues and character relationships but it needs like, 3 more hours of cutscenes to make it work and there's already more than enough cutscenes. and some characters are underserved because the story is just Too Huge. part of the hype was 'what if the game actually realizes a story of this massive a scope' and yeah, the answer to that was probably not possible, but they at least nailed the gameplay aspect of the scope they were going for so that's a plus.
The most ambitious final fantasy...
No but for real, I think it was doable. The plot could've been fixed with some rearrangements and reworking some scenes. Then next you could just cut some of the sidequests and reallocate them to developing the Dominants, maybe by, surprise, having them in the party and commenting on stuff.
Was it a mistake to give a MMO team a single player game?
I don't hate 16 at all, but I think quite a few of the flaws can go back to the fact that all CBU3 has done for years is an MMO and are probably all out of touch in what should be done when developing a single player game.
14 is a single player game basically
so is the Blight supposed to be an allegory for climate change?
ye
Yes, and the mother crystals are an allegory for leaving your lights turned on when you don't need them, or showering for too long.
cant believe clive raped jill
josh's impression here seems to be that clive sucking on your juice makes you weak forever and incapable of living a normal life. overreaction.
It does if your name is Benedikta.
Guys did you literally not watch the scene? Joshua's problem here was that he is trying to save the world all on his own by taking their power so they won't have to risk their lives, basically carrying all their burdens as his own. That's why he is pissed, and he refuses to hand him the phoenix, not some misconception that what he did hurt Jill.
yeah im moronic that scene was good actually
Cliveren Yeager
Why do you fricks keep saying there's too many cutscenes? They're about as long and plentiful as many other modern jrpgs
That's the sound of the target demographic rejecting the game
i loved when ultima's final phase was him using other eikon's abilities with new, godly names
that was great
maybe it's not that there's too many but so many cutscenes are telling us the same information we already know instead of expanding what needs to be expanded (which is mostly character relationships. more downtime, more conversations with people learning about and appreciating eachother). if there's one thing 7r is among the best in the series at doing, it's establishing likable characters and relationships. not a minute of screentime goes to waste between cloud, tifa, barret, and aerith. that game is a case study in scriptwriting.
It's just Shazamtroons trying to get another flop.
There's around 17+ hours of cutscenes in FFXVI and the average game length is ~34 hours.
FFVII Remake is a good example of another cutscene heavy game and it had 13+ hours of cutscenes with a ~40 hour first playthrough average.
FFXVI = ~50% cutscenes
FFVII Remake = ~35% cutscenes
15% difference between 1st and 2nd is a pretty big deal, that's why it's being pointed out. I didn't mind the cutscenes in Remake personally because they were nice but I know it got some criticism back then so FFXVI getting criticism for being way more cutscene heavy than even Remake was is completely expected.
>the average game length is ~34 hours.
Horseshit. Unless you rush only the main plot, the game is going to take longer than this.
Everything but the main story and maybe the hunts are boring mmoTier waste of time.
Well that's a very different argument.
Some side quests give neato upgrades, the others give side characters a lot of personality. They not quite MMO time wasters but I agree some get pretty close
The average playthrough of FFVIIR is either as long or longer than an average playthrough of FFXVI, that's verifiable. FFVIIR is definitely not a shorter game than XVI, you can google that.
It's also easily verifiable that FFXVI has about 4 more hours of cutscenes than FFVIIR does.
As long as those two are true, then my main point of FFXVI being significantly more cutscene heavy still stands regardless of the accuracy of the exact %
I 100%d the game in 42 hours. every sidequest and hunt. If you just rush the story its probably like 24-25 hours and 17 hoursof that is cutscene.
am i crazy for not being into the spectacle boss battles? i just did the titan one earlier that i've seen people rave about and it just felt like every phase was too long and the combat is so boring and limited. it reminds of when i'm playing a game by platinum and there's a random section where the game becomes a shmup or punchout or something except in those games the segments are (sometimes) short enough not to wear out their welcome.
i'd have liked the fight if every phase was like a third of the length they actually were or if you had a fuller moveset as ifrit but as they are i just get bored, which seems crazy given what's happening on screen
I agree that the Titan one went on for too long, but I liked the others.
lol the titan one might be the one that i feel least strongly about. i definitely felt that was the one platinum helped with. titan would be bad if titan lost didn't have the playable section that lasts for most of the fight after the initial cinematic 'scale of the battle' section. i found the falling through his body fighting the inner titan pretty fun too. certainly it's in the lower half of boss fights in the game and i prefer typhon to it for example. it's still good though.
Length usually comes from doing something wrong. I had a friend take forever on Bahamut because for some reason he never thought to use the new attack except for on the balls. Another took forever on Titan because they never did bursts and never used magic on the lost phase and waited for him to always get in range.
>he relies on the eikonic abilities to do more elaborate air juggles
What's action games autistic obsession with air figting? I've yet to find a reason to leave the ground. You don't do more damage. Most of the abilities don't even work in the air. You have less defensive options.
>enemy variety is pretty high and they feel like they have the right amount of aggression and the right amount of attacks.
LOL? There's barely any. The zones are the same shit over and over renamed. The hunts (majority) are just named regular enemies with maybe 1 extra attack. This is utterly shameful since they have 15 games prior full of enemies to call upon.
>What's action games autistic obsession with air figting?
being in the air is safer than being on the ground usually. it's also fun to juggle enemies, don't ask me why. it just is.
enemy variety in this game far surpasses expectations actually. compared to other games in the genre like dmc and bayo there's more unique enemies here, no doubt about that. more boss battles too. and they're all good.
>being in the air is safer than being on the ground usually. it's also fun to juggle enemies, don't ask me why. it just is.
Everything dies in one ability (maybe 2) that can be juggled.
Not on on the arcade hard mode.
Ah, well the main game hasn't been good enough for me to invest anymore additional time in side modes. c'est la vie.
The pacing and boring sidequests issues are the result of giving a MMO producer ( Yoshi-P ) to make a single player game. Anyone who played ff14 can notice how much ff14 storytelling/game design influenced ff16 and thats not a good thing, mmorpg game design simply doesnt work in a single player game.
giving a mmo procuer the lead to make a single player game*
>mmorpg game design simply doesnt work in a single player game.
Tendies have made Xenoblade a multimillion-selling franchise, and it's pure offline MMO shlock.
Xenoblade franchise didnt sell that well, its a pretty niche jrpg and faced a lot of criticism because its "mmo" mechanics like the loot box system in xc2.
But he isn't the director?
>we're TOLD about the treatment of bearers and the expansion of the blight over and over, but we have limited examples shown
are you out of your fricking mind, the first third of the game has so much hamfisted "the bearers have it bad" crap that it got annoying. do you just skip all dialogue and all the shitty side quests?
yeah maybe i'm forgetting shit i dunno. my primary problem is that CLIVE himself doesn't give much of a shit about this, it isn't his reason to live. then it becomes his reason to live. i'm asking for a throughline there, that's the really bothersome part.
in a lot of those sections where clive has the brand, it is him personally getting shit on for being branded. but i do agree with your point that some npcs being mean to him seems like a weak motivation to take up cid's cause. i guess you could argue he was also a slave soldier for all of those years, but that feels weaker since that was more about his mother punishing him and less about him just being another random bearer. they should've just had clive focus on wanting to kill the mother crystals, i don't see why they really needed him to take over for cid as the leader of the bearers. let gav or otto do that. even dumber when you're the leader and still doing "fetch me some wood" or "serve these people dinner" quests
it's stated several times clive is a rather selfless guy who serves others, doesn't think to save himself so yeah any bad treatment washes over him because annabella has surely done worse than what these people are saying to him. he needs someone he cares about to really suffer. like he sees the way the ironblood treat jill in the opening but he still asks moronic questions to cod about his goals and purpose. if clive just said "yeah frick the way people treat bearers and the mothercrystals are ugly too let's get em" from the start there wouldn't be any problem.
>it's stated several times clive is a rather selfless guy who serves others
yeah and this is such a fricking lame gary stu trope. give me a protagonist who has motivation beyond being the second coming of christ who just wants to be a good guy
eren yeager until the final chapter is what you want
To be fair, as a cliche personality trait as it is, it at least kinda makes sense with Clive. From a young age he had to endure humiliation because of the way his mother treated him, and after that he was basically forced to be a slave his whole life. That dude is way past caring about anything done to him.
Why, I'd rather it just make him more pissed and focused on revenge against his mom. He's not even interested in going after her really, or in freeing Rosaria. If this game had been made 15 years ago, those would have been Clive's motivations for the first half of the game and then the mother crystals would've been the focus in the second half after Clive had matured a little more. Instead we've already started completing end game objectives in the first like quarter of the game
Why does everyone hate Bearers again? Cause of magic and shit but anything that feels like a good enough reason for them to be treated like they are?
because they have 2000's tribal tattoos. get with the times
There's a history book in Ash that details what happened before bearer slavery.
They were called Bearers of the Gods or something and they were revered by the normies as something great. However the normies outnumbered them, and when the bearers started installing themselves in every political office and economic system known the man, the normies decided they'd had enough and didnt want the guys who can use fricking magic to also control their political systems so raised a revolt and enslaved the bearers, before burning every text that revered them and creating a new narrative about how bearers were born to be slaves.
Does any other FF heroine want so blatantly to frick the protagonist as much as Jill?
Tifa with Cloud. The problem is how Cloud is a legit schizo so Tifa is horny and afraid of him going insane.
>Tifa with Cloud. The problem is how Cloud is a legit schizo so Tifa is horny and afraid of him going insane.
man i love the fact of FF7 actually having an insane protagonist.
Btw before SH2 when the trope started getting popular.
I hope the next FF game has a schizo mc and is by Yoko Taro
I think there is no reason to give FF to yoko taro when he can make nier games. There is tons of options for FF directors
No reason to put all your talend in one IP
But maybe in the future....
FF game probably means bigger budget by square, also FF has way more potential for crazy stuff than Nier, I feel like Nier as a property is stuck in a type of fatalist style/niche despite the happier Nier:A ending. Essentially I want Yoko Wackyness with the grander scope of Final Fantasy
I love nier, but it's clear how Yoko taro has one good trick, and that's it. But i would also like to see what he could do with it. It would be the most deranged party ever.
Yeah, I'm really curious for his next big project because up until Automata, he at least could excuse the recurring theme and ending as him experimenting trying to polish the idea, but he did it so well with Automata that bringing the same trick up again will just make him a hack.
He already did the "delete your save" almost 4 times if you count the mobile games. There is also a ton of tropes he repeats a lot. Really curious if he'll be able to keep things fresh in the next nier.
I hope Yoko Taro works XVII just so it shatters his annoying cult like XVI is shattering Yoshida's
I'm not expecting 11/10 work, I'm expecting quite literally what
Would expect, a literal deranged hellscape of a party with the largest budget we'd ever seen for a Yoko Taro title
I'm the guy you tagged.
I will say one thing, i'm sure the next Nier will be high budget as frick considering how well Automata did.
Sure it wont be a mainline FF because it's just insane what FFs are pulling off, but it will be top of the industry production levels.
It's just Nier doesn't really have the same feel of a final fantasy, I guess. Nier plays the worldbuilding trope they choose extremely straight but adds whacky mysticism, meanwhile FF is just some schizo mind palace tier world at times
Yeah, the strenght of FF is how it can be a truly "FINAL FANTASY"
You dont see other IPs being versatile enough to pull what FF can do.
Exactly! The games are just so grand and expansive, they feel unique even among other JRPGs or RPGs in general, like a Bethesda game set in all of Tamriel instead of just one zone with mediocre plot and design
I find really boring how for most rpgs the most fantasy you can get is elves and a generic sauron. It's depressing
20 years later and we still didnt see a setting like Spira.
Hmm yeah, or how most fantasy apes Europe without copying what makes Europe feel distinct, like how FF8 used German scarring traditions
Tifa did take some time getting there though. From the very start Jill is basically begging Clive to push her down, Tifa was never that thirsty.
Like, i guess it is easier for Jill because Tifa found Cloud dissociating at a train station. But i'm kinda impressed by how far things are for them just in the first part of remake.
In the remake they are going extra hard because they are gonna pull some shiphomosexualry in the second part and have Zach get with Aerith, so they are pushing Tifa extra hard so it won't be as bad. I wonder how many cuck posts will flood Ganker when that happens.
Yeah, there will be no love triangle anymore. For people who want actual romance, they will be happy because writers can go all in like they did with Tidus and Yuna.
I'm curious about what they can do romance-wise because it's been 20 years since X. So how they evolved? we'll see.
My problem with XVI is that it has no good villains.
ultima is a good villain in gameplay but needs work in story, that much is true
ENTER
she’s a comically silly character
i love her.
She's your generic bloodline obssessed/racist antagonist. It doesnt make her a good villain at all.
I feel like the ending being so definitive in stuff like removing bearers and eikons as well as killing all the villains was a dumbass choice. Sure, let us kill Ultima but leave other stuff on the table still. Unless they do a prequel the setting may as well be dead.
RAPE CORRECTION IS NEEDED
I liked Ultima but I dislike how superficially involved he is
would have been nicer if he was pulling the strings and only our main party was aware
Barnabas being a thrall was a fricking miss, as well as somewhat competent Anabella having her whole life ruined in one night when she very well knew she was messing with a dominant
She didn’t think Dion would do anything about her antagonizing him because up until that point he hadn’t taken a stand despite clearly being unhappy with the things he was being ordered to do.
she still acts smug when he starts the coup and walks right into the throne room, and for some reason starts screaming after the emperor gets killed despite planning to get him killed earlier in the game
>despite planning to get him killed earlier in the game
When was that?
way earlier in the game around the time she meets with hugo she mentions she's going to have him killed at a meeting, but then he just abdicates the throne randomly because he listened to his augurs
because she doesn't care and could just have all of them killed. everyone knows she's an evil plotting b***h already
>starts screaming after the emperor gets killed despite planning to get him killed earlier in the game
Ah yes, she should have started to ominously laughing while all their retainers are present, that would be the smart choice, why would that stupid b***h scream?
>gigaflare
>teraflare
>ZETAFLARE
Bahamut was about to ARR Valisthea holy shit what a fight
Maybe they will learn to satisfy their actual fans before trying to court normies with shit like 16 (which i think is ok). FFS, they haven't made a great game in like 20 fricking years.
god, i wish i were ifrit...
>*spits on you*
ifrit's ssj powerups were badass
>Mfw i will never get stepped on by a big hot dragon femboy
I just don't get it. How did they manage to nail the pacing and set up everything so perfectly in the prologue. Maybe the dad died a little too early for my taste but it was such a fantastic prologue. How does that change almost immediately afterwards
its funny because if it hadn't been a prologue it would have been way better, in that the game should have picked up right after it rather than skipping forward like 13 years.
yeah the demo flashback was pitch perfect on hitting what needed to be hit. joshua and clive scene, elwin and clive scene, jill and clive scene, then it's off to the action. it was supremely intelligent and i felt like it was an indicator for what their focus would be with the rest of the story but there's just too much to juggle in the main story to do everything i guess.
A large majority of the immediate post demo felt great but yeah, story takes a bit of a hitch in the last third I feel
honestly they should have just committed to making it a fully linear experience. any time you leave a big story section and the game opens up for side quests, it immediately goes to shit. the side quests all suck ass anyway and there barely any point to the exploration. all you'd lose was a decent chunk of play time, most of it padding nobody would miss
Good point here, I think the hunts are nice but they could have just been main story bosses instead of the reused boss/enemy segments. Though I think the bigger areas are nice
Nah I like the open areas. They are literally like any other jrpg to me it could definitely use better rewards though. Story itself is what has pacing issues
>They are literally like any other jrpg
Literally the latest numbered FF had multiple optional dungeons to explore, what is this revisionist history shit?
"Action" RPG collectathon vs Action "RPG". I think a lack of optional dungeons is completely fine in this one
You can be ok with it without pretending every single game in the genre has nothing but MMO fetch quests.
You mean the last numbered and that was also an open world. If it didn't have more shit to do it would deserve even more flak than it already got. XVI literally has side quests, hunts, blue glowing items, and chests all around these open areas to explore. That's more than enough for me for a game not open world but like I said the rewards should be better. That said, it would definitely have been cool if it did have, say, an optional point on the world map that leads to a secret area with secret bosses or rare items or whatever. It's not perfect but the game is far far from bad
I think it'd have been better received if they allowed more rpg type gear effects and weren't so afraid of letting some stuff be unbalanced by gear setups and enemy power.
Man that Jill and Clive cutscenes would probably be more embarrassing than porn to get walked in on
why is it so long
>dad walks in during suteki da ne as a kid
nothing can hurt me now.
>cause I don't care anymore
>best ever spectacle boss battles ever put into a game, this can't be understated: the singular biggest thing the game brings to the table that no other game does is fully
that's not asura's wrath
Outside of QTE's and the ridiculous DBZ expansion I'd say the spectacles from 16 beat out Asura, we'd have to see when the game is fully finished
by all means i'm lovnig 16 and think it's easily goty for me but you can't bear asura brother
I'm 50/50 on this one. In terms of just purely from a direction and scale standpoint, Asura wins, easy.
But as actual interactive, playable setpieces, it's gotta go to XVI.
I love Asura too bros, but the DBZ power scaling in Azura aside (which was phenomenal), the overall gameplay and spectacle combination in 16 is better IMO, Titan is just absolutely phenomenal. Then again, like I was saying what really makes Asura stand out in spectacle is the absolute insanity of the dlcs but you do have a point that fight choreography in Asura is superb
If a DLC or a set of DLCs for 16 come out and they're about as good as what Titan and Bahamut are, then I'm willing to say it'd have Asura's beat
Ultima first appearance was cool as frick, he looks really creepy and mysterious... Then everything goes downhill...He becomes le mysterious manipulative ghost.
>all you do in this game is combat
So why is monster hunter so loved for it then
I can't tell if this is a joke post but how you tackle each monster in MH changes not only from monster to monster but in each fight as well. The way you approach every fight in 16 is literally the same
I played this game for about two hours today, all the good shit you pointed out is irrelevant considering DMC and Bayo do action games a fricking million times better. This game does NOTHING great
no arguing dmc and bayo have better combat systems but 16 has the better boss battles and that's the primary selling point.
>no poison spells or debuffs
Crazy how I've paid for all the ff games between now and 97 and suddenly I'm not worth it any more
The only time poison was good was in particular was 10, status effects are only really good in turn based rpgs and rarely in action games (debuffs are useful in souls games except for rare occasion)
I don't care it's what I like
I think we can all recognize that the writing for women in this game is terrible right? Coming off of the high point that was Venat in Endwalker, and comparing the other females in FF from Rosa, Rydia, Terra, etc... from the SNES to the PSX glory day characters Aerith, Rinoa, Dagger, Eiko, Yuffie, Beatrix, or the Yuna, Rikku, and Lulu from X, to Ashe from XII, and Lightning from XIII... Final Fantasy hasn't really sucked with women. They've all generally had strong personalities and designs that really stood out, but goddamnit this game is terrible with female agency and writing.
I liked Benedicta and Annabell, those two and Cid are like the only good characters in the whole game. It's not a woman problem, it's just the character writing in general was dogshit. Not having a proper party that spends most of the game with you doesn't help
The sad thing is there's clear examples of things they could have done, like tie certain side quests to major characters as guests and having Jill and such actually talk and voice their opinions more while just traveling or after a quest is finished.
Benedikta was going well - then it just stopped. I can't even tell if there was an arc.
Anabella was just le evil shit. We don't even know why she became proto-hitler.
Tarja is ok. Unremarkable. If Benedikta lived, she should have gained some rapport with her.
Mid is ok. Would have been better if we saw her in the Hideaway before Cid dies.
Jill is so mediocre. She talks a lot about her motivations, but there's little in the way of endearing her to player. Wasted potential. She really does feel like a waifubot.
>Benedikta was going well - then it just stopped. I can't even tell if there was an arc.
should've had her join the party instead of dying but they'd have to rework a lot of stuff to do that. would've been for the best though, hugo simping that hard for her stretched my suspension of disbelief
Benedikta is clearly the Eikon they talked about almost cutting
I imagine it was Typhon instead, he literally does nothing
>graphics are great
uwot m8?
I mean Asura's Wrath WAS cool and it's not a bad thing to copy it
Yeah, that's totally fine. I wish more games had spectacles nearly as good as Asura's and this
I can't fault the game on spectacle. I was so disappointed that after God of War 3, which was arguably the swan song of the PS3, that the new God of War was so lacking in it. Whatever FF game comes next, if the developers decide to minimize the impact of summons, there's going to be a lot of disappointed people.
Yeah man you really feel the SHTF moments with summons in this game, 15 was so disappointing relatively as a next gen game with summons. I hope the next one has some crazy shit too. But I doubt we'll get anything this unique again
That's true, but the problem is XVI is the worst of both worlds. It has spectacle, but it makes you spend 5-6 hours between each instance doing shitty side quests in a boring world that ultimately amount to nothing.
If they wanted Asura's Wrath then they should've cut all the fat and gone for Asura's Wrath rather than pretend to be an RPG with nothing that makes an RPG an RPG.
Asking out of curiosity, is there any modern game that's like Asura's Wrath?
Agreed. FFXVI would be an incredible 15~20 hour long action game if they cut the bullshit.
How do you increase Torgal's Sic and Ravage commands? Is it a story thing? I've been using them whenever enemies are half/full staggered or when I use an ability and they haven't gone up so far.
The character writing in this game is so dogshit the majority of the way through that it’s an actual miracle Dion is as good as he is.
I'm honestly way more interested in what Clive Joshua, and Jill were doing in the 13 year timeskip and its weird there are no flashbacks to that
>Clive
Slave
>Jill
Slave
>Joshua
Assuring the continuation of the Rosefield bloodline. He has a whole order of female knights to impregnate after all, Jote was the only left without a swollen belly to accompany him.
If 2 years ago you told me 15 would be a better rpg than 16 I would shit a frickin brick
they have been so transparent this is an action game the whole time
Not a great excuse for boring ass items
Like when at PAX they told people asking about RPG mechanics to wait a bit more that they would reveal them?
the only time they've ever misled, even then after the april reveal of the rpg mechanics being... quests that should be tipped you off
I personally don't mind the game being an action game (though even then I expected a lot more depth and variety to it than it has), but they brought it on themselves. Should have been more honest. Back with the JRPG debacle shit too, the messaging was "we're just an RPG, we don't want to be specifically judged against the preconception people have of what a JAPANESE RPG is". I'm pretty sure "not JRPG, just RPG" still implies an RPG.
Are the boss battles using the same mechanics as the rest of the game's combat? If not then they are mini games and can't be considered boss battles
they are. that's what's remarkable about them.
Mostly yes but you're flying around and shooting giant lasers instead of running around swinging a sword
these guys are being a bit disingenuous
it's similar to the main combat but extremely simplified
ifrit has all of base clives moves and two eikonic powers by bahamut. they made sure ifrit was equal to clives complexity in gameplay for a reason
>best ever spectacle boss battles ever put into a game, this can't be understated: the singular biggest thing the game brings to the table that no other game does is fully playable and fun action sequences that would usually be qtes in other games.
they are QTEs though
it's an outright lie to pretend they're real fights
Did you even play the game?
the majority of every eikon battle is gameplay. each does have some qtes but only a minority of the fight.
>they are QTEs though
The phase transitions have qtes for flavor. Boss hp bars in 16 lie and put the actual ends of their health bars several chunks behind what they show you on the screen, so the ending qtes are just victory laps for after the point where you actually beat the boss.
>inb4 cope
These qte sequences make up like 5% of the actual boss fights, which the rest of are easily comparable to bosses from games like dmc in terms of combat depth.
>it's an outright lie to pretend they're real fights
It's literally an outright lie to pretend they're not real fights.
https://clips.twitch.tv/DiligentKathishAppleSpicyBoy-_BgjlutebjTSESIO
its over
A pothead's opinion is worth less than nothing
Asmon loves it
Why would I care what a hermit thinks about vidya?
>if asmon stops playing, means it's shit
>if asmon praises it, he's a moron
doomers...
I don't think anybody is going to be truly satisfied with an FF game again unless we get FF versus XII with the original story, premise, and something resembling the original moody artstyle and gameplay. Basically the Snyder Cut for FFXV.
And no I don't mean that shitty Verum Rex copium that we probably aren't getting anyways. You damn well know even if it does come out it's only going to be superficially reminiscent of FF vs XIII because it's connected to fricking Disney, they'd never let a game like that be rated m and edgy as all hell
>I don't think anybody is going to be truly satisfied with an FF game again unless we get FF versus XII with the original story, premise, and something resembling the original moody artstyle and gameplay
Why do people jerk off FF Versus so much? It basically wasn't a game before it got turned into 15 and pretty much everything anyone believes the game was going to be exists exclusively inside their own heads. It just wasn't this grand masterpiece you've gaslit yourself into thinking it was.
because they hyped it up when they were 14 and they can't accept that reality could never live up to their teenage fanfiction
Just did the Bahamut fight
me when i did the garuda fight
Titan was better.
This quest pissed me off. The Bearer shit is so goofy we have to stop letting Japanese writers touch this subject ever again. Was absolutely terrible in Arise too. I'm sure there's a follow up quest but it's no less frustrating to go through.
Its funny how fricking dad of war ragnarok had more rpg elements than ff16.
That game sucks dick though
The story is marvel tier of bad but the gameplay, exploration and gear system are much better than ff16s.
Maybe so. But seeing pic related makes me crack up.
and the game is worse for it. 16s lack of rpg elements is a blessing not a curse
This lol, GoW 2018 have different armors and weapons (that can be both upgraded) and even have a party member (with the kid) that you can control too during the fight.
It have actual exploration lore (odin eyes etc...) and meaningful puzzle and loot reward.
In top of that, it does have a true hard mode that is challenging and rewarding skill wise.
WAY more. Game sucked, but it's definitely way more of an RPG than FFXVI.
All the rpg elements of that game feel so fricking forced to me. It was following that trend where every game tries to copy paste rpg elements, which was pretty awful.
It's jarring because 3 years ago FF7R figured out how to keep different weapons relevant, being more than just numbers go up. Then you see 16's gear system...
I feel like this is more true of 2018 than Ragnarok, even though 2018 is overall a much better game. Ragnarok has actual builds, like a poison proc focused build is the strongest build you can have at some point in the game in Vanaheim. FFXVI doesn't even have poison.
You do know that GoW was existing before the 2018 version, right?
Everything they added doesn't seems forced to me, and to be honest, it was necessary for the new direction.
>You do know that GoW was existing before the 2018 version, right?
I know and I have played them (which you obviously didn't), which is why those elements feel so forced to me. What a moronic post.
>which you obviously didn't
KEK
Not only did I played the PS2 versions I also played the PSP one (not the ps3).
And I still think that what they added was totally normal for the genre they switched.
what even are the eikons? what connection do they have with ultima?
They are but mighty acts of God (Ultima).
i think ultima is pretty shit and barnabas was literal writer exposition dump or i didnt like his ENG va accent. Game of thrones aesetetic was pure shit and they do the final fantasy thing where the party members look out of place compared to the npcs again. mid burying the engines is moronic.
great graphics
great fights
kino music
cool sidequest shit.
I think maehiro is mid to be fair.
I get what they wanted to do with Barnabas, but it was too sudden so it becomes garbage. They could've used him a lot more to set up why he is the way he is.
He appears at 90% of the game as a ultima schizo and that's it
Guys I've been gone for at least more than one year. wtf happened to 15 kun or barry or whatever he's called now?
YoshiP saved his life by not putting Black folk in XVI so it got -10 off journo review scores
But really was he banned or did he off himself? I haven't seen an ff thread that wasn't porn or him going schizo for over 10 years. wtf is going on
Frick off moron.
No. I take several year long breaks in between my shitposting sessions so I require updates.
XIV trannies have been spamming threads about their mmo every day.
but also "someone" keeps making these
Also I asked this the couple times but why is troony the new Black person? Like it literally took me hours to realize that "you will never be a woman" was supposed to be an insult. Is this a
generational thing or what?
He usually only shows up in the salesgay threads at the moment
You nailed it. But it also means that this game is nothing special without the boss fights and eikon spectacle.
yet those moments are so epic that arguably they justify the games existence. the game lives and dies in your judgement of those segments
>he takes up cid's life goal yes, but there weren't sufficient seeds planted for this to feel natural. a lot of talk is put on 'a place to live and die on our own terms' as a central goal for the main characters, but the story does not SHOW enough people suffering
I disagree, We were shown a whole bunch of suffering and honestly I feel like if we had to be shown even more it would be dragging down the pace of the story by that point.
Real talk. Is he solely responsible for the REAL boycott that is happening for 16
No, it is him and the rest of CBU3.
MMO devs = MMO quality = Do not Play
Yes, he should've answered the bullshit diversity questions better by bringing up the arabs
No it's Barry! He's behind it all! BARRY BARRY BARRY!!!
i'd say it's the exclusivity deal
that shit always fire up the angry morons
Is this a Final Fantasy game? Can it even be called a spiritual successor to FFs I-X?
As some anons said here. Not having a good main villain or rival is kinda bad. The best FF games had some type of complexity with its villains or antagonists. 16 focused everywhere so they never set up something like that.
I believed it was going to be barnabas lmaaaaao
How wrong i was
The least ambitious Final Fantasy...
MMO devs == MMO quality
You know it’s weird that they released Triangle Strategy last year and that did GoT-inspired low fantasy medieval political drama last year and it did all the themes and plotting better without sacrificing the zany elements people expect of a jrpg. The only thing FFXVI has over it is spectacle and Clive being more interesting than Serenoa
I wanted to like Triangle Strat but I just found the storytelling so dry.
It gets more interesting as it goes on. It also sticks to the political drama and doesn’t devolve into another kill god final act
All they had to do was not mention game of thrones, but they thought it would entice the normalgays
I don't agree that the story is that good. But it also has horrendous voice acting and is still stuck in the SNES ps1 era. Im tired of devs having to resort to ages old graphics to have to tell a remotely comprehensible story. These guys literally just needed more time to flesh out the story
I liked the Benedicta fight the most honestly, after that Ifrit feels too much like the underdog (even if he isn't), and the two other eikons he would physically dominate even easier than Garuda (Shiva and Ramuh) don't even have a fight.
I liked underdog(heh) Ifrit against the other eikons though, I felt that it made them more significant as Ifrit is typically a weaker early game summon
oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Is that from your new blog Barry?
4/10 sounds about right.
I wonder why one person would spend time doing these edits when someone can just go to metacritic check if it's true.
I would give it a 5. They were considerate enough to give auto-battle accessories because they understood how boring the combat is.
I feel like the game needed to make an excuse for you to have at least 3 move sets by 5 hours in.
>we're TOLD about the treatment of bearers and the expansion of the blight over and over, but we have limited examples shown
You must have skipped a ton of sidequests because they hammer this point in almost to the point of ridiculousness, especially in the field area right before the first Mothercrystal encounter.
With how boring the side quests are why wouldn't you skip them? If it's a big plot point then it should be shown as PART OF THE MAIN STORY.
This is why you don't relegate important narrative moments to sidequests. Expecting people to engage with all of the poop-gathering sidequests in order to learn about how badly treated Bearers actually are is moronic.
>With how boring the side quests are
Bro what? Every sidequest in that area was fricking doomkino.
this
best side quests in the game were where you make the kid cry because he doesn't realize his bearer slaves actually feel pain and the other one where the guy and his son get killed by a wolf after trying to trick you
but regardless, yeah the side quests are shit but don't complain that they game didn't emphasize a point enough when you intentionally skipped all of the content that emphasizes that point
> yeah the side quests are shit but don't complain that they game didn't emphasize a point enough when you intentionally skipped all of the content that emphasizes that point
You realize how stupid your argument here is, right? If the content is SHIT then expecting people to engage with it is stupid. It's like saying people didn't understand how good a 5 course meal is simply because you had to eat the first course meal which was a plate of shit. Of course people aren't gonna dive right into that.
The content isn't shit but I guess I can't expect ADHD children to pay attention to important world/character building sidequests
>expecting actual quest design is now ADHD
Actual sidequest design like what
It's more a matter of being too braindead to enjoy world building quests
>Actual sidequest design like what
You have an entire series of Final Fantasy games to pull from, some which do this better than others. Many have optional dungeons, bosses, equipment behind side quests. Even the dogshit God of War gets this by having side quests be unique combat encounters rather than having them be MMO-tier fetch quests.
>Even the dogshit God of War gets this by having side quests be unique combat encounters rather than having them be MMO-tier fetch quests.
This game has hunts and some sidequests do this too
>You have an entire series of Final Fantasy games to pull from,
And a lot of them use the same sidequest design
>Many have optional dungeons, bosses, equipment behind side quests.
Chronoliths
Have you played this game?
Yes I have. Now tell me what the rewards are for all this great side content in XVI is. I can wait.
Outside of story and character building, you get mats, XP/reknown, and gear occasionally. You'd know this if you played the game
Okay anon, you're almost there. Now tell me what the mats are used for and what gear does. Connect the dots for me.
Frick off. Not my fault you're a moron that proved himself wrong
You b***hed about the game not having a bunch of shit that it has. Just take the L and my wiener up your ass and get over it
And now you've proven me right because you know what I was going for. The gearing in XVI is garbage. Mats, upgrading, new gear is all pointless because they literally do nothing. They're stat upgrades tossed away a second later after you get them. Even accessories are the same with most of them being a low cooldown reduction on a single skill.
You know what's common between God of War, FF7 Remake and Stranger of Paradise? Actual gearing and choices. Actual rewards from side content.
>Stranger of Paradise?
not even a comparable game
>And now you've proven me right because you know what I was going for. The gearing in XVI is garbage. Mats, upgrading, new gear is all pointless because they literally do nothing. They're stat upgrades tossed away a second later after you get them. Even accessories are the same with most of them being a low cooldown reduction on a single skill.
>do nothing
>stat upgrades
Pick one. Earlier ffs has gear just be stat upgrades and one b***hes about that.
You also are conveniently ignoring the initial point but whatever I guess
>Pick one. Earlier ffs has gear just be stat upgrades and one b***hes about that.
First off even if that was true, why do you think that's an excuse moron? It's 2023, not 2000. All of the games I mentioned were released recently and are far more engaging. And second it's not even true if you weren't a secondary that hasn't played another FF game in their life.
And how is Stranger of Paradise not comparable, exactly? They're both action RPGs. So tell me how they're not comparable.
>First off even if that was true,
It IS true, not IF
>why do you think that's an excuse moron
It's a deliberate stylistic choice to avoid watering down the action based gameplay which rpg stats+gearing do
>And how is Stranger of Paradise not comparable, exactly?
It's a diablo loot based grindathon specifically designed around making builds to kill things faster. Totally different style of game
t. someone who has put hundreds of hours in nioh 1, 2, SoP, and Wo Schlong
Completely asinine to compare them when they're going in two totally different gameplay directions. Gear is everything in SoP
>And second it's not even true if you weren't a secondary that hasn't played another FF game in their life.
I'm 30 and I've played every single one and beaten most of them. Step off bro, you are out of your league here. You're talking about shit you haven't played and it's obvious.
>I'm 30 and I've played every single one and beaten most of them. Step off bro, you are out of your league here. You're talking about shit you haven't played and it's obvious.
Every single prior FF has had more diverse equipment. From rod breaking to materia slots to abilities on gear. You could remove the gear from XVI entirely and it literally would not affect the game at all. Not balance-wise, not gameplay-wise. It literally does not matter whether or not you upgrade your sword.
16 has good accessories at least
>. You could remove the gear from XVI entirely and it literally would not affect the game at all. Not balance-wise, not gameplay-wise. It literally does not matter whether or not you upgrade your sword
You kill things faster/take less damage. That's an impact moron
>From rod breaking to materia slots to abilities on gear.
Lmfao, bro? Stat stick gearing was how things were for a LONG time. They got around it eventually in stuff like 7 but Jesus dude, get a clue
>Lmfao, bro? Stat stick gearing was how things were for a LONG time. They got around it eventually in stuff like 7 but Jesus dude, get a clue
Those games were released literally about 30 years ago anon. You're saying it's fine for gearing to be meaningless and awful in a game released in 2023 because games did the same thing back when they were on the SNES. Do you realize how fricking insane that sounds? And even then, FF5 had stuff like the whole job system which alone is as complex if not moreso than anything XVI does.
No shit they're going to be basic because most games were more basic at the time. If you honestly think that's a valid argument then you need help.
>Those games were released literally about 30 years ago anon. You're saying it's fine for gearing to be meaningless and awful in a game released in 2023 because games did the same thing back when they were on the SNES.
I'm saying it has a precedent for a real FF game and I'll take that over modern AAA loot vomit stapled onto games for no good reason
I said it earlier and you ignored it, but it was a deliberate choice because the more rpg/stat elements you add into an action game like this, the more it waters down the core gameplay because fear becomes more important than skill/the gameplay itself
It's crazy to me that I have to explain this to you
You also dropped every other point including your initial one so great job I guess.
And I've been saying that both aspects are so terrible because none of them are deep. The core action gameplay is worse than SoP, Dragon's Dogma etc and the core RPG gameplay is worse than prior FF games. It is literally the worst of both worlds.
>The core action gameplay is worse than SoP,
you have not played SoP lmao. that's a shallower game than this by far
>Dragon's Dogma
?? Most games are?
>It is literally the worst of both worlds.
moronic hyperbole spoken by someone that hasn't played the game. The core gameplay is quite fun
At least you can skip XVI's sidequests, 7R makes you reapeat it's dogshit quests three times if you want to get all the content
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP YOSHI-P IS A GOD TALK TO THIS CHARACTER, CLICK X ON THESE THINGS, AND THEN TALK TO THIS CHARACTER AGAIN FOR A REWARD!!!!!
Assblasted by Yoshida. Kneel.
>16 has optional bosses, equipment, character moments, rare materials and a chocobo behind side quests
Now try again without being so disingenuous
What does ADHD have to do with not playing content that's garbage? Is this just the MMO player mentality where you MUST do every side quest no matter how shit it is?
that's a separate complaint (that I agree with). stop being moronic
No, it's the same complaint. You shouldn't hide important story content behind shitty side quests. Because by nature of it being a SIDE QUEST the expectation is that players DON'T have to do it. It's either a SIDE quest or a MAIN quest.
You don't have to do it. Just don't be surprised when you missed some shit.
I'm not the same anon complaining about the missed racism. I'm telling you simply that side quests are meant to be side content. If that side content is important to understanding the themes of the main story or plot, then you've fricked up the content of your game. There's a difference between dropping the main story before it kicks off and disengaging with the side content because it's all garbage.
I don't agree with this. Nothing wrong with having sidequests be important, they just can't be fundamental to the story being comprehensible. If it only makes sense with sidequests, that's stupid. If sidequests provide more context, that's fine.
The problem is simply that the sidequests are garbage and a lot of main quests also feel like sidequests. Purely a level/quest design issue.
It's fine if it was a sidequest/discoverable like in the PS1 games. The problem is that they're freaking mmo quests lmao.
it's not important story content, it's world building flavor which is completely appropriate to put behind optional side quests. why are you being such a homosexual about this. you were wrong, get over it and move on
yes the side quests suck. that doesn't mean your complaint about the racism not being hamfisted enough is valid. that would be like if a game journo complained about about the game not giving you any other eikons because they stopped playing before getting garuda. you don't have to be such an embarrassed homosexual because one piece of your criticism was incorrect, it's still a shit game.
all this money put in some one time use product with barely any gameplay, depth and 0 replay value
i fricking hate modern gayming
>one time use product
FF16 has a lot more replayability that most FF games
Does it have a bloody palace mode or something?
I know you're following shitpost guidelines. But i would recomment cutting the "no replay value" part of it.
Do they ever explain how Joshua heard of Ultima?
Dont worry about it.
I think the Undying had access to Moss the Chronicler's journal, which was apparently extremely rare. Joshua has a book when he's looking at the mural in Ash. So yeah, he just randomly read a book about Ultima, and then had his knights do more research. Why he did this rather than find Clive, I don't know
please buy episode joshua
so less platforms than any other ff and faster than any ff and higher priced than any ff
Eikons are so powerful and cool in this game, its gonna be hard to not get disappointed seeing them back to being just summons in the next games.
I'm curious to see how they will make the WEAPONS in FF7R
Yeah, I would not mind a spinoff that cuts out the human parts and is just eikon battling.
>next game
Unironcally this was probably their final fantasy and they're going to go under when recession hits.
They are going off with a bang at least, but it makes sense that even with FF16, they couldn't recover from three lightning games(wtf were they thinking), FF15 and Forspoken.
I unironically loved both 15 and forspoken. Also I am not 15 kun. I'm the caveman who comes by every few years.
I think I called myself artgay one time when I b***hing about the art direction
I could excuse 15 if you are an autist, but not the latter, henceforth you will be known as tastelessgay.
Yes I am an autist and she reminds me of my cousin whose dad fricked off when she was little. Also, I really liked the combat and art direction.
Forspoken is a better rpg than 16 and has better movement gameplay
XV is a solid 7/10. It's held together by duct tape but it emphasizes the journey with friends which is the most important narrative element of an FF game. It's one of the FF games I think about fondly more often than others.
OP is an autistic tyranny that writes a fricking essay to defend this piece of shit only because its ps exclusive.
He doesn't care about the story or if it's a good ff game, he is rivaled only by Barry in it's autistic ways, he will defend an awful game because he can't think otherwise.
The leaks were a godsend and was more than enough to understand that the square we used to love it's now infested by people who forgot what made them so successful before.
Tldr: game is shit, op is a homosexual, nothing new
>r*ddit spacing
i thought your kind loved xvi
The whole "founder" talk was a bit too much, it was really hard not to compare it to AOT at this point, especially since it didn't even lead anywhere.
>clive and jill's shocked expressions at joshua immediately kissing mid's hand
pretty funny
imagine the amount of pussy he gotten while Clive and Jill stayed autistic virgins until they were 30
Why did they make Odin a communist
EAT ZE BUGS CLIVE
no one bought the game but it doesn't matter
its probably 100% funded just by the time exclusive deal
games don't need customers anymore, its been like that for a while
corps paying themselves
>we're TOLD about the treatment of bearers and the expansion of the blight over and over, but we have limited examples shown - this leads to the messaging feeling kind of weak, the player doesn't really care because it isn't believable that the world is so bad a place for the average citizen.
we're shown multiple times how they're treated like shit and even seen them and average citizens get slaughtered
Cloud: gamers
Aeris: Square Enix
Water: FF16
they really went ham on the Christianity motif, Barnabas is just a crazy preacher, and Ultima's ultimate attacks are stuff like the Rapture, or Purgatory
FF has been leaning hard on the Christian LARP ever since FF6
I think it feels heavier in this game because the english script came first, so you just know that they're literally just quoting evangelical sermons and stuff
>the english script came first
fanfiction
Yeah, it's obvious what they are trying to do, it's just hard to make it work when you start giving focus in that at the very end of the game
We are still trying to understand what ultima wants to do in the last hour of the game.
why is Odin the dark spirit and Bahamut the light spirit? based on just their names, it feels like those should be swapped. Bahumut reminds me of Baphomet and just sounds kind of demonic in general. Odin obviously is a reference to the norse god, and while i'm sure he did some bad shit I think he was more of a good guy than bad guy. yes i know ffxvi didn't invent this
Odin probably because of the dark horse and zantetsuken. Dark Blade
they used to both be non-elemental
Bahamut can go both ways. But they used it as something divine in this game. So light aspect
Just finished the game man what the frick were they thinking. Yoshi-P kept describing this as a rollercoaster but the pacing is so fricking slow. Game had a great premise but they shit the bed with almost all the characters and what the frick at ultima fricking hell. Could of been an all time great but they fricked up in so many areas i can't believe it
>be yoshi-p
>think FF needs to "evolve" for the modern generation
>create the most laborious scenes in the series history, literally never ending boring dialogue
>new sidequest senpai: deliver three plates of food (again)
lol, this hack and his team would be shut down if it weren't for ff14
MMO devs = MMO quality = Do not Play
Still, it's funny that even mmo players don't like the game.
Is it just me or people suddenly have very high standards for this game?
That always suddenly happens when you want to hate on something
Blame the FF14 cultist, you guys are extremist that push others to become extremist too.
The top 3 worst FF: FF15 > FF16 > FF13
13 is worse than 16 and 8 is also worse than 16. You doomposters are just being outright unfair.
16 is a mid tier FF game, its definitely not a top tier or bottom tier game.
worst ff = 14, 16, 13
behead all who insult xiv
I didn't take the MMO into account, because for me, MMO = dog shit by default.
>13 is worse than 16 and 8 is also worse than 16
The frick, 8 is the best one lol.
>16 is a mid tier FF game
a mid tier FF game that doesn't look like FF at all, ok.
You're genuinely fricking moronic. 16's story has some issues but its legitimately 100x better than 8's dogshit story. 8's combat systems are also janky as all hell due to how junctions work and clearly unfinished.
Also 16 is very clearly a FF game. the only thing "not FF" about the game is the fact that all of the environments are boring as hell.
Also, Clive's design is too hairy and buff.
Yeah sure, I'll give you this one. I don't hate Clive's design but I'm not a huge fan of it either.
no you don't understand FFVIII dropping multiple plot points, annoying love interest and constant asspulls was kino
I clapped and cried when it was revealed they all grew up in the same orphanage and forgot it all. 10/10 storytelling and writing.
Remember how Seifer becomes leader of Galbadia and then just disappears after giving Rinoa to Adel and his arc never gets resolved? Kino.
No hes seen happily laughig and fishing with Fujin and Raijin during the credits. Apparently he just resigned from being President of the Worlds militaristic empire and serving the multiverses omnicidal sorceress
Everything you said was wrong, so I don't even know where to start....
>16's story has some issues but its legitimately 100x better than 8's dogshit story
FF8 have more characters that have better writing and development, the world building and lore have a meaningful impact in the story, and here, at least, the main characters are really meaningful compared to your Jill that is like a C tier NPC during the rest of the game.
There is also so many kino moment with Laguna, something FF16 never ever reached during the entire game.
>8's combat systems are also janky as all hell due to how junctions work and clearly unfinished.
Compared to what? This FF16 mechanic that is bland as frick? no complexity, no tactics, no deep strat, nothing. You can't even have a minigame like the Triple Triad for god sake.
>the only thing "not FF" about the game is the fact that all of the environments are boring as hell.
That and the lack of party members, the lac of real RPG features, the lack of interesting sidequest, the lack of content and variety, of minigames, etc.....
Having the fricking guts to compare FF8 to FF16 lol, you guys are out of this world.
keyed and true-shotted
It's frankly amazing that FF8's schizo plot is as coherent as it is. The only part I really have an issue with is with them suddenly remembering they were all childhood friends. That's just pure bullshit
>The only part I really have an issue with is with them suddenly remembering they were all childhood friends. That's just pure bullshit
Honestly, not really.
As it been described in the game, GFs do erase memory over time, and even without that, I experience this in real life, I got some "friend" that didn't even remembered me (when their own friend did does remembered me), point being, it's not far far fetched.
>What interesting decision making or customization is involved in junctioning your best spell to STR, HP and then limit break?
Are you really asking this? The amount of possibility and personal style is what make this function the best. You can split everything to each members, or just put everything on 1 or 2 members etc... you can create so much variations knowing that during a big part of the game, you are limited in number of GFs and magic, which require to min/max everything.
While yes, the game have somewhat too many options to become a literal god and break shit up, don't even act like you did know all of this in your first playthrough without any guide. Point being, FF8 junction system is deep and take a long time to test and try everything up, it's like a car setup in Gran Turismo 2, you test multiple variations to get your own personal style.
What interesting decision making or customization is involved in junctioning your best spell to STR, HP and then limit break? Are we really pretending casting magic or using any buffs or debuffs besides Meltdown and Aura actually mattered as soon as you understood how the game really worked?
ok so you have never played FF16 got it.
Shit bait
The demo kinda baited a lot of people inti believing the story would be decent, but the actual game devolved into "lets kill the alien god"
alright, how would you change the story, smartass?
give Jill bigger boobs
>Clive saving Jill and Clive meeting Cid don't happen right next to each other
>no/minimal timeskip
>Barnabas has more presence before the last quarter of the game
>Hideaway NPCs actually die when Hugo attacks
>more romantic dialogue between Clive and Jill
>more Uncle Byron
Make Joshua the main character. Frick baragays and frick clive's velmet cosplay.
frick off fujo
I'm a mostly straight dude who likes to self-insert as a prettyboy and it's one of the main reasons I get ff games.
If I wanted to play as a witcher in a drag outfit I would mod witcher 3.
>mostly straight
>self-insert as a prettyboy
Who do you think you are fooling
No one. It's literally the truth. Outside of the odd femboy I am completely straight.
Yes, people expected sonething different. Plus ff7 had tons of rpg elements such as customization, exploration,build choices and progression etc... ff16 shouldnt evenbe considered a rpg.
>get rid of everything Ultima related
>make Barnabas, Anabella and Olivier who becomes a naturalborn Ifrit Risen the actual villains
>No Ultima
>Make Odin look like the final boss (not a cuck/clown)
>Make Dion a character that betray the group (and end up being the first final boss), fight on stratosphere then in the galaxy
>Make Benedikta a snake that come and go during the whole game to frick shit up
>Make Hugo a true badass (not a cuck/clown)
>Make another X mysterious eikon that also can steal power (turns out to be Joshua, that will steal Bahamut)
>End up as a final between Clive vs Joshua
>Shiva at some point go into the fight to help them, you choose who you want to save
Voila, you get an actual good story.
>Make Hugo a true badass (not a cuck/clown)
Impossible. This game is a serious story based on Game of Thrones, anon
>Game of Thrones
Never watched this, so I don't know. But it's quite incredible how most of the male vilain in this game are all clowns.
Why it would be worse?
>Not sure about this one, I think the concept of Ultima is fine just bad execution
It's not only bad, it's also have being used over and over and over again in some many medium now, using this kind of trope is just lazy writing at this point.
>Nope, Dion's one of the better chars in the game already.
He already does that in a certain way (when he break up and destroy his city). here instead, you would see him taking a more "extreme" way, a "final solution" which in the end, would match perfectly his Eikon, Bahamut.
>Not sure how this would affect the game, might make it worse honestly.
She is one of the most beloved characters by those who actually hate this game, she is also responsible for the good review from the demo.
>Another mythos that is actually Joshua
Take a look at the cover and the logo of the game, tell me what you see.
The story would have been better if at the end, the 2 brother fight against each other on how to "fix" the world, aka, one that want to believe in magics and the other one that doesn't, and you, by using Shiva, you decide of the future of "Final Fantasy".
you'd need to drastically rewite the entire story for that to work.
Its pretty badly done because they keep Joshua away from Clive for the first 60-70% of the game but the story's core is clearly about how much the brothers care for each other, as well as the will vs slavery thing being important too. The ending reinforces this too. making a Clive v Joshua thing would require just outright changing what the core themes of the story are.
>will vs slavery thing being important too
well the final conflict is just humanity vs ayy lmao in a competition to see who will continue to exist. Ultima was never a god that wanted a utopia for humanity.
even if ultima is supposed to be this character with no upside to his option, he should still represent the status quo of the world at large that clive is fitting against: accepting of slavery, just trying to save themselves. and he is that. so mild success there.
literally what status quo, die to the Blight or get genocided by ayys?
i mean the attitude of the average human in valisthea is "gotta look after myself frick everyone else."
all the more reason to oppose Ultima. Clive is literally fighting a strawman. You might as well claim there's nuance in fighting Kefka.
its hilarious because barnabas thinks humans who side with ultima will be saved, but ultima reveals that he's going to exterminate humans afterwards, for no reason other than them being annoying
>you'd need to drastically rewite the entire story for that to work.
But not that much.
The game start with the trio (Joshua, Jill, Clive) and end up with the same trio.
Basically, life and experience make them drift away, and they end up looking at the issue and how to fix it in a different way.
I think having a "fire" duel between Phoenix vs Ifrit and Shiva being the one that close the fight, a better story, a dramatic one, yes, but something that at least, would be emotional and very interesting, since in a way, nobody is the villain here, just a different point of view on how to fix things.
It could even have been used as way to enhance the new game+, by giving the possibility to play the game from the Joshua point of view. (and thus double the game content life by having 2 side of the same story).
>require just outright changing what the core themes of the story are.
I'm not even sure about that, in fact, I wonder if my "version" of the story wasn't even the original one at some point.
Because everything related to the cover/logo/marketing back then was suggesting a fight between Phoenix and Ifrit (exactly like at the start), and Ultima feel like something added at some point for whatever reasons.
I could be wrong, but I do really think that the story was changed mid development, and a lot of things got taken away to shorten the development time.
The story was definitely changed at some point but I dont think it was ever supposed to be Clive vs Joshua.
Leviathan was definitely cut from the game at some point though, and I think Jill had some things cut too in the late game.
That sounds even worse than the shit we got jesus never become a writer i beg of you
>No Ultima
Not sure about this one, I think the concept of Ultima is fine just bad execution
>Make Odin more badass
Sure. This is badly needed.
>Make Dion betray the group
Nope, Dion's one of the better chars in the game already.
>Benedikta more relevant
Not sure how this would affect the game, might make it worse honestly.
>Hugo badass
I think Hugo is fine as he is but I guess making him a bit less of a cuck would be better.
>Another mythos that is actually Joshua
dumb
>Final fight is Clive vs Joshua
Also dumb and at this point a completely different game.
>Choose who you want to save
again dumb.
Honestly most of your ideas would just make the game outright worse and we'd be mocking the hell out of it.
>>End up as a final between Clive vs Joshua
extremely moronic, but the rest isn't too bad
Personally I'd have liked Ultima scrapped and the dominant vs eikon thing scrapped somewhat and just making them simply reincarnations of the eikons in human form who can temporarily reattain their true form. And leave the exact nature of them more ambiguous. You could have a more interesting characterization of them all by bringing the question of their individuality and how much of them is reused per rebirth, as well as questioning the degree one considers their identities as the human or the eikon and how they relate over generations to humans.
>"lets kill the alien god"
So it's an FF game then.
Old good new bad
>lets kill the alien god"
So it's a FF game then?
Obviously. All you need to do is look at the criticisms in the review and then look at these reviewers other reviews and see how hypocritical they all are. These homosexuals will just cry yoshit piss cult like usual though
>only time cid and mid are together is in a hallucination
they didn't want to make a younger model for just one cutscene
jote is cute
BRO THEY GOT A HECKIN DOGGO I GONNA SPEND 570 TO PLAY THE GAME
it's funny to get called "yoship cultists"
now I kinda want to play 14
You're not allowed to play FF14
is that pic supposed to persuade me to not play?
not doing the best job
NOT ALLOWED
So what was Ultima's problem again
what did he want?
wanted to create a new world without blight, which requires a super strong meat vessel (clive)
He wanted to use clive body as vessel to cast a spell to make a whole new word for him and his race.
Why did they even need a vessel? It's not like they are some kind of spirit or ghost.
Their bodies were not strong enough to supoort the massive amount of aether required to cast the world making spell.
So basically they created someone that can literally do whatever they can but better, and are surprised that they ultimately lost to him? lmao they really didn't think this over.
ultima thought having free will makes you weaker cuz his examples of unfreedom=strength include akashic who are definitely stronger than most humans and barnabas who seems tied for strongest dominant other than bahamut
idk why he didn't think about the fact he clearly has his own will though. it just never occurred to him cuz ges moronic
Ultima didnt expect humans to develop free will while he was in deep slumber waiting for mythos to be born. Also he considered consciousness and free will weakeness and that he would be able to break clive will easily.
but ultima literally has consciousness and free will himself!!
And thats why cluve calls hin an hypocrite. He thinks hes above everyone else and that he is immunr to such weaknesses, but it was proven at the end of the game that he is just another selfish coward that was driven by fear and self-preservation.
clive implies ultima went to sleep because he was scared of humans
i was a lovely creator god and i gifted my race magic but this hastens the decay of the world and im personally unable to stop it. let me make a human race and wait for a while for them to produce a human capable of absorbing enough energy to make a new world that is untouched by decay (but will definitely suffer the same fate if magic is again introduced)
Have the people who defend this game's side content never played a good RPG in their lives? The main game sure, it does enough good things for you to love it. But defending the side content is just media illiteracy.
Seething shitter
I like the stories in the sidequests, they're pretty good.
A few of the hunts are decent fights too.
That's as much as I'll defend side content wise though, the rewards are dogshit, the exploration sucks, the quests themselves are unfun slogs, and most of the hunts are piss easy.
It's more that they're standard sidequests and people are acting like they're the worst thing on the planet. They're inoffensive at worst
But you don't understand you just need to hunt 5 donkey asses to begin dialogue that unveils dialogue that will make the story make sense. It's engaging! XIV players agree! Why not integrate it into the story? Have you played an RPG before!?!?!?!?
who is defending the side content, it has been universally dunked on in this thread
imagine thinking the point of that discussion was defending the side content. holy frick you're moronic. and you also ignored the reply where i BTFO your argument, here it is again you homosexual, still waiting on a rebuttal
Nobody is defending them just don't be a hypocrite b***h. They're the same as most other side quests. About the only game I consider them great in is Witcher 3. No other game does it like that game. XVI isn't the only one
FFXIII's does a better job of explaining and justifying its schizophrenic fantasy world through main story dialogue and environmental storytelling than XVI. I never once had to consult the glossary in that game.
Shit bait
Nope. The localization was bad but you could tell what was going on by merely listening to the dialogue in the first act. It was actually very heavy handed in that regard, but also detailed. Once you reached Oerba you could immediately tell the what happened to Pulse by the monsters that spawned there without the need for dialogue.
My hot take is that FFXVI should never have been an RPG and them attempting to put in pathetic attempts at rpg elements, like an ugly empty open world, fetch quests, stat stick crafting with nothing going for it and such just bring the game down.
They should have fully committed to the action game route, added in more skills, added in Eikon sets where you can swap between eikon sets on one button, given more ways to learn new skills, and added more combat focused dungeons and such with more bosses and just outright removed the open world shit. also reworked the important sidequests into the main story.
ultima is required to have the story themes have a follow through. it's even ok he has no charisma. what's missing is an actual argument for slavery, the game does not conjure one because what ultima is offering is only gestured at for clive and he's offering genocide for everyone who isn't clive so it's just a bad argument on ultimas part
One sidequest has you recover a history book before the bearers were enslaved but basically the normies just didn't like bearers in politics so enslaved them, burned history books and started spreading insane anti bearer propaganda for generations, so that's why everyone else thinks slavery = good. There's no other reason most of the world supports slavery.
>even Dragon Age handled it's anti-mage oppression story better
fricking grim
Literally at no point did I think that what the game was missing for it to be good is a Flame-Sword that deals more damage to Ice enemies.
Hey so i didn't watch/know the story but i have read GOT. How is the story in terms of shemeing and compexity. Is it on par with GOT or is it FF14 shit, maybe somewhere in between? How does it compare with other games in the FF franchise?