Full spoilers for the entirety of the game follows.
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
So, I beat the game and couldn't find any recent discussions about it here, so thought I'd make one. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the game (or on my thoughts). In no particular order:
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The combat system was very cool! I wasn't sure about it at first and I still admittedly miss controlling a party rather than an individual, but it sure is a fast paced and varied system. I switched my eikons up a few times, with the final set I found most useful being phoenix (ignition / flames of rebirth), bahamut (wicked wheel, gigaflare), and shiva (windup, diamond dust).
- I found that phoenix's "o" ability was the most useful most of the time but mostly used it for reaching flyers. I usually didn't otherwise find I had time for o abilities.
- I found that most normal enemies were extremely easy, so it was best to build largely around staggering + heavy hitting the toughest enemies.
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The ending was really sad. Though also a little confusing. It seems like Clive tried to heal Joshua, couldn't, and sacrificed himself to... I think completely destroy magic for good? Sounds like the blight would still be there, though presumably wouldn't progress anymore?
- I like that the game used the red star again. I felt so bad when Jill realized Clive was gone.
- TBH, "confusing" was kinda a recurring theme in the game for me. But at least some of that was surely intentional (Ultima's monologues).
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The game sure had a lot of really badass, dramatic fights! Ifrit really helped to make some fights feel massive in scope without having much "ludonarrative dissonance" (since early game, you couldn't control Ifrit and it was supposed to be extremely taxing to fully prime). The Titan and Bahamut fights are perhaps some of the most epic Final Fantasy battles I've ever done (and I've played almost all of them)!
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I thought it was a bit weird that the bulk of the game is based in a Fallen airship, yet you never actually restore the airship, even when you need to fly! When Origin rose, I was like "aha, time to finally restore the airship!", but nope. Felt like a tease.
- I also really wish the game had more lore on the Fallen. They're such a prominent centerpiece of many maps, and yet the game barely delves into them at all. I kept expecting they were saving it for some big bombshell later, but nope, nothing.
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One thing that confused me is that Ultima talked a lot about Clive needing to absorb the other Eikons, yet no Leviathan? I noticed early on that the game said there is one Eikon for each element and listed 8 elements, yet only 7 Eikons (plus Ifrit) were ever mentioned. "Leviathan the lost" even gets named dropped by Joshua and yet Ultima doesn't even seem to notice the missing Eikon. Wonder if they're saving this for DLC? Either way, it feels poorly executed considering how central Clive absorbing Eikons is to the plot.
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Oof, Waloed was depressing. I was so hyped to see Ash, after going so long without ever even seeing this whole 'nother continent. Only for it to be a graveyard of dead and Akashic.
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Fuck Annabella (Clive's mom). She was such a piece of shit. I kinda wonder if Ultima was influencing her from the start, or if it was only later? I suspect she betrayed Rosaria out of her own free will, considering how terribly she treats Clive from the start.
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The treatment of Bearers was sickening. At first I was noticing parallels to American chattel slavery, but it quickly became more of a Nazi Germany kinda thing. It was a great design choice to make Clive a "bearer" so that you'd experience the bigotry firsthand. I wanted to outright murder most NPCs I met because they were so horrible.
- It's especially sad when you later find out why Bearers are treated bad. They were originally freaking blessed and people in power were just jealous/afraid, so had to scapegoat Bearers.
- I also felt so bad for L'ubor. He was the centerpiece of his village and yet the people who loved him turned on him so fast the instant they learned he was a Bearer. And they acted like it was some big betrayal, as if they couldn't understand why a Bearer would want to not be a Bearer.
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The map design is very meh. The game is pretty, but aside from the mothercrystals and Fallen ruins, everything feels so grounded that it may as well be our world during medieval ages. I want a fantasy world that feels fantastic! And aesthetics aside, most maps are fairly linear. They often have some branches (many used only for specific side quests), but felt like they didn't give enough reasons to explore. The movable parts of the map feel narrow and restrictive.
- For whatever bizarre reason, you can often find larger enemies off the beaten path, but they're rarely worth the time. The XP/AP/gil they give is hilariously bad compared to just a pack of normal enemies that you might be able to beat in a single AoE spell.
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Early game side quests are terrible, but they get great later in the game. It's really weird. IDK why they made the early game quests so bad. It set me up to expect side quests to suck. And the game has a lot of side quests, so they probably could have trimmed a few to make the early game side quests suck less. In particular, the early game quests within the hideaway feel very forced and awkward.
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Ultima was a decent villain. Very creepy (those eyes!). I'm not entirely sure I understand where he and his "collective" came from, but am thinking from another planet, since his final form fights in a cosmic setting and Origin is described as a ship, but looks far more like a spaceship than anything else.
- Barnabas was also great. Super intimidating in ever scene. The battle you're supposed to lose was well executed, as you've seen a few of those "press the attack" moments by then, but it's the first one that can't be finished fast enough (I kinda wonder what happens if you cheated?).
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I liked the twist that the crystals and magic were bad for the environment. Kinda wonder why no academics or something at least noticed that before, though. Isn't the pattern of the blight's movement kinda obvious to its cause? Kinda feels like they missed an opportunity to draw analogies to climate change, where we know what's causing it and simply refuse to do anything about it.
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The contextual codex was a neat idea, but the execution felt lacking. It only seems to work for the main quest, despite the fact that side quests populate a huge number of codex entries. I also found that despite regularly checking it, I often would not see the new codex entries I expected to see (until I went to visit Harpocrates). New pages of existing entries were also written as if you'd only read the newest page, with lots of repetition for minimal (if any) new information. I love lore, so codexes are super appealing to me. It was sometimes disappointing for new entries to not actually say anything new.
- It generally didn't do a good enough job at explaining new things (e.g., at the very beginning of the game, characters are talking about how they're on a mission to kill a dominant and for so long I'm like "WTF is a dominant"). And it took a little while to understand the high level global politics because the game is slow to explain them.
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Damn, the game is long. Took me about 60 hours, doing basically everything except the cronoliths (I tried those a couple of times and gave up -- too hard and not fun to me).
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The game does fantastic at updating NPC dialogue. I noticed so many changes to dialogue throughout the events of the game, including side quests. Lots of games barely update dialogue and it's sad cause I want to know how characters are reacting to some big event.
- The hideaway really needed to be more compact. You spend soooo much time walking around to visit quest givers and hear updated dialogue.
- For whatever weird reason, some major NPC dialogue (shop keepers and such) isn't fully voiced. I don't get why. It felt incomplete. I mean, I'm glad that dialogue didn't get outright cut, but would have preferred it being fully voiced.
Overall, it was a very fulfilling and fun story driven game with action packed combat. I'd give it a 9/10 (though I am a Final Fantasy fangirl, so am biased).
I thought it was one of the worse games I've spent time on in the last few years. I'll repeat some of your points below for sure.
The pros for me were:
-Backdrops were gorgeous.
-Music was top-tier.
-Technically well-designed (I only run into 1-2 very minor bugs during my playthrough and had no performance issues).
The cons were basically everything else.
Story:
-The game story lacks cohesion. There are plot threads that get dropped randomly and never picked up again. Some examples here are: (a) the medicine girl is a recurring character that has no real purpose (really, anyone could've healed Dion at the end), (b) the Fallen are just kind of around but stop being developed after a certain point, (c) so much of the game is spent on the plight of Bearers yet that gets completely side-lined in the final act, (d) Leviathan is missing for some reason, (e) there is a lack of characterization for the Eikons considering how important they are to the game's premise...they just kind of exist and that's all you need to care about. These are just off the top of my head.
-There are other plot holes too. For example, when Jill is kidnapped Clive and Joshua just say "oh it's cool, we still feel Shiva so we know she's alive." If that's the case, why did Jill and Cid not feel the Phoenix the entire time Joshua was thought to be dead? The game also makes a big deal about how turning into Shiva is harming Jill's body and Cid is shown to be turning to stone because he primed Ramuh too many times. Yet when you see Jill naked, her body is totally pristine for some reason. Joshua spent years gathering info on Ultima yet has no further info to give once he joins up with Clive. Early-game Joshua also conveniently wears the same hooded outfit as Ultima for some reason that's never explained.
-Overall, the story relies on too many overdone anime tropes instead of going for something original. A lot of the plot can be guessed before it happened (e.g., Cid dying and the hideout being destroyed in that one mission were not shockers at all). Plot points like Barnabas being too powerful make no sense because Clive just goes and beats him the third time despite not really being that much more powerful (yes, he got access to Shiva but the game doesn't really communicate this being a big power level increase, certainly not to the point where he can completely turn the odds in his favor).
-The ending falls flat too. It's basically a rehash of the ending to Mass Effect 3.
-The characters are pretty badly written. Cid is retroactively made into a master inventor in the latter half of the game despite it never being mentioned before. Jill doesn't really do anything noteworthy either. Even the part where she is trying to prove herself, her only purpose ends up being making an ice arena for Clive to fight in. Any characterization doesn't come until side quests that are literally right before the last boss.
Game Systems:
-I struggle to think of any system in the game that actually worked well. Too much of it felt very half-baked.
-Side quests were almost all terrible and killed the pacing of the game. I recall one moment where Clive says "wow we really need to hurry" (I think this was to save Jill) right as the game opens up like 10 new side quests for Clive to complete. SqEnix already established that some quests are considered urgent quests where you aren't allowed to free roam, why wasn't this one? The same issue happens right before the last mission where the game dumps a bunch of side quests on you, sort of killing the momentum of the game. Now, granted, some of those endgame side quests were much better than the early game ones because they actually took the time to characterize the people Clive's been interacting with the entire game. I just can't help but feel that they needed to be spaced out better.
-Similarly to the above, being able to teleport to the hideout at almost any point really kills the immersion of story missions. Oh, you're running into the windstorm to fight Garuda? That's ok, take some time to teleport across the world to buy more potions.
-The maps themselves are pretty boring too. Sometimes quest objectives are 2 feet away from the quest start point. At some point, I ran through the desert map for like 30 seconds straight without encountering an enemy. The second part of Ash is just an empty field with no points of interest.
-Dungeons are almost all just straight hallways connected to giant rooms where you know the next batch of enemies will spawn. There is minimal opportunity for exploration.
-Stats don't matter. The game only has 4 stats: damage, stagger, defense, and HP. It's not clear how much of a practical upgrade a 225 damage weapon is over a 215 damage weapon in terms of killing speed so upgrades don't even seem that impactful.
-Because of the lack of stats, the gear doesn't matter because the stat upgrades they provide are so minor. There aren't a ton of options to the point that I crafted some gear from a quest fairly early on and didn't find an upgrade until like 10 hours later. Most of the accessories are pitifully weak (e.g., 10% damage to 1/6 of your skills that has a high cooldown).
-Related to the above, the loot also doesn't matter. Most loot is crafting materials but there is almost nothing to craft so they just end up sitting there. The rest of the loot is stuff like 10 gil when I'm sitting on 400k or potions when I'm at full stock + full HP. Very rarely do you actually find a piece of gear in the wild and when you do, chances are that you already crafted something stronger if you've been keeping up with your side quests.
-Party members don't matter. They don't do much damage, they don't have health bars to micromanage, they can't be equipped with gear, often times they don't even talk. I couldn't tell you how many times I forgot that Jill wasn't following me on a quest. I don't even know why you have the option to control Torgal because nothing he does feels impactful (for example, compare this to Astral Chain where your pet is an integral part of your combat). I'd rather they just let me add more items in the quick slots that Torgal takes up so that I don't have to pause the game to use a Stoneskin Potion.
-Trash mobs don't matter because you can just spam square to get through these fights without taking damage. Often times, I would just use the Phoenix ultimate skill and put down my controller while one-shotting the entire encounter. They give very little in terms of exp/skill points so you can just skip most of these. I ignored basically all open-world mobs and ended my playthrough at level 49 anyway.
-Elite/boss combat really boils down to spamming your Eikon abilities off cooldown because they do so much more damage than your auto attack combos (of which there are almost none). However, since these abilities have long cooldowns, you have very low lows between the high peaks while you wait for your abilities to come back. Most of these encounters play out the same way where you try to stagger the enemy as often as possible and then wail on them while they just sit there.
-Loadout diversity is poor too. Ramuh and Bahamut specials really don't feel like they belong in an action game, meaning that Phoenix/Garuda/Titan is the optimal combination until you are well into the endgame. The game is also very stingy with skill points and there is not much to upgrade so you can ignore these for most of the game. Mastering abilities doesn't matter when you don't really have any other Eikons to mix/match to. By the time you have enough skill points to experiment with mixing up skills, you're about 90-95% through the game. And at that point, you realize that most skills are just bad anyway so there's no point in using them.
-Speaking of skills, there's so much hidden info about them that makes it hard for players to actually make informed decisions. What does 3 star damage mean? What is the cooldown of skills? If I upgrade a skill to "increase the number of hits," how many more hits am I getting? How many did I get at the base level?
-Overall, the game was just way too easy too. I don't know why the hard mode is locked behind finishing the game once. Though to be honest, I thought it was such a slog that I probably wouldn't have finished the game if I had to endure it on a harder difficulty. I think the combat needs a lot more depth to be engaging enough, no matter the difficulty.
Anyway, it's a competent game, just very lazily put together and poorly thought out. Not sure if their development was rushed or what.
It's still better than FF15 though...
All fantastic observations that I agree with (though I did find most of these issues didn't keep me from having fun).
I totally felt this, too. You'd often get this utterly miniscule stat increase. Like, around the end of the game, you have over 2000 HP and your two pieces of "armour" that you get to pick would give a mere double digit amount of extra HP points. I assumed at first I must be misunderstanding because it makes no difference at all.
And the accessories... Oof, so bad. Why the heck are so many a miniscule change to a single skill? Why are the devs afraid of accessories letting you specialize? I never even bothered to use a single eikon related accessory as a result and they're like 90% of them.
Yeah, same thing with exploration. All those glowing blue items feel disappointing. "Yay, another 3 bloody hides", of which I get a dozen from beating a group of trash mobs. And for some bizarre reason, you'll also randomly find single digit amounts of gil. Ignoring that there's nothing worth buying, why single digit? You probably can buy a single potion from all the gil you'll find when exploring.
I think they badly needed to give us more armour slots. It feels weird that your "armour" is just a belt and bracelet. You can't customize the visible armour at all, either (I personally didn't care for how it looked and also thought it was a bit immersion breaking how much your clothing stands out).
I wasn't bothered by that personally. After all, it's entirely optional and does ensure you can stock up on items if you really need to (not that it was ever really necessary -- the game even refill potions if you die).
Lol I thought that was weird too. The game was very clear from the start that Mid was the master inventor, but as soon as Mid started having issues, suddenly we're told that Cid is the one who actually designed much of the mythril engine? And he conveniently made the Deus ex machina that we needed to make things work? Rather jarring. Felt like they wanted to have Mid show more affection towards her dad and weren't able to come up with some better reason.
I kept wondering what was up with her, too. I mean, she's even in Vivian's interactions chart despite being such a minor and irrelevant character. I wonder if she was cut content? Leviathan maybe?
For what it's worth, Clive getting rid of magic means no more bearers. Not sure how that would go for existing bearers (given how they're normally treated, I worry many would just be killed once they no longer can perform magic), but at least there'll be no new ones to suffer the same fate?
I'd like to think that the triunity thing would have pushed for freeing bearers once things stabilize a little, too.
One other thing that was pretty mind-boggling to me re: accessories was the ones that increase healing. I had a green one from the early game that increased potion healing by 40%. I later realized that it only applied to the "potion" item and not all potions...because I got a purple item that increased the high potion healing by 25%. So (1) that was not clear at all and further goes to show how little thought went toward game clarity and (2) if you did the math, you actually get more total healing from running the green one over the purple. The only time it's worth it to use the higher level purple accessory is if you're already using the other one (i.e., use both at the same time). I really don't think anyone on the dev team did the math on this.
Also, one of the endgame legendary-tier accessories in the game literally increases all damage you deal by 5%. That's beyond boring. It might have been nice as an early-game drop but it's literally the best-in-slot endgame items.
Good point re: deus ex...there happens to be a note in a child's doll that solves all your problems. I forgot about that but I think it was probably one of the single worst plot devices I've seen in recent years.
There are definitely ways the game could have made fun gear. For example, gear that makes a Phoenix skill do more damage after you use a Garuda skill. Stuff that helps you synergize your Eikon choices better.
As much as Stranger of Paradise gets memed, it would have been really amazing to see a similar gear/job system in FF16.
lol, I had the exact same reaction when I got that potion accessory. I never actually used either accessory, but when I got the second one, I was like "are you kidding me?". But lol, I never did the math and it's crazy that the green one is actually better (I guess you could use both, but out of all the accessories, I don't think those are worth 2 slots).
The 5% damage boost item was so disappointing to me, too. 5% boosts make sense if we're stacking boost after boost after boost. But you only have 3 accessory slots and you always want the beserker ring equipped no matter what, because it's hands down the best non-cheat accessory in the game. I personally also never removed the ring of timely assistance, because I found controlling Torgal to be too annoying. I accidentally wasted sooooo many potions before I decided "fuck this, I'm just gonna use the accessory". If they made using an item require holding the d pad for even a half second, it would have made a world of difference I think. I just accidentally switched to potion mode so many times trying to control Torgal. Anyway, point is, I basically only had one accessory slot and never felt like any of my choices for it felt very impactful.
I would have loved to see some accessories that change combat in significant ways, especially the basic melee combo, which feels far too dull. Or for a really basic thing they could have done, they could have simply made the many existing green accessories actually high impact. e.g., nobody is gonna use an accessory that increases lunge damage by a measly 5% (like, what the heck devs?), but, IDK, a hefty 5x multiplier on extreme lunge damage and then it might be enough to make it worth it. IDK if 5x is necessarily the right number, but some number such that there's suddenly a very compelling to start trying to use all the more tricky techniques.
Similarly, I barely used the basic magic or charge magic. It didn't do remotely enough damage. Accessories could have made that better. Heck, there even was a notable accessory that interested me, the channeler's whispers, which claimed it would automatically charge spells. But it felt too good to be true, so I searched it and it sounded like it would still require holding down triangle (??), so I never bothered trying it.
I've... actually never heard of that. Is it good? Huh, seems it's already on my Steam wishlist, so I must have noticed it before but forgot about it entirely.