#ffxvi shadowbringers | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pocketbelt · 11 months

Text

okay here we go fuck it, FFXVI criticism/complaint/whinge post

spoilers are a given, play XVI or decide you don't care, but they will at least be in the plot section at the end. There will also be mild spoilers for FFXIV: Heavensward and light mention of later parts of XIV as well (Stormblood and Shadowbringers, no Endwalker).

this isn't about being fair or even-handed it's just knives in its back the whole way down; the game is at best okay but I grow more annoyed and angry about it the more I think about it, and I personally think it is just shit now

this post is giant, you have been warned, I could not bring myself to condense it more as I felt I would be losing relevant points

Combat

XVI's marketing made a big deal of the combat director being Ryota Suzuki, 20-year Capcom vet whose last jobs at Capcom were game designer of Devil May Cry V and programmer on Monster Hunter World. His joining the team was championed, interviews focused a lot on the action game aspect, he's said it's his "personal masterpiece" in interviews and XVI's official sites in all languages call it Final Fantasy's "first fully-fledged action RPG" to step around XV's corpse.

The game emulates DMC heavily in style and gameplay, the comparison is desired by the devs.

And this was the stupidest thing they could have done.

Clive's core moveset is extremely lacking. He has a single 1-2-3-4 Square button combo that does not change from hour 1 to hour 45, no alternate combo routes, no ways to link seamlessly into and out of other moves, not a goddamn thing. Outside of this Clive has projectiles that are extremely weak and functionally useless (its charge upgrade does not change this), a chargeable sword attack that just leads to the same 2-3-4 hit string, a DMC Stinger-esque lunge that's obsoleted frame 1 by your default Eikon and an aerial drop attack. That's it, that's his entire basic non-cooldown moveset for the entire fucking game.

The projectile is worth honing in on: ranged attacks in Devil May Cry serve to keep your Style ranking ticking over for a few seconds while you keep your distance, and even then have extra utility and damage capability besides. Dante, for instance, in V has his dual pistols, dual shotguns and dual rocket launchers which all serve obviously different purposes and behave differently. On top of this he has his Gunslinger Stance, which changes their default attacks and gives each a special move, while also providing access to stance-exclusive gun attacks like Rainstorm, a useful midair attack with a very precise form of movement that makes it useful for sticking on bosses evasively while still attacking. In Final Fantasy XVI Clive has fucking nothing but a single piss-weak shot that does almost no damage or stagger, ever, and can be charged to do tiny damage or stagger. It has no further utilities, ever, even as it changes from its default fireball to match the element of your equipped Eikon (ice, lightning, etc). It isn't useful for anything, as flying enemies are better dealt with by using Phoenix's dash to teleport to them or Garuda's grab to yank them to you.

That's XVI in a nutshell: an extremely constrained Devil May Cry whose devs missed the most crucial and critical parts of what makes Devil May Cry work: it's not just that you have lots of moves with interlocking traits and mechanics to make a complex combat system, it's that you have so many options you can do whatever the fuck you like with. DMC's core strength is player expression: if you want to use one weapon then by god you can and can still get SSS ranks, you just have to not use the same one move in succession over and over (and don't get hit), it's just easier the more of the kit you use. XVI has no interest in player expression, you are very limited in tools and by design you are locked down.

The big stuff comes in with Clive's Eikons, of which he can equip a max of 3 who have 2 slots to put moves into. You have just 6 special moves that do the big damage and special effects and also they're all on cooldowns. The idea is to use your cooldowns carefully so they pop back up when the enemy enters stagger: in practice you can just open every fight with them and then just go back to beating on the enemy until they come back up, and if stagger happens it happens, the cooldowns will largely line up anyway. The spectacle wears away as the hours pile on and the standard enemies never get engaging. Your ability to play with moves, link them up and create mad chains is harshly limited by the 6 move cap and the fact that they all just go away for 20-50 seconds. Few of the Eikon attacks can link into each other very well, either.

Eikonic Feats clearly align with Dante's Stance special moves, as they're mapped to Circle and some are clearly just Dante's own (Phoenix is Trickster's dash and Titan is Royal Guard). The problem is you only have 3 at once and some feel like they should just be core mechanics on tap, such as Phoenix's dash or Garuda's grab, which has special animations when used to floor bosses at the 50% "mini-stagger" threshold. A combination of that, the length of time between Eikons (they're plot-tied) and the order they come in means many players will be extremely hard-pressed to even consider leaving the Phoenix/Garuda/Titan combo in particular, given how instrumental, useful and powerful their moves are. Phoenix is further a problem because it also has Ifrit's attacks without needing to "master" them to let them be equipped to other Eikons, and Ifrit's attacks are batshit good. It's not even that later Eikonic feats are bad (Megaflare is cool and has uses, Shiva's works on bosses which is delightful and Odin's just makes your standard moveset cooler so it's a flat upgrade), it's that the game's pacing and the implementation of these as limited capacity hot-swappable powers and not always-on core features discourage swapping out what works to explore and experiment, even with easy free respeccing. If you weren't locked to so few Eikons and so few move slots, getting new ones would be a delight instead of going "oh, okay" and then not bothering with their moves because most of them don't stack to Titan's anyway. I myself fucking loved Odin's and was delighted Shiva's worked on bosses, as it was a rare instance of bosses reacting to something you could do outside of the pre-ordained 50% stagger Garuda grab.

The nail in the coffin is enemy design: standard enemies such as regular knights, normal orcs, wolves and things around that size are fairly passive fodder to be blasted into paste in a single Eikon move from around the 1/3rd point of the game. Small enemies that fly die in single 1-2-3-4 strings from around the same point as long as you keep up on your equipped sword. Large enemies armour through anything and everything you do, can't be launched, their only "special" state outside stagger is the Garuda grab window, they're just big sandbags to pile Eikon moves into and dodge around. They use the FFXIV boss design philosophy most of the time, where they plainly ignore what you do and just broadcast AOEs or heavily telegraphed strikes, only occasionally moving to a new spot to do a new mechanic (which is always an AOE). They are just completely un-engaging. I think often of how Kingdom Hearts' bosses often can be made to flinch, or put into a state that's vulnerable to being launched or just hitstunned into the dirt. XVI needed that kind of thing so badly.

Un-engaging is the term for the whole thing; on Action-Focused (the higher of the two default difficulties), standard enemies don't have the HP for you to try and do things like super-long aerial combos. They turn to dust if breathed on so you can't style on shit, and the focus on cooldowns means you can only style on bosses for very brief moments before going back to dodging and mashing Square. The higher difficulties unlocked after the end of the (45 hour) game would alleviate that somewhat but they wouldn't fix any of the other problems here. I want to stress it's not that it's easy (though it is easy), it's that it's dull. It doesn't engage you. It doesn't present anything to push you to explore its limited systems, and the limits it imposes seem extremely arbitrary (if not simply existing because of performance concerns, as performance hangs by a thread as is). Plenty of easy games rank among the greats of every generation, and they do so because they're still very engaging to play and interact with. XVI isn't, at all.

And this game is at minimum twice as long as a Devil May Cry. I can't fathom the logic behind massively reducing the options and tools DMC has and then going for a much longer game. None of it really works well together, at all.

RPG Mechanics

In a slide at some convention or other presentation, YoshiP included questions from users, including some slightly more aggressively worded ones for humour. One of these was something along the lines of "Why aren't there RPG mechanics? Isn't this just an action game now?", to which they said they existed and to keep an eye out.

As it turns out, the question was more on point than expected.

XVI's RPG mechanics barely exist. Stats go up in tiny uniform amounts each level-up, and the difference is not perceptible. Enemies are already made of wet paper at level parity; that they pre-emptively crumble to dust at a slight level lead doesn't mean anything. It at least takes a significant level lead for bosses or large enemies to start melting. The bulk of your stats come from equipment, then, however...

...equipment is clearly an afterthought by the devs. For the first few hours, you have a tiny array of options of different swords, belts and bracers to craft and reinforce, and then after some hours you get Clive's dad's gear and it outclasses everything before it by leagues, and will outclass everything for the next 10 hours or so, whereupon superior alternatives are found in the odd chest in dungeon levels, to do you for the next pile of hours. By that point, the Blacksmith's Blues quests start appearing, which by the second quest unlock the recipes for the best belt and bracer in the game, and they are readily achievable around that time. Do that, and now for the entire second half of the game you never need to change equipment, ever. Weapons are worse off; the storyline gives you Eikon-related materials after each Eikon fight, which upgrade a specific sword that starts outclassing everything by the time you get Ramuh. It is topped maybe once and only very shortly, and then the Blacksmith's Blues quests come into things; they hand you the Ragnarok for free, which is only topped by the endgame Eikon sword and the best sword in the game...whose recipe comes with the Ragnarok. Outside of these, you can just ignore the swords for basically the entire game; there are only like 7 alternatives throughout the game and they get topped by the Eikon sword most of the time because this entire thing is an afterthought.

No weapons or armour have special traits or unique attributes that make them more suitable for a given area or sequence, or for dealing with specific kinds of foe. You don't ever need anything other than the thing with the highest number, like this is an ancient NES/SNES/PC-98 RPG, and there are no factors that might outweigh pure damage.

What secures this as an afterthought and not just a super simple system is that the game is constantly, constantly shitting buckets of crafting materials at you. There's only like 6 kinds of non-unique or "elite" crafting material, which are dispensed as rewards from quests, fights, chests and items lying around. By the end of the game I had around 2000 each, because you need only small handfuls for the very rare times you do craft something that needs them, and the game is always shitting them out. They have no other purpose in a normal playthrough; I've heard you can reinforce your gear to higher levels on NG+ using the materials, but that just means they're completely fucking pointless if you aren't compelled to replay the game. And they're used as the main reward for basically everything, and have no other fucking use.

Similarly, the economy's fucked: potions and other restoratives are piss-cheap and the game buries you in money and items that are sold for big amounts of money. I never sold one of those, crafted all the best gear and still had 250,000+ gil in my pocket by the ending. There's nothing to use it on other than unlocking songs to play in the home base, which are all mega-expensive (20k-50k+) to justify it, but that's clearly a sloppy "fix" for gil numbers that weren't considered. Like the crafting material, there is no other use for it; this shit cries out for investing money into the home base and other side activities, but the game has none of those.

This may as well go in this section too: the game is packed with sidequests and very few of these are worthwhile. The ones that give meaningful upgrades are marked with +s like in XIV; outside of them, some give good AP (for moves), good gil and very, very rarely give something like orichalcum for the best equipment. The majority give you fuck all, and thus are dependent on being engaging to do or telling an engaging little tale...and the majority fail at this too. The sidequests are generally MMO-tier stuff, unsurprisingly given the devs' pedigree as, well, MMO developers; you just go from point A to B to C hitting X at things until it ends, sometimes you go to B and fight stuff, etc. I've seen people say that XVI's sidequests have compelling character moments, and this is true for a handful, mostly the ones kept to the very end of the game at the end of a variety of sidequest chains. The majority tell you things you already know, things that aren't interesting and also don't matter, all three of these or not even these. Here's the thing: world lore only matters if your world is interesting, and XVI's world is not. It's a bargain bin Ivalice (the setting of FFXII and Tactics) with none of the truly fantastical designs or truly stunning world design, filtered through the Game of Thrones TV show. I hope you like hearing that slaves have it horrifically and are treated terribly because that's what most of the sidequests will be about for the first half of the game, and it's also what the plot is about for nearly the first half of the game (and is otherwise a running theme of the game), and oh my god the XVI writers want to be sure you absolutely know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Similarly, character moments only matter for, well, characters, and the game just isn't able to sell everyone in your home base as a fun or compelling character. The moment with Otto when you find a note from Cid is genuinely heartwrenching and well done, and it's pretty much the only one that genuinely lands...and it should've been in the main story, not an incidental sidequest. Especially with how dry the main story is most of the time you're in the home base.

Also, Final Fantasy traditionally was never big on sidequests so much as side stories, optional areas and side activities. Pretty much starting with XI is when it began really dabbling in them more and more, starting with XII having some, XIII-2 having a lot (XIII-1 had nothing because it was stripped to the bone to finish it), XIII-3 being almost completely sidequests by design, XIV being an MMO and XV having a lot. The thing is, some of these still had actual minigames and side activities; XIII-2 had its casino games and chocobo racing, same for XIV, XV had a very fun fishing minigame with attached sidequests, etc. Going further back, the PS1 FFs had card games and multiple minigames throughout, chocobo breeding and racing and treasure hunting, etc. XVI has none of this, absolutely zero, and it's a shame. Sure, XII also purely had sidequests and hunts, but XII's hunts and elite hunts were way more interesting and involved than 99% of XVI's; they often had special spawn conditions, special gimmicks and mechanics, could often be brutal and even had fucking surprise twists. There's no fun surprises in XVI's hunts, even the familiar recurring faces are at their most boring and incidental here. XVI's Carrot and Red Chocobo don't even begin to stack to XII's.

Put shortly, XVI's RPG aspect is so fucking thin it's more an action game with a very faint RPG layer strapped on. With how simplified and restrained the action side is, you'd hope it was to work with the RPG side in tandem, but no, there's basically nothing here.

Presentation

The game's really pretty and really high fidelity until it moves. Outside of combat, in Performance Mode, the world will often just swim and devolve into a blurry mess of over-aggressive motion blur and really bad temporal anti-aliasing if you or the camera move too fast or too suddenly. It struggles to hold 30FPS when just walking around environments, and I suspect performance is why Clive's auto-sprint is turned off when in towns (and your Chocobo is forbidden from entering towns) which also makes time spent running around towns for main or sidequests absolutely agonising after a little while. The game is so pretty, but I find myself wondering if it's actually worth it; is this fidelity worth the game melting and the console revving when I try to actually move in it? No, obviously.

I will go all RETVRN here but like, the fixed camera-angles and 3D models on pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 FFs allowed to be visual powerhouses in their day, and VIII and especially IX still hold the fuck up now. We seem to be slowly realising the strengths of these perspectives and designs again, as Nintendo rolls out a surprisingly immaculate looking Super Mario RPG remake and Square keeps rolling out incredible remasters and remakes of their older titles. Can you imagine what a big budget FFXVII could do with the strengths of that style, where you only need to render what can face the camera and nothing else? We need to go back.

In combat on Performance Mode the game mostly holds 60 pretty cleanly, sometimes staggering a little when shit gets busy, especially in the Eikon fights where the designs are complicated and particles heavy. It blatantly jumps between 30 and 60 for cutscenes and special animated sequences a lot in these fights, and I again wonder if we wouldn't be better off with lower fidelity for smoother shows.

Still, it is pretty and they at least knew to focus on making combat perform slickly, so hey.

While I'm here, the OST is a massive downer. It's mostly generic orchestral shite and very little stands out. This is especially saddening because the composer of at least most of it is Masayoshi Soken, who is a fucking eclectic powerhouse of range and skill in his work on XIV. YoshiP's drive for a grounded dark fantasy styled like Game of Thrones strangles so much of what this game could be; the Titan Eikon battle is the one time Soken's let off the leash and it's the highlight track of the game. This is also a baffling choice when you consider the gameplay is inspired by Devil May Cry, a series rife with tracks in the same flavour as shit like this! You had the perfect team for a DMC style OST and you wasted it!

Plot/Writing

okay here we fucking go

To establish, the game's core theme is that an unequal societies built upon the exploitation of some of their people will not stand, and that if we aren't united and equal we are damned to die, likely to a problem of mankind's own making such as the gradual destruction of the environment (which is what the Blight in game is, it's the world rotting from overuse of magic). This is what all the focus on slavery early on is done for, it's about how deranged these societies are for the subjugation and exploitation of others and the myriad ways both explicit and subtle they created justifications in their cultures for it (the slaves, called Bearers, are designated slaves by religious doctrine in the Sanbrequois Empire, for example). The main counterpoint to this is Cid's anarchist commune, which is your home base and eventually what Clive comes to lead...and does very little with, truthfully. Like Clive is never very concerned with the running of the place, a lot of it explicitly is handled by Otto for you (and he did the same for Cid, apparently).

The problem is this theme isn't really backed by gameplay at all, and it's here that I have to start slagging off the writers; the main scenario writer was also main scenario writer on FFXIV's Heavensward expansion, which also really, really struggled with this, but it is a failing of the gameplay end of the team as well. Namely, in this game about how united we stand and divided we fall, Clive does everything by himself successfully and unerringly. He beats every Eikon he fights 1v1 with one sole exception, and when the final boss reveals an Eikon form it wins a 3v1 matchup (where 1 of the 3 is the Eikon Ifrit couldn't beat alone!) only to lose to a solo but empowered Clive right after. From a gameplay perspective it's a fault that your party members just never matter ever, sure, even when they are present, but from the story perspective I have no idea why you'd deliberately do things like set up the 3v1 as a loss that leads to a Clive solo victory when your entire fucking theme is people working together for the betterment of all. Like, that's the moment where all the prayers of the people at the home base explicitly fly into Clive or your remaining Eikon allies descend from on high to skewer the boss for Clive to get the winning counterhit in.

The main way the game tries to show "people uniting together" is people giving up their Eikon powers willingly to Clive so he personally gets stronger, but like, that's a shit way of doing it. When Jill gives Shiva to Clive, she falls out of the plot immediately afterward; Clive has to tag-team with Joshua to defeat Bahamut, but at the final fight, Joshua surrenders Phoenix to Clive so Clive can beat the final boss alone instead of just doing the goddamn fucking tag-team again.

On that note, talking about Shiva naturally brings us to Jill. Jill is Clive's childhood friend, she's the Dominant of Shiva and the game's female lead. And she is probably the worst-handled female character in any Final Fantasy. Combined with the handling of two of the villains and the trends among women in this game in general, XVI might actually be the fucking worst about women in the series - yes, XV barely had women in it but the ones it did have weren't treated anywhere near this bad.

Alright, so, Jill starts the game being freed from Ironblood control by Clive after he realises who she is (they've been separated for years and he was sent to assassinate her). After she's back on her feet, she tags along with Clive as he journeys to Phoenix Gate, where his life went to shit, to see if he can discover who the mysterious second Fire Dominant that killed Phoenix was. In essence, Jill goes along with Clive for his revenge/self-discovery arc, and later, the opportunity to lay siege to the western Mothercrystal owned by the Ironblood Kingdom reveals itself. Jill pushes for it to be done, saying she has her own revenge to seek similar to Clive's, and her own sins to atone for like Clive's (all the people she killed as Shiva for the Ironbloods, as they threatened to kill enslaved women and children whenever she refused). Clive agrees, and has her back the way she had his.

It's a little scuffed but the arc in general is nice. Clive legitimately does mostly take a back seat to Jill for it (though Jill isn't playable as that would cost money they spent elsewhere). It fucks up a little in places: Jill struggles to freeze a spout of lava in a way no other Dominant struggles to use their powers, and a fire beast summoned by the overarching villain right as they reach the Mothercrystal's heart manages to wall and fend off Shiva. The explanation, ostensibly, is that Shiva is struggling because she's ice-elemental in a volcano but to be frank, later evidence tells us that Shiva is just the weakest Eikon outside of perhaps Garuda (whose Dominant is the only other female Dominant. Good job, lads). Ramuh may also eat shit, but Cid is old when he loses to semi-prime Benedikta and he eats shit to a mysterious force none have perceived before; when he's on point he's the only Eikon to floor Ifrit and survived an encounter with Bahamut in the past.

Outside of that blemish, the arc works, Jill kills the Ironblood pope herself and takes her revenge in doing so. In breaking the Mothercrystal, they also break the back of the Ironbloods' religion and thus their entire society, fucking them all royally and thus both having revenge and atoning partially for the crimes she committed for them.

From that point on, Jill does mostly nothing in half the scenes she's in, and her trajectory in the plot goes thus: captured by Hugo and almost executed to antagonise Clive, rescued, sits out from going to fight Hugo, sits out from fighting Bahamut, gets one-shot by semi-prime Barnabas, is kidnapped, is rescued, watches Clive get wrecked, fucks Clive, surrenders Shiva to Clive, and then she falls out of the plot almost entirely. She is kept out of the party after that point, only appearing to menace enemies with her rapier while Dion does all the real fighting as they buy time for Clive and Joshua, and then sits out the final battle along with everyone who isn't Clive, Joshua or Dion.

At no point do Ifrit and Shiva tag-team another Eikon. Shiva is explicitly shown to be able to hold her own against Titan in the opening/after the prologue (she fights him to a draw!) but doesn't take part at all in fighting him for real! Whenever Shiva does show up after the prologue, it's to be ineffectual or get defeated, every single fucking time! She is all but explicitly stated to be the weakest Eikon by leagues!

Lads! What the fuck were you doing!? That was the most obvious fucking set-up and you wasted it!

To say that Jill is wasted is an understatement. But the fact that the writers largely see her as a damsel for Clive to save or a vector for people to antagonise Clive through is fucking baffling for a series that has, historically, done really well by its female casts. Funnily enough FFXIV also struggled with female characters until Shadowbringers, almost like there's a pattern here.

Fumbling the ball is debatably the game's real big theme because it's doing it constantly. None of the villains are a hit for a variety of reasons, and it becomes really obvious that the Heavensward leads and parts of the XIV team went onto this after that came out because the strides XIV made in villain quality afterward feel extremely telling (yes Stormblood fumbled Yotsuyu hard and Fordola is 100% awful no matter how you see her, but Zenos was gold; then Shadowbringers has the series' best villain after that). A lot of them can be done quickfire:

Benedikta is an insecure failwoman that had some actually good character foundations for an arc about becoming secure and succeeding! She's dead within the first five hours and nothing further is done with her as a character in any way, significant potential cast to the four winds for no good reason other than "Game of Thrones has killing so we should kill". Heavensward had a character somewhat like this in Ysayle and it wasted her in similar fashion (FUNNILY ENOUGH YSAYLE ALSO TRANSFORMS INTO SHIVA WHY IS THIS A FUCKING PATTERN). Also her last moments as a person are breaking down right as a group of bandits begins to attempt to rape her. Great work, lads.

Hugo is seduced by Benedikta early on and believes she genuinely loved him, and is driven by unyielding rage when someone makes him believe Cid killed her (when it was actually Clive, which like, same difference after that point anyway). He has a good speech in the Rosarian throne room but otherwise isn't up to much and all semblance of character vanishes going into his fight, with no moment afterward.

The Sanbrequois Emperor is a generic emperor man who initially wars for access to unBlighted lands and then for control of resources, which while bastardly is just standard operation for an empire. His sign of greater evil is feckless disregard for treaties, which is explicitly driven by his wife's ambitions, which, christ, we'll get to in a bit. By himself he isn't up to much of anything at all.

Barnabas Tharmr is king of Waloed, the eastern smaller chunk of Valisthea, and Dominant of Odin. He fights Bahamut in a very early CG cutscene, then isn't in the game for about 35 hours. When he shows up, he gets built up as a Vergil-esque impossibly strong opponent who truly could only have been matched by Dion, Dominant of Bahamut, who you needed to partner up to defeat as Ifrit. He wrecks Clive in a really unconvincing cutscene where he just kicks him out of a blind rush and then one-shots him, is implied to oneshot Shiva without needing to become Odin (which is not a feat as Shiva can't do fucking anything after the prologue), and shortly later has a more even fight that ends with Clive and Jill fleeing from him. Then you fight him for real at a tower in the middle of Waloed and he's Odin for all of 2 minutes before Ifrit ganks him and the rest of the fight is mostly just fighting him in his "semi-primed" Devil Trigger state. The entire time he's back in the plot, he's a calm, collected cold type who just repeats the real villain's very limited spiel over and over, until halfway through his real boss fight where he randomly begins cackling and goes psycho, revealing an actual character trait...and it's just bargain bin scam-brand Zenos from XIV Stormblood. It's never suggested at being a thing anywhere before this.

There are three villains I have not discussed above, who are noteworthy for being three different kinds of more elaborately bad.

First and simplest: the entire Ironblood Kingdom. The Ironblood Kingdom is a small island nation off the west coast of Valisthea, whose army are fighting Dhalmekia (Titan's nation) in the game's opening before the flashback sequence to Clive's childhood. They are an explicitly barbaric and unbelievably violent people who wield the Dominant Shiva for conquest, forcing her to fight for them by threatening to kill innocents. They are the only people in the game who speak their own foreign language, they have an evil religion based around human sacrifice to their Mothercrystal, they raid Clive's homeland Rosaria before the imperials take it and kill all the men, kidnap all the women to use as slaves and Jill's discussion of this leaves the implication of "worse" (rape) in the air but doesn't confirm it. The Ironbloods are just flavourless Vikings with unfortunate connotations (why are the evil human-sacrificing ultraviolent cultists who kill men and kidnap women the only ones who speak a foreign language?), and after Jill's revenge arc they vanish from the game completely and never matter ever again. They get one mention - that their society collapses after the loss of the Mothercrystal, the centre of their religion - and that's it. Clive and Jill, now heads of an anarchist commune looking to rescue and take in slaves wherever it can, never even mention considering going to the Ironblood home island to save the Rosarian slave women. They're just left to their fate out there in the collapsing society of ultraviolent Vikings.

The Rosarian slave women Jill grew up with, lived with, was protected by, and met with again during the incursion into the Mothercrystal.

Just never mentioned again, left to their fates.

10/10.

The second is the real villain and final boss, Ultima. Ultima has an interesting appearance: a snow-white gaunt fleshy being with dark pits for eyes. He endlessly repeats the same few lines about free will being evil and how mankind's will is super weak and how it is reinforced by consciousness and links with other people to survive and etc etc. This is genuinely over 80% of his lines, the remaining few being "You cannot win because I am God" and him descending into coping and seething as Clive beats his ass in the final fight, which is also the only time he develops an actual character.

Ultima is a boneless version of the Ascians from FFXIV, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that he is very clearly hacked together from Heavensward-era lore bible/character notes on the Ascians at that point. The Ascians in XIV: A Realm Reborn (the base game) and Heavensward are all one-note masked robe-wearing villains, largely interchangeable as they rant about making the Darkness happen again and resurrecting their fell god Zodiark to restore Balance, and so on. The only exceptions are Lahabrea (who fucking loves being evil and is cackling all the time) and Elidibius, the lone white-robed Ascian and their leader, who is just the smug "I Know What You Do Not and that means we will win" sort of preening villain who doesn't do that much. None of the rest matter or have much in the way of character in either part of the game, and the Ascians are entirely absent from Stormblood until the patches leading to Shadowbringers start.

If you still don't believe me, consider this: Ultima is a member of an unbelievably advanced and magically powerful race of god-like beings who ended up creating humanity, with the goal of exploiting humanity and laying waste to the world to remake it for their own ends and restart their own long-lost civilisation. That's the Ascians from XIV to a tee. It's the same exact shit, only Ultima doesn't have a character, he just spouts blandly mean evil shit so meaningless platitudes can be spit back at him before he gets punched in the face.

This was the worst possible road to take. It's a bad road to have taken at any point, but in a post-Shadowbringers world this was the worst possible road to take. With its shuffling in staff and promotion of Natsuko Ishikawa, previously a writer for optional side content and famously XIV's excellent Dark Knight job quests, to lead writer, Shadowbringers saw the Ascians greatly expanded. The remaining Ascians, Elidibius and technically-a-newcomer Emet-Selch, are fucking fantastic characters in Shadowbringers: Elidibius is rescued from being a boring forgettable generic smug man into a genuinely tragic figure, and Emet-Selch is Final Fantasy's single best villain. Ishikawa had the giga-brain idea to look at the Ascians' situation, of perpetuating apocalypses for millennia to try and reform their destroyed world and resurrect their dead god, and thought to ask "What kind of a person does that? What drives you to actually stick to that plan? And what does that do to you as a person? How do you hold together? How do you keep going?".

And it was beautiful.

And then XVI stumbles in with this fucking cumstain who just keeps burbling "free will bad, being my slave is based actually, please stop having the free will" and trying to climb into Clive's skin.

Ultima has no character and has fucking nothing going on. He is at least an embodiment of the game's main theme but that's all he is, he's the ultimate slave-driver and exists for a former slave to spout platitudes he himself doesn't embody at and then be punched so that a truly equal society can be made...except we don't see that truly equal society, we just see one that no longer has magic and thus no longer has Bearers, who were enslaved for their magic, and is thus saved from the Blight too. Except in the Ironblood Kingdom where women were generally enslaved to make food and be sacrificed. Those slaves we just forgot. Hm.

Fumbles the ball constantly.

Anabella gets her own section

The third and final villain to discuss isn't the main villain or even an ally of the main villain, she's just a singular black hole of fucking awful writing and concerning attitudes. Anabella Rosfield is Clive and Joshua's mother, and at the start of the game she quickly establishes a seething hatred and deep-seated bigotry for Bearers simply because they are slaves and poor, and similar contempt for everyone not born rich. Her husband, Clive's dad and duke of Rosaria, talks about making life better for the Bearers and thus possibly has intentions of abolishing slavery in Rosaria, so Anabella concocts a scheme with the Sanbrequois Empire to perform a decapitation strike that kills him and the duchy's top military unit and leaders while letting her walk away with Joshua, her favoured son because he got made the Dominant of Phoenix. The way it plays out, Anabella assumes Joshua died and walks off to marry the Emperor and have a new child.

Over the course of the game, Anabella makes it clear that her goal is to simply be the birth-mother of the ruler of the world. She desires no power for herself: she isn't concocting a scheme to make herself regent in a system that favours men and male heirs as rulers exclusively, she isn't working the system to get herself in charge. When she gets her weird child with the Emperor into the seat, she does so by talking the Emperor into letting an eight year old onto the throne in name while the Emperor stays on as regent and continues doing his work. This is her end goal. She simply wishes for her son (and it is always a son, too) to rule and for that son to be known as legitimately hers. Having and birthing a ruler is the sum total of her existence and all she strives for, except for one thing: killing slaves.

Anabella's hatred for Bearers goes beyond even the other cartoonish examples you see throughout the early game. She straight up creates an honest-to-god Nazi death squad to go around carrying out pogroms on slaves in Rosaria specifically, not to spite Clive specifically because he escaped enslavement under the imperial military, just to kill slaves in Rosaria because she really fucking hates slaves. The Nazi death squad pillage one village, sack a church, raze a second village to the ground and raze a third to the ground before Clive finally deals with allegedly all of them as they prepared to raze another. They kill slaves in massive numbers and kill anyone who might object as well, all explicitly in the empress' name, simply because she hates slaves so much. Slaves never did anything to her, there is no hack shite like "a slave killed her dad for being a slaver" or something like Fordola in XIV Stormblood, nor does she have XIV Stormblood's justification for Yotsuyu (victim of childhood abuse and sex trafficking that the state permitted to exist openly - and still did nothing about even when new king Hien was faced with the specific sex trafficker who took her what the fuck guys); she just hates slaves because they have magic and are slaves. They are a subset of the poor and non-nobles, who she also hates blindly.

She's a deranged eugenicist-fascist birth-obsessed gender essentialist who holds these beliefs and thoughts simply because. Literally every line of hers is self-assured smug preening about screwing people over, slaves being killed or enacting her plans to get her child onto the throne so she can claim to be an emperor's mum. There is an extensive scene where she openly shit-talks, insults and smugly preens at the emperor's first son with his deceased first wife, openly gloating about screwing him out of the throne simply to gloat. She is not in league with Ultima, she does not act to serve his plans, she isn't even unknowingly corrupted by or influenced by Ultima to stir up discord to further his ends, she's just a pit of blind hatred towards everyone and everything who sexed her way to a position to give birth to someone who would take actual power, because actual power doesn't matter, birthing someone to take it does.

I have to wonder if the person who wrote her was freshly divorced. It may be uncouth to suggest it but I genuinely believe they have problems with women. I think it's deranged this got past editing and made it into the game as is.

Like, let's be clear here: Anabella is the single biggest individual source of suffering and death outside of Ultima, the literal slaver god. She:

Disowns Clive for not being a Phoenix Dominant

Orchestrates the assassination of her own husband once she has a Phoenix Dominant child and he starts suggesting they abolish slavery

Has all her husband's top men and staff killed, to a man where possible, leaving Rosaria entirely without leadership

Has her own handmaidens killed after preening to imperial soldiers in front of them, having given them the impression they would be spared to join her as she went to the Emperor

As Empress, is explicitly said to corrupt the Emperor, making him more callous and cruel. The suggestion to break the peace treaty with Twinside is from her influence

As Empress, creates a Nazi death squad themed after her dead first husband's band of loyal men, only coloured black and now called "the Black Shields". In her name openly and explicitly, they go out into Rosaria specifically alone to kill slaves, razing villages to the ground for having too many slaves and not turning over slaves, simply for the joy of killing slaves. Two villages are razed, a church sacked and a village pillaged with hundreds of people killed, and plans are made to continue doing this before the squad is allegedly completely defeated by Clive

As Empress, goes to Dhalmekia behind the Emperor's back to discuss terms with Hugo, telling him to lay siege to Rosaria's capital to set a trap for "Cid the Outlaw". This siege destroys ever more of Rosaria, continuing the trend of aggressively and viciously shitting on and destroying her prior family's legacy and history, and also sees myriad imperial soldiers and Rosarian civilians killed in swathes by Hugo's men

As Empress, having corrupted the Emperor into sieging and taking Twinside as the new imperial capital, following the destruction of Dhalmekia's crystal, she suggests the Emperor take up Dhalmekia in making a treaty to end the war (as Dhalmekia now struggles without its Mothercrystal) and then rout them as they try to leave. She suggests this so Sanbreque can take Dhalmekia and the outlying Free Cities and thus hold all of Valisthea outside Waloed.

She then intends to have the Emperor siege and take Waloed to complete the conquest of Valisthea for her 8 year old son to nominally rule over. This is a plan she has dedicated decades of her life to: making everyone bow to her child. Not her, not her family or lineage or name, just her son. Any of her sons, just needs to be one of hers.

Directly gloats about corrupting Dion's father to Dion, and directly gloats about screwing him out of the throne. Calls his "blood" "unclean", further insults, and sneers that he should just obey her weird child emperor. Thinks this will work without repercussion. This causes Dion to carry out an uprising with the intent to kill her, leading to the slaughter of the royal guard, and Ultima (who hollowed out her weird child to wear as a skinsuit a while ago) to provoke Dion into losing control and become a raging Bahamut, which then lays waste to Twinside, killing untold tens of thousands at minimum. This sequence also gets the Emperor killed.

Ultima doesn't even do anywhere near as much as she does when it comes to sowing discord. Depending on the population count of Waloed (which is more or less entirely converted to magic zombies by Barnabas choosing to serve Ultima blindly) versus the slaughtered slaves and people in Rosaria and Twinside, she may actually have caused more deaths total by her actions than Ultima does before the aetherfloods and Waloed's zombie invasion arrive. More, if we count war dead as technically hers too by her seducing the Emperor into ordering it.

I need to make it clearer: none of Anabella's actions or motivations make any actual sense. Nothing scarred her into needing to be validated or legitimised by having a child of hers placed into the highest seat of power in the world. She has no tragic backstory. She simply comes into being an unfathomably hate-filled pit directed at the weakest and most oppressed people in society, and all of her actions directly or indirectly lead to unfathomable numbers of deaths simply because she wants them dead or because she wants to be called an emperor's mum. She does not want personal power, she does not want to shape the world according to an ideology, she is not in league with the ancient slaver god or his thrall or anything like that, she just really hates slaves for no reason and is obsessed with birthing.

And they clearly aren't intended to make sense, because she's obviously meant simply to be hated. She exists to be hated, she's a completely ridiculous, embarrassingly cartoonish mess that acts as deranged as possible to make you hate her. One of her longest scenes is that one I keep referencing where she openly gloats at and insults Dion and laughs that her child is now emperor and he isn't, and she legitimately completely thought she could just do that and nothing would come of it.

Because she's shocked when Dion rocks up the next night, declares rebellion and attempts to kill her weird child. She is reduced to hysteric screaming when the Emperor takes the blow and dies, completely shaken and left a quivering wreck found by Clive later in the ruins of the imperial palace, legitimately unable to believe this could have happened or that anything could go wrong.

She's so specifically engineered to be spited and hated, to try and make you seethe at her, to be a singular symbol of all evil, and for what? This isn't the first time this team has done this sort of shit, though never to this scale; FFXIV will randomly produce minor villains and NPCs who are evil to the point of blatant stupidity, doing acts and getting minutes-long scenes of cackling and sneering and gloating about it at agonising length, and it's always dumb and bad when it happens there. At least on one occasion the gloater gets bisected gloriously, half the time they weakly eat shit or are simply rolled away.

Anabella is the worst fucking instance of it by far; as a villain type it just fucking sucks because it's not interesting to see, it has nothing interesting to say, it isn't fun or actually shocking or actually capable of disgusting you to your core, it's just weird and annoying in how much time they take up. Combining the weird birthmother angle shit to it, the fact that they're always sons and that she's the only woman in the upper ranks of these governments makes it all very pointed in a very discomforting way.

One might say it's realistic, there are genuinely people out there who are bigoted beyond belief and beyond all rationality, who will be bigoted even when it will actively work against them. Yes, that's true, they are tragically common and often shitting themselves on social media at the revelation that no-one likes them, not even their fellows. But so what? So what if they're realistic? It's not interesting, they aren't interesting, they're just shitty people. Being realistic doesn't automatically make them a good fit for a story, and often it makes them a bad fit.

Moreover, if you want to bring realism into this, let's do it: let's bring realism into Anabella's shit. That scene with Dion, realistically, is so fucking unbelievably stupid that she could not have conceivably survived to that point in the first place, she would have gotten herself killed stupidly long before it. Dion is:

First son of the Emperor

Leader of the Sanbrequois Dragoons, dragon-taming super knights and strongest and most powerful military division of a heavily militaristic society. This also makes him the highest ranked military leader in the country

Dominant of Bahamut, divine dragon in a society that worships and utilises and integrates dragons into itself. Bahamut is also undebatably the strongest of all Eikons. Sanbreque is a deeply religious society, Bahamut's Dominant is nigh-on a living god to them.

Suspecting that Anabella is an agent of, or possessed by, Ultima, who he knows is a real thing thanks to Joshua. He knows his father has become more violent and cruel lately, and has been since the marriage with Anabella. This makes Anabella a threat to all humanity, not just his family or Sanbreque, and thus she needs to be killed.

Is seeing Anabella tear his family apart before his eyes and taking away his birthright while laughing about it

Alone with her in the room at that point.

Is willing to kill her.

Is armed.

Dion has every single conceivable form of social and institutional legitimacy available in a medieval/early modern society shielding his actions. He could kill Anabella in the street and simply declare "Heathen" and walk away unfettered. He is also an extraordinarily powerful warrior himself before you even factor in "can transform into the most powerful god" - when he comes to the throne room to declare rebellion, no knight or cardinal/bishop there speaks up when the Emperor commands Dion's arrest. They don't budge. They either agree with him, or take his legitimacy over even the emperor's, or they simply refuse to fuck with him lest he kill them instantly.

When Dion orders the Dragoons to rebel and seize the palace, they do so without question. Not a man disobeys or turns away, they immediately set about slaying the royal and city guards, while evacuating and protecting civilians flawlessly. They take his assertion that Anabella is a traitor and usurper and that she and her 8-year-old son need to die without question and set about carrying it out.

Dion's word is basically divine law.

And Anabella, living in this society for over a decade if not near two, near the highest seat of power, regularly around bishops/cardinals/high priests and commanders, somehow believed that actively antagonising Dion as much as is entirely possible could not result in anything other than Dion going "okay" and just kneeling before her child. She somehow figured that Dion was not, in fact, the single most powerful man in this society (literally so, in a physical sense, too) despite living in it and seeing its workings from the inside for years.

Anabella is so stupid it's criminal. She's such a bad character it's unfathomable. The entire plot is actively warped by her presence and her list of sins is so deranged it undermines the fucking story because is this societal system that employs slavery actually this bad, or is it just this singular individual lunatic at the top ruining everything? She's the single worst character in any Final Fantasy, any one, ever. There is a weird seething, boiling disgust behind this character and I don't think it's unfair to say that someone wasn't right when writing her. Someone was freshly divorced or freshly seething about a woman for something, because I don't see how you go to these lengths and not be.

In fact, take what was said about Jill before, consider what they do with Benedikta, consider that no other female character is as prominent as these three. And then contemplate these facts:

The creative director and screenplay writer was also main scenario writer for XIV: Heavensward, where the main female character in the core cast, who also transforms into Shiva as her power-up state incidentally, steps to another primal as Shiva and gets fucking wrecked, and later sacrifices herself when there wasn't any real need to, dying as Shiva to a big airship.

One scenario writer was a scenario writer for Persona 5, which should speak for itself

One scenario writer was a game designer for Yokai Watch 3, a game so uninterested in its own female lead that not only is half her story completely irrelevant to main story, but postgame content actively denies you entry if you try to play as her for no actual reason. No plot reason, no character reason, she just can't do some things like a battle challenge tower simply because.

Another scenario writer was a story writer for Yokai Watch 3, as well.

And tell me that the writing staff of Final Fantasy XVI doesn't have problems with women.

There's other straggler issues I had, but nothing will top that. Now at the end of the post, actually, I remembered something and have nowhere else to put it. It's petty but I want to get it down somewhere.

After a point, you get a historian/lecturer at your home base called Vivian who tells you about the state of the world and the ongoing conflicts at different points throughout the story, and she is entirely useless every time. She gives you a very basic rundown of character backgrounds, she gives you a very basic rundown of recent history, and 95% of the time you already know what she tells you from previous scenes and the remaining 5% isn't of any use or interest, when it's even there. It's annoying in that it's pointless minutes of fluff and padding to a game that could do with better pacing and thus doesn't need it.

Like a lot of CBU3's work, it's following in the footsteps of an Ivalice game, specifically this time Final Fantasy XII (which is also a regular source of names, scenes, characters, plot elements, ideas and more for XIV as well). There are a scant few scenes in XII where you get an excerpt of the memoirs from a relatively minor NPC, the Marquis Ondore, and the first one of these comes in the game's opening, after its lengthy and gorgeous CG cutscenes. It sets the stage of the world and puts in more context for the things you saw in the cutscene, and establishes what the prologue sequence you're about to play is.

Compare the two for yourself: XVI's first Vivian scene (0:31 to 2:14, there's little bits of dialogue before and after with Clive if you want) and XII's opening excerpt with Ondore (7:04 to 9:14).

It's not just the performance, though I would argue Ondore's is miles and miles better, it's the presentation and all, really. XII's lead-in, its use of images, its fucking great music, the way it cuts it silent at the end to deliver its tantalising sting, it's not just exposition but a solid part of the opening narrative itself. Note how much faster paced Ondore's performance is, and how much easier it is to follow as a result. That sort of pacing would help a lot of XVI's dialogue and delivery, XII's English dub is very lively and theatrical and it really elevates it.

But really, I am petty about it; Ondore's opening excerpt is one of those scenes fucking embedded in my head, his delivery and cadence of his lines stuck in there. I love that scene, it's so good at establishing tone, context, flavour and leading in to the prologue it's nuts. I was excited to see XVI try the same, and was deflated when it didn't match up, and continually annoyed every time we had to go back to this random lady to be told things I already knew or even had just inferred.

And if you think I'm harping on it, just look at this bit where when asked "how do we enter Ash/Waloed", Vivian gives a 3 minute lecture only to end on "the beach you already went to literally right before this return to the home base". Tell me these scenes aren't just fucking filler.

Final Fantasy XVI should've been right up my alley. "Final Fantasy but Devil May Cry" crosses my favourite series with one of my other favourites, I should have been the target audience for this one. But holy good fuck, they fucked it in basically every area and I grow more negative on it the more I think about it.

At least now I can shit this out and get it off my mind.

#pocket-media-tag

6 notes · View notes