reincarnator07 posted...
The non MSQ stuff though is MMO quality, which makes sense given the team but that is
not
a compliment. The vast majority of the side quests suck outside of the final lot, at which point most players have stopped doing them.
Even the final batch was mostly still the same junk and weren't necessarily fun. And that batch also throws a ton of them at you at once, making it even more exhausting to even see pop up. But the exploration is pretty terrible too. Pretty much all the gameplay that isn't combat is just bad.
The far superior Final Fantasy difficulty is locked behind completion, along with a lot of RPG elements.
I was personally a victim of that. By the time I beat the game, I was
done
. No desire left in me to tackle a replay for higher difficulty at all. And base game difficulty was a snooze fest for anyone who actually plays action games. They really should have done the legwork to apply difficulty options.
Speaking of elements, they're absent from combat which can lead to said combat getting rather stale. While the action system is decent, it tries too hard to be DMC while not actually going far enough at the same time. When compared to FF7 Remake/Rebirth and their approach to integrating real time combat into FF, the difference is night and day.
It feels like it wanted to be DMC but was kneecapped. And considering what they wanted it to be, "decent" isn't good enough. They needed to either lean into the RPG more heavily a la Remakes, or they needed to cut the RPG elements entirely and let it be an action game. If it was pure action, they could have easily implemented difficulty options and trimmed the fat of bad MMO style side quests. I say this as someone who wants Final Fantasy to be menu RPG again: this would have been a better game as a pure, stage based action game.
Funnily enough, I played Forspoken earlier this year and it felt like the way it handled elemental kits was far better than XVI. It had its share of other problems with the combat, but having an arsenal of secondary abilities at my fingertips, quick switching, and tying your primary attack options into the elements was great. The Mastery system too I was particularly fond of, the mini tasks for a power up adding a lot of variety to how I approached combat.
I don't think the game is fundamentally flawed in the same way that 13 was, there is a good core here. What Squenix needs to do here is just refine the style rather than throw everything out. Also, they
really
need to let Soken off the leash with the music.
I'm less sure here. There's a lot that's good about XVI but I feel like all the places it really succeeds aren't in the gameplay. I don't know if a full scrap is in order but I feel like it needs a lot of work to get the gameplay to a good place.