Recent reviews by BlazePh

Man, where do I even begin.....

I'll start off by saying I am a huge FF fan, having played and enjoyed most of the mainline games. When I first heard CBU3 was gonna be working on the next FF game I was very excited as, despite not having played it myself, I've heard nothing but good things about XIV. I went into this game expecting to really like it, and was disheartened when it turned out to be a huge disappointment for so many reasons, not the least of which being the piss poor performance even on high-end hardware. Many people will try to chalk up my dislike for this game as me simply not liking newer FF games, but I will point out that in addition to being a huge fan of the classics, I actually enjoyed XIII and XV enough to play through both multiple times. XVI may be the only mainline FF game that I truly dislike.

I'll start with the combat. It is very DMC-esque (albeit much simpler overall) which is fine for me because I love that kind of combat. However it gets very old incredibly fast as throughout most of the game you're basically fighting the same 5 or 6 enemy types over and over with just minor variations (a huge missed opportunity considering FF's vast catalog of monsters to pick from). The only real variety comes from the occasional miniboss and the Eikon fights, though even those get pretty same-y until much later in the game. The Eikon fights get a lot of praise for being a spectacle to look at, but from a gameplay perspective they are incredibly basic. The majority of them start off with just the regular combat (except now you're big) before devolving into incredibly basic QTEs where you press one of two possible buttons and then win. Overall, with the sole exception of the Rising Tide DLC and a few of the S-rank hunts, the combat was incredibly easy and rarely posed any kind of challenge. There are no status inflictions, nor is there any kind of type weakness/resistance affinity. You also only ever get one type of weapon and throughout the game you just swap it out for a stronger version of the same weapon. It mostly just comes down to spamming the same one or two combos while waiting for your bigger attacks to cooldown. I'm not inherently against action-oriented combat (quite the opposite, in fact), but at least XV had some basic level of strategy with magic/weapon type affinities, statuses, and a larger variety of enemies.

The exploration in this game is an absolute joke. The game is broken into essentially 4 main explorable areas that are mostly just open fields with a bunch of enemies. The only area I found even remotely interesting to explore was Dhalmekia because at least it had a few sections with cris-crossing paths. There are only a couple towns you can explore and they are all small and mostly uninteresting. The major cities in the game are only visited as part of linear main quest sequences where you basically just walk down corridors between fight areas, and you can never revisit them to truly explore them. The "dungeons" (if you can call them that) are the same story, just linear corridors that lead you from fight to fight. There are no branching paths or puzzles to solve. The most you get is occasionally there might be some side hallway that just has a chest at the end with worthless loot.

Most of the side quests are completely monotonous. A small few of them do an okay job at expanding on the game's lore or the background of a character, but the vast majority of them are simple fetch/kill quests where you just go to a place, maybe kill some monsters, and then press X in front of some people. Sadly this is also the case for a good number of the main quests as well. Many simply boil down to standing in front of a person and pressing X to initiate the next cutscene. You are never presented with any kind of dialogue choices nor do you need to do any thinking. Just sit back and watch as Clive does all the talking for you. The game also has a tendency to spring new side quests on you at the worst possible times, and it gets worse as the game goes on. Towards the end of the game just as you're about to set off to save the world, the game springs over 10 new side quests on you that are mostly meaningless.

On the subject of the story and lore, many people seem to really like it but honestly I found most of the story beats to be completely predictable and mostly boring. To me it felt like just a stereotypical "kill god" over-the-top "chosen one" anime plot with all the tropes therein, with the only difference being instead of playing as a generic angsty teenager you play as a generic angsty adult. There is so much wasted potential with the characters. Jill for example could have been so much better, but instead throughout most of the game she just follows you around and agrees with whatever you say. The game's background lore has a fair bit of complexity to it, but unfortunately most of it just info-dumped to you in the form of wiki entries that you can read, and none of the built-up political intrigue really ends up amounting to anything in the end. The character dialogue is absolutely abysmal. The vast majority of what people say is just basic nothing-burger filler content, either making some obvious remark or confirming something you already knew. The whole "plight of the Bearers" subplot, in addition to being a very weak and on-the-nose allegory for slavery, really makes no sense at all. Like they have abilities that exceed that of regular humans and somehow are just content with letting themselves be treated like dirt for centuries? Much of the main plot feels like someone just fed a cliffnotes of Game of Thrones into ChatGPT and sprinkled in occasional FF references. Many story beats feel like they were included simply for the sake of it. Countless times throughout the game drama will get stirred up only for it to be immediately resolved in the same or next cutscene. Sometimes characters will straight up just do things that directly contradicts what they said earlier. For example there is one sidequest where a character asks you to talk to someone who is *literally* 5 steps away, with the excuse being that they need to stay where they are to take care of a sickly man. When you accept the quest they immediately proceed to leave the sickly man by himself and go wait for you somewhere else. This is not helped by the game's super stiff and generally lackluster character animations. The animations overall feel like something an indie studio would put out, not AAA world-renowned studio Square Enix. I hope you like watching Clive shift his body and extend his arm off-camera to imply he's handing someone an item, because you'll be seeing that a LOT. It seems the vast majority of this game's budget was poured entirely into the Eikon fights.

Aside from the awful fetch quests and a few combat challenges, there is absolutely nothing in the way of side content in this game. No optional dungeons to explore, not even so much as a fishing minigame. The closest thing you get is wasting your money to buy a round of drinks for the hideaway, and all you get for doing that is the screen fading black while a generic "crowd-cheering-5.mp3" sound effect plays. But hey, if you do that FOUR times then you'll get an achievement!

I dunno....I could go on and on but I'm reaching the text limit. There were a couple positive points about the game. The OST has some really good tracks in it, such as (importantly) the main battle theme which is an absolute banger (and very reminiscent of VIII's battle theme). Some of the set pieces are very beautiful and some even got a verbal "Wow!" out of me. And of course the Eikon cutscenes are quite epic to watch. But much of that is just window dressing on an overall lackluster gameplay experience. If you compare this to a game like Breath of the Wild (different genres, I know) the difference in attention to detail becomes very apparent, and I think it's fair to hold SE to a similar standard as Nintendo.

The Pokemon Company is just upset that Palworld is doing it better.

Click start.
Music begins playing.
Already out of tissues.

10/10