IGN FF16 review is almost like a critique of FF14's own issues

Knowing XIV all the dungeons are straight lines.

Watching people play ff16 and complain about the story was kind of funny, because some of their complaints about its presentation mirrored my own complaints about how ff14's story is presented. I don't want to put a lot of stock into it until I actually play it myself (I don't own a ps5) but one streamer was basically griping about the postgame side story cutscenes feeling like stiff uneventful snoozefests that railroaded him into a fetch quest, and all I could think was "yeah that's basically 90% of post-ARR." It's just funny how outside of the 14 community, most people are totally willing to acknowledge that a story told at a glacial pace, with barely animated (lemme /handover nothing to you real quick) largely unvoiced cardboard-looking cutscenes, just doesn't grab them. Post-ARR is referred to as a sort of filter for a reason, but it's not because there's something inherently wrong with the people who quit. It's because everything wrong with the game's story presentation is on full display in post-arr, for over 80 quests. When you go to other games and ask people about it, they'll be frank about it. When players encountered similar design choices in 16, they outright skipped it or sped through it. But oh, god forbid you mention it here. People will call you a troll account for daring to suggest that more of the cutscenes should be voiced, or for asking why every other cutscene in EW has the same clenched-fist animation, etc. etc.

Maybe SE will allocate more funds and manpower to CBU3 so they can make all of their cutscenes hildibrand-tier going forward. Oh, who am I kidding. They'll just squeeze 14 harder while pulling what little staff we have left to fund and create Forespoken's undeserved sequel.

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Knowing XIV all the dungeons are straight lines.

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A complaint I heard often was regarding the linearity of the game in general. Which yeah, given what we've seen in 14 and the staff overlap involved (and just the nature of modern gaming tbh), doesn't surprise me at all. It also made me laugh when I learned that to unlock a harder difficulty you apparently must beat the whole game on normiemode first, which is apparently piss easy. Since lots of people lose any desire to play a story-focused game twice, this has left many ff16 players feeling dissatisfied with the game's difficulty. Though the details are slightly different, ff14 fans have long complained about the way normal mode is like babby tier while savage mode is highly coordinated, with not a whole lot of room in between. It's a different kind of complaint, but at its core you have a system that's sort of shoehorned a lot of people into a mode that's way easier than what they'd like. It's funny when you stand back and look at how lots of the issues we have with ff14 are reflected in 16. But, hey. At least in 16's case, the gameplay seems solid and fans of it won't have to worry about the devteam jumping in to suddenly turn their favorite playstyle into a one button rotation haha can you imagine haha just imagine haha

It's not just the filler sidequests that are glacier-paced in FF16. It's really everything. The UX is one of the worst I've experienced in an AAA for a while now. You can barely skip anything. Talk to Tomes, wait for a year for him to get his XP. Killed a boss, wait for a year for the loot screen to process. Cutscene ended? Wait for a year for the camera to slowly pan back to Clive.

And of course the unskippable loot screens that pop up as you kill a boss and completely kill the climax. Who designed this lmao. Even Skyrim modders make better UI than this

The game doesn't flow. The first sidequest is horrible not just because of the story but because accepting the quest, finishing the quest, sending the soup to people, all these are buried under an extraordinary amount of waiting in the UI screens. The actual quest takes like 4 seconds but the UI takes up 2 mins while the cutscenes repeat the glaringly obvious lore details that anyone with two brain cells would already be able to infer from the plot.

This game's UI/UX is like Stone Age design but then again it's Japan where they still fax each other and a look at MogStation UI tells you all you need to know. Anyone who thinks the UX is good hasn't played a top-tier modern Western single player game.

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Originally Posted by thevanguard

It's not just the filler sidequests that are glacier-paced in FF16. It's really everything. The UX is one of the worst I've experienced in an AAA for a while now. You can barely skip anything. Talk to Tomes, wait for a year for him to get his XP. Killed a boss, wait for a year for the loot screen to process. Cutscene ended? Wait for a year for the camera to slowly pan back to Clive.

And of course the unskippable loot screens that pop up as you kill a boss and completely kill the climax. Who designed this lmao. Even Skyrim modders make better UI than this

The game doesn't flow. The first sidequest is horrible not just because of the story but because accepting the quest, finishing the quest, sending the soup to people, all these are buried under an extraordinary amount of waiting in the UI screens. The actual quest takes like 4 seconds but the UI takes up 2 mins while the cutscenes repeat the glaringly obvious lore details that anyone with two brain cells would already be able to infer from the plot.

This game's UI/UX is like Stone Age design but then again it's Japan where they still fax each other and a look at MogStation UI tells you all you need to know. Anyone who thinks the UX is good hasn't played a top-tier modern Western single player game.

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I dont blame the UI design (although why is there a key item hand over screen is beyond me). Its mostly the pacing of dialogue and cutscenes being so slow. Like it feels it takes a good minute for characters to say their peace and its one of my main gripes with voice acting where I read the text faster than the voice actors reading and emoting their lines.

This is why I enjoy older games where you can read and proceed through the cutscenes at your own pace without having to consciously wait for the game to catch up with you

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Originally Posted by TheDecay

https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-16-review

"RPG elements feel a little underdeveloped"
"Status ailments are basically completely absent"
"there’s no real system of elemental strengths or weaknesses very little in the realm of buffs and debuffs"
"loot seems like an afterthought"
"I never once felt incentivized to explore either the corners of the linear main levels, or the more open fields of the interconnected overworlds."

Much like modern FF14, FF16 dazzles and bedazzles, but it is all style, no substance. Much like modern FF14, FF16 uses its story to cover up its uninteresting RPG systems.

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It is pointless IGN appeal mostly towards western ways, and FF games is Japanese or Eastern... it is different cultures.

Instead of watching game of thrones before making XVI they should have played some old final fantasies.

Just saw a comment on reddit that sums things up quite well. I've edited it down a bit.

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Originally Posted by FarSurvey3285

Let's be honest about 16s extreme departures from all FF games. The full sprint into this type of combat, not having traditional party members with distinct jobs like blm, thf, or whm opposed to Clive being everything rolled into one, unprecedented shift into disproportionately long and frequent cutscenes, all weapons not having a single special effect and being indistinguishable from each other, not having a single mini game to switch things up with, not having status effects to use against enemies, not having the mix of fantasy and technology many fans under 40 are used to, flying airships, poor rewards for optional content compared to previous games, comically easy difficulty for 95% of encounters, nearly 0 incentive to explore, and a million other things. If the summons looked different people wouldn't even guess it was meant to be a FF game.

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I wish the director and producer would see comments like those and feel some regret about how they mishandled the series legacy. How was this supposed to regain the trust of fans after XV made a big departure of its own.

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Originally Posted by TheDecay

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Anything from IGN, GamesRadar+, and Kotaku should be taken with a shot of gunpowder and salt. The game was made in a more western-type approach, rather than the traditional Japanese rpg (being more action oriented). Games change as series progress in time. Theyre not hanging it back like most boomer culture seems to think (back in my day blah blah blah). A lot of journalists praised the changes to Tomb Raider, as well as the Assassins creed series from a more open world leveling grind (rather than how they were prioritized through AC 1- IV without it). FF VIIR is getting that same praise in change (though it seems to be more biased of FF7 fans, which is nothing new for all the FF7 simps out there). Suddenly FF XV and XVI change the way the games are played going forward, and everyone complains? Starting to think that even RPG fans have no clue about what they want anymore. Do you want a more traditional rpg style? Go play Final Fantasy 1-6? It's available in a whole pack? Or fallout and skyrim? Persona was great, but Atlus just doesnt change at all. Is it a good thing? Eh, depends on who you ask. But what do yall actually want??

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Originally Posted by Elkanah

Anything from IGN, GamesRadar+, and Kotaku should be taken with a shot of gunpowder and salt. The game was made in a more western-type approach, rather than the traditional Japanese rpg (being more action oriented). Games change as series progress in time. Theyre not hanging it back like most boomer culture seems to think (back in my day blah blah blah). A lot of journalists praised the changes to Tomb Raider, as well as the Assassins creed series from a more open world leveling grind (rather than how they were prioritized through AC 1- IV without it). FF VIIR is getting that same praise in change (though it seems to be more biased of FF7 fans, which is nothing new for all the FF7 simps out there). Suddenly FF XV and XVI change the way the games are played going forward, and everyone complains? Starting to think that even RPG fans have no clue about what they want anymore. Do you want a more traditional rpg style? Go play Final Fantasy 1-6? It's available in a whole pack? Or fallout and skyrim? Persona was great, but Atlus just doesnt change at all. Is it a good thing? Eh, depends on who you ask. But what do yall actually want??

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FF16 tries to be a modern Western action game a la God of War (PS4/5), but doesn't match up. It's really that simple. They pissed off the traditional JRPG fans, sure, but it isn't as good as the games it's trying to emulate either. It's not that deep.

It does, however, seem to cater very nicely to RPG fans who suck at action games but are also open to trying out an action game for the first time. Such a demographic is so small idk why they went for this market. But it says something about CBU3 sadly. They chased the hardcore FF fan who hate MMOs with a passion for FF14 and the effect is clear as day. And they did the same for FF16 once again.

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Originally Posted by thevanguard

FF16 tries to be a modern Western action game a la God of War (PS4/5), but doesn't match up. It's really that simple. They pissed off the traditional JRPG fans, sure, but it isn't as good as the games it's trying to emulate either. It's not that deep.

It does, however, seem to cater very nicely to RPG fans who suck at action games but are also open to trying out an action game for the first time. Such a demographic is so small idk why they went for this market. But it says something about CBU3 sadly. They chased the hardcore FF fan who hate MMOs with a passion for FF14 and the effect is clear as day. And they did the same for FF16 once again.

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Another thing also is that a majority of their releases that either fell flat or just failed to meet expectations were titles geared towards western audiences either as new IP's or entries into acquired popular western franchises they had at the time and recently sold off. It's honestly not a very strong track record for making games catering to western gamers. The titles catering more to Japanese gamers were the ones that got them attention in the west to begin with.

As for who FF14 is catering to. Honestly I'd say it caters more to people that do not play RPGs with things like EX trials, Savage, Ultimate added as an afterthought to say the game does have a hardcore gaming community. The game had nearly every RPG element stripped from it at ARR launch and has steadily had more removed as the game progressed and basically had visual novel mode added later with the option to select very easy on solo MSQ trials. Our relic for this expansion so far has basically just been using the tomestone type the game hands out like candy on halloween.