Tried out the FFXVI demo. Thoughts in spoiler tag, starting with the TL;DR version......


.....Eh. Doesn't look like my kind of thing.

Graphics are nice enough. The art style is.....every medieval fantasy game on the market today. Aside from the chocobos, nothing really says Final Fantasy about it. The human faces are just realistic enough to start hitting the uncanny valley for me, and the sudden transitions between the pre-rendered cut scenes and the actual gameplay models are jarring. The eikons are impressive, but they're so detailed and busy that I had a hard time following what was going on sometimes. The puppy was cute, at least.

The story doesn't really draw me in either. Clive's pretty dull, the "evil empire betrays the peaceful neighbor kingdom" starting point isn't anything all that interesting, and about the only note about any of the characters that stuck out to me is that I swear the dragoon boss has Estinien's English voice actor. I know, it's less than two hours into a Final Fantasy game, I'm sure there'll be more to them later in the game, but nobody really had any particular charm or compelling points. Again, it just felt like every medieval fantasy on the market.

There isn't much to the combat in such a short demo, so I won't say much about it. Standard action-RPG early gameplay, reminded me of a Tales game. The fight between Phoenix and Ifrit Eikon of Fire felt like it could've been about a third of the length and had the same impact, if not more.

So, yeah, I'll wait for reviews, but as it stands now, I'm passing.