Final Fantasy XVI

The Set Pieces Are Not In Question

The Eikon fights are the most spectacular thing this series has ever put on a screen, and it is not close. They change genre mid-encounter. They are scored like a finale and shot like one. There are four or five moments here that I will still be describing to people in ten years, and the production discipline required to land them at that scale is genuinely rare.

The front half around them is strong too — a political drama with real weight, adult performances, and a willingness to sit in a scene and let people talk.

Then You Do A Side Quest

And the whole thing deflates. The optional content is structured like an MMO that wandered into the wrong building: go here, talk to this person, kill six of that, come back. For long stretches of the middle, that is the connective tissue between the spectacle, and it is doing the work of thirty hours.

It built the best boss fights in the franchise and then made you walk to them through a to-do list.

The RPG stripped out underneath is the deeper problem. Gear is a number that goes up with no decisions attached. There is no party to build, no roles to balance, no reason to think about anything except which cooldown is available. Every system that made this series a series has been reduced to a difficulty slider you cannot see. The zones are corridors dressed as fields, wide enough to look open and empty enough to prove they are not.

By the back half the pacing gives out entirely, and the gap between the best scene and the average minute is the widest I have ever felt in a Final Fantasy.

Sixty-Eight Hours

I finished it, which should count for something, and I would not undo a single one of the fights. But an action game this confident should not need this much filler, and a Final Fantasy this expensive should not have this little game in it.

It sucks loudly. It also contains the best twenty minutes of the last five years. Both things are true, and only one of them is sixty-eight hours long.