During the first few hours of Final Fantasy 16, you’re going to be extremely confused. That’s normal. FF16 introduces you to an entirely new world by thrusting you straight into the action. The openin🧸g act is a verifiable proper noun fiesta, with names and places thrown left and right so quickly you’d have to have a Master’s degree in Valisthean History just to make sense of it all (that’s the name of the realm, please keep up). Trying to understand the intricate politics of land disputes when you’re not even familiar with the nations themselves is daunting, and that’s before you even get into the whole ‘gods walk among us’ magicka ꦜof it all. You’re not just learning new names, you’re learning new words too.
Early on, the game does a couple of things to help you find your footing and learn your Dominants from your Dhalmekians. The first tool you learn about is Active Time Lore, a heavily-marketed feature that allows you to pause at any time, even during cutscenes, to learn more about the people and places in the story. It’s a bit like Prime Video’s X-Ray feature, except instead of reading an actor’s IMDb credits, you get to read about the Holy Empire of Sanbreque’s peace treaty with the Crystalline Dominion. Later, you’ll meet an old man named Harpocrates, a historian that keeps a glossary of important terms for you to peruse. Here you can find details on all the important people, places, and things organized into a searchable catalo▨g that even levels up and offers new information throughout the game as you progress.
Both of these tools are helpful, if somewhat lacking. Active Time Lore is a great reference, but it lacks the kind of context that would be helpful once you’re familiar with the basics. I often find myself accessing it whenever a specific character or event is referenced, hoping to learn more about the relationships and history of the world, but all you really get are bios for the characters that are physically in the scene, and short histories of the location you’re currently in. Afteജr the first few hours, Active Time Lore♋ is rarely helpful.
Harpocrates’ journal is a lot more comprehensive, but I find that it’s not organized well enough to really be useful. The search function is only good if you have a particular name in mind, obviously, and the categories aren’t specific enough to be helpful when I’m confused about something, but I don't really know what question to ask. At one point early on I just wanted to get a summary of the five major nations of Valisthea - a broad and pretty common request, I would imagine - but the only way to get that was to scroll through a giant list of places and click on the name of each country when/if I recognized them. It’s not a particularly explorable document, unless your preferred way to research is to just read an encyclopedia from end to end.
I had mostly resigned myself to being confused by some aspects and would hopefully pick things up better in a second playthrough, bu♐t꧑ a couple of mid-game additions completely changed the way I engaged with the story. If you’re somehow that wants to dive deep into the lore and understand every dynamic at play, the State of the World board is going to blow your freaking mind.
There’s two parts to the State of the World board, which becomes accessible after a certain pivotal story moment about 15 hours in (don’t worry, you can’t miss it༒). The first half is a character web that maps out all of the major and minor characters in the game, organizes them by home territory, and draws lines to show how each of them are connected. Here is where you can really get a sense of the relationships and dynamics between the factions and dive deeper into some of the secondary characters that you’ve seen, but may not remember. What’s really amazing about the character web is that you can scroll through FF16’s timeline and see how those characters and their relationships have changed throughout the course of the narrative. Much of FF16’s story started before the game🙈 and takes place during time gaps in the narrative, so this resource is crucial for understanding how all of the players are connected. I use it frequently to remind myself who everyone is and what they want. I would kill for a real-life version of this.
The second feature, the Situation Map, is even more impressive. It gives you an overview of the world and shows you the movements of every major character and army, with a description of their actions, at any given point on the timeline. You can scroll back and forth through the entire history of FF16, starting when Clive was a child, and track the movements and conflicts of every faction. Spending 20 minutes with the Situation Map gave me a deeper understan🧸ding of FF16’s plot than the precedin♍g 15 hours of cutscenes, and I’ve gone back to it frequently to fill in the gaps and clarify plot points as things continued to develop.
I don’t think most people will bother with this stuff. Ultimately FF16 isn’t that hard to follow if you’re only interested in the melodrama. There’s handsome good guys and hideous bad guys, and everything dies when you hit it hard enough. If you’re just here for the Kaiju I certainly don’t blame you - that stuff is great. But if you want the full Game of Thrones experience, if you want to get caught up in the political machinations and intrigue, then you’re going to be blown away by how useful the Situation Map is to that end. Final Fantasy 16 has the density of a novel and the spectacle of a film, but the interactive Situation Map is a resource that can only exist in a game. I hope that similarly story-driven games, which historically push their glossaries and codices into the margins, are emboldened by FF16 to bring the deep lore front and center. This level of interaction and approachability makes researching less laborious and more fun. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Considering how stale lore has become lately, Final Fantasy 16’s Situation Map is a m♐assive W for lore fiends lik🎉e me.