I've played about four hours of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16, although 'played' is a generous interpretation for what I did with that time. I've fought a few things - all gigantic things, to boot - but mostly I have watched. I have watched and watched and watched and listened and never enjoyed. I love narrative games usually, but Final Fantasy 16 is not a narrative game simply because it is loaded with exposition. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Fi♓nal Fantasy 16 wants to be an RPG or an action game, or a combination of both, but at times it feels like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it barely wants to be a video game 🧸at alꦏl.
The opening exchanges are full of meaty cutscenes that are all gristle. If there's a subtle subtext to these scenes that will reveal itself in time, that gristle will taste like sour grapes to me (I think the food metaphors are coming from the highly obvious banquet scenes), but I can't imagine they will. Each piece of dialogue is drawn out, delivered in overly jovial fashion, trying to pull us into a non-existent joke. It's all surface level, with any twists exceedingly obvious. It wants us to sit back and be amazed, but it fails to amaze us.
Final Fantasy 16 is open about being inspired by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game of Thrones, but it seems to possess a glib understanding of George RR Martin's work. Game of Thrones was about power imbalance, societal inequality, and the dangers of unchecked cruelty and ambition. Chaos, after all, is a ladder. Final Fantasy 16, at least in the first four hours, has only blood and dinner parties. Game of Thrones deliberately usurped and conformed to expectations of women, the unknown power of the underclass, the mystique of rule, and the power of words. Final Fantasy 16 has barely any women, barely any underclass, no real examination of its rulers, and the less said about the words the better. This is as much 'inspired' by Game of Thrones as those old memes of Ned Stark are.
Eventually it leans on a crutch o🐲f gameplay, but does so reluctantly. Playing as Joshua feels forced, and then the Eikon battle in the sky is too long and too cinematic - much like the Star Wars bike ch🃏ase earlier this year, the stakes dissolve into nothing when it is so clearly a scripted event that resents the player pushing buttons. The tutorial combat with Clive against the goblins is the most we get let off the leash, and that fight stops every other swing to teach you the rules.
I know it gets better, I've heard everybody say it. Maybe across the next four or 14 or 40 hours something will click and I will 'get' it. That still doesn't feel like an excuse for what Final Fantasy 16 makes us sit through. This is not a masterful work of complex genius where all of the pieces slowly line up into something magnificent later on. This is a drawn out exercise in self-indulgence that we shouldn't have had to sit through. I'm sure the gameplay ahead of me is sprawling and epic. I know Final Fantasy 16 reviewed strongly and is seen as a key evolution for the series. But if this is to be the blueprint, it needs to get over itself.
A slow burn is fine. Some games, either deliberately to build up atmosphere or as a result of feeling its way through a new structure, take a while to get going. In some cases, this slow start makes it easier to absorb the world and benefits the whole experience. Final Fantasy 16 is not a slow burn. It's just slow. It is arrogant enough to believe the title on the box will keep you engaged as it forces you to sit back on the sofa and watch a school play interpretation of a HBO show. Unfortunately, it's probably correct.