There is an ingrained expectation that RPGs need to be incredibly long. Games of this ilk need enough time to develop characters, build worܫlds, establish mechanics, and get us to a 𝔍point where we care about the stories they intend to tell. Without this, the genre fails.
However, there is a fine line between a well-paced adventure that lasts dozens of hours and a bloated nightmare of needless busywork. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16, in spite of its many boons, falls somewhere in the middle, and I wish it was much shorter. Not because it offers too much to do or is filled with superfluous content, but because it just takes too long getting to the meat of things. Its full p🌌otential isn’t realised until we’re nearing the end.
I previously wrote about the glacial pace of the game’s first aཧct, and the need to persevere through the slow beginnings. This part of the game is all about building up the world and mechanical complexity, afraid we’re going to be overwhelmed. The trouble is that this unwillingness to give us a greater range of tools and environments to play with means combat and exploration runs the risk of becoming stagnant very quickly.
Phoenix, Garuda, and Ifrit are the only Eikon abilities Clive has access to until he defeats Titan, which is an essential set of moves when it comes to mixing together dif🐈ferent Eikon offerings and pulling off effective combos. Without it, you’ll spend almost ten hours ꦏusing the same strategies against the same enemies over and over again to the point of tedium. I actively avoided certain monsters because I knew how spongey they tended to be, but I wouldn’t have if combat offered a smidge more variety.
Final Fantasy 16 opens up once you’ve unlocked a larger v﷽ersion of the Hideaway along with huge swathes of land to explore across Valisthea. Side quests unlock at a steady clip while you progress the main story, and optional monster hunts provide a worthy distraction away from saving the realm📖. All of this should have arrived much sooner, and I fail to see why it couldn’t have.
I🃏 can’t mention certain roadblocks due to spoilers, but Final Fantasy 16 would have benefited from blowing our minds with its inevitable scope, instead of hiding behind a relatively linear path of dungeons and battles.
Not to mention the early combat paints Clive as a barely capable warrior, when in reality we know he’s ༺able to wield gods at his fingertips at any moment. But herꦰe I am beating up a pack of crabs for the thousandth time with wind powers that are meaningless without Titan. When it all clicks into place, it’s phenomenal; I just wish this greatness didn’t take so long to show up.
Side quests feel similarly awkward, and frequently task Clive with walking around a large base of operations with no fast travel or spr𓃲int option. I grew fonder of the small snippets of conversation I caught during each visit, but exploring the same places over and over again grew irritating soon enough. Some streamlining would’ve kept these moments feeling vibrant, rather than a chore.
Many of these quests areꦅ also introduced at a strange cadence. 🅠At times, you’ll only have three to chip away at slowly, but after big story missions it isn’t uncommon to have five or more thrown out at once. There is a need to scoop them all up right away because they add incredible context to the main narrative, however many of the tasks contained within these quests boil down to fast traveling to somewhere, talking to someone, and killing a thing. The stories underpinning them excel, but once again it feels like some sort of improvement could have been made to the pacing.
Final Fantasy 16’s highs are better than anything else the series has ever seen, so it hurts me to admit its lows are the worst of tedious open world design and slovenly pacing which doesn’t gel in the slightest with everything else the game stands for. While you’ll eventually unearth one of the finest RPGs in recent memory after crawling through the opening act, a similar inconsistency still applies to combat and exploration which never really goes away. I’m excited to try Final Fantasy Mode on NG+ to see exactly what it adds, and how earlier parts of the game fair now I’ve got a muc♍h larger selection of abilities at꧅ my disposal.
