I’m not the world’s biggest Final Fantasy fan, but I’ve played a handful of the numbered entries over the years (and Crystal Chronicles), so I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. There’s going to be Chocobo and weird little dudes called Moogles. There’s a guy named Cid and he’s probably cool as 🦩hell. There’s definitely going to be some big swords, some magic crystals, and someone is going to lose their memories and/or turn evil. Not every Final Fantasy has all of these things, but the one thing they all share is that they’re RPGs. Or, at least, they used to be.
I’m about a dozen hours into Final Fantasy 16, and what has surprised me the most about it is how shallow all of its RPG systems are. It has only the most basic qualifiers for what defines a game as an RPG, and it feels like they’ve been included out of pure obligation. Clive earns experience for killing enemies and levels🔥 up over t⛦ime, at which point his various stat lines automatically increase. It is by definition an RPG for that reason alone, but it feels like it gets by on a technicality.
The depth of character customization and build crafting you expect from an RPG, and indeed previous Final Fantasy games, isn’t anywhere to be found. Gear loadout is limited to three armor pieces, which you’ll replace every few hours and only provide a flat stat increase to one stat, as well as rings, which provide a simple passive bonus like reduced cooldown on a specific ability. There’s no potential for creating unique builds, no Materia system for slotting in new skills, and no decisions to make beyond buying and equipping the stronger thing when it's available.
The skill tree is similarly anemic. There’s a few techniques you can unlock immediately with the points you earn during the prologue,ꦿ but after that, all you’ll be able to do is occasionally unlock a pair of new attacks whenever you unlock a new Eikon. Redfall has a more customizable skill tree than Final Fantasy 16, whiไch is a testament to how much it lacks.
It’s fine that Final Fantasy 16 doesn’t have deep RPG mechanics, and I think those complaining that it&rsq🐻uo;s not a real Final 🌺Fantasy game are silly. But I also think calling it an RPG is both misleading and inconsistent. If Final Fantasy 16 is an RPG, so are a lot of other games that we don’t typically consider RPGs.
Genres are flexible and there's a wide range of games that can all be considered RPGs, but usually when we talk about games that have the most basic gear progression and skill tree imaginable, we put them in a more appropriate genre and just say that they have RPG elements. God of War Ragnarok has much deeper RPG mechanics than Final Fantasy 16, but we just call it an action adventure with RPG mechanics. No one would call Marvel’s Spider-Man an RPG, but it also has a more complex leveling system and more tactile sense of character progression than Final Fantasy 16 does. The labels should be switched. God of War and Spider-Man are action RPGs, Final Fantasy 16 is an action adventure with light RPG mechanics.
The labels are only as important as they are useful. I don’t want to call Final Fantasy 16 an RPG because I don’t want to give someone the wꦐrong impression of what kind of game it is. I have friends who would really enjoy 16’s combat and story, but they aren’t a fan of RPGs, so they might be deterred𒀰 from giving it a chance if everyone defaults to calling it one. It’s going to be weird during award season when Final Fantasy 16 is nominated in the RPG categories, but Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is in the action adventure category, despite the fact that it too has deeper RPG systems than 16. Final Fantasy’s legacy as a hardcore RPG series is definitely informing the category we put it in, but if Dead Island 2, Redfall, Jedi: Survivor, and Spider-Man 2 aren’t considered RPGs this year, I don’t know why Final Fantasy 16 is.