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[LakeOf9]

I thought I loved this game when I started it but the more I play it the less I like it

Combat is great and the bosses are amazing, but everything else is terrible. The fact that 80% of the game is MMO side quest caliber fetch questing would be bad enough but I’d be able to put up with it if it at least continued to do what the game is supposed to be good at, which is the storytelling stuff. But holy shit, the production quality of these quests is so bad. Like I just did these quests back to back

Spoiler: mid game story quests

I had to hunt down a bunch of stuff for Mid so she could build her airship, which was already really annoying, but then I had to help Goetz find his lost pass

And these quests are so bad! They don’t even have proper cutscenes or VA, it’s just canned animations!

The actual quest design is bad too. It’s always “talk to this person, go to this place, talk to this person, go to this place, combat encounter”. There’s no variation. It’s all very fetch questy and when the story side of things becomes bad, then there’s nothing left to make up for it since the quests themselves are so bad

Like, I get the concept of having down time in a story, I don’t mind it if it’s done well. I love persona 5 and red dead redemption 2, both of those games are pretty much just down time. But you have to do it well and FF16 doesn’t. And it just comes off as a badly paced mess that I am losing interest in playing as more time goes on. People criticized Ragnarok’s slow sections and I get that, I agree with the criticism but at least they were well produced to help convey the character moments they wanted to show (the character moments sucked, but that’s a problem of concept not execution). Here it’s literally a mid budget ps2 era game with how some of these MAIN STORY QUESTS are.

What a disappointment this game is

 

[mdkirby]

Not been able to judge yet…I’m sure it’s great and I’ll have a lot of fun with it, but it’s not instantly gripped me yet and it released at same time as rogue legacy 2 which I’ve been bingeing instead

 

[mykedo0909]

The team behind was involved in mmo, maybe it explains the mmo style.?

 

[LakeOf9]

The team behind was involved in mmo, maybe it explains the mmo style.?

Well, this game is not an MMO, so they should have adjusted

Like, this game has no RPG mechanics or systems or exploration but retains RPG padding of the worst kind anyway. The worst of all worlds.

 

[Mephisto40]

The actual quest design is bad too. It’s always “talk to this person, go to this place, talk to this person, go to this place, combat encounter”.

That's pretty much how every Final Fantasy game plays

 

[GymWolf]

The game simply has like 10 hours of good content milked into 50++.

I got so burned that i had to put it aside until i get the strenght to finish the last 5-10 hours, and the worst part is that from what i'm hearing you need to do all the final batch of sidequests to better understand the finale or some shit, too bad the sidequest (and like half of the main quest) are what burned me in the first place.

Being a mindless cakewalk for 98% of the encounters and having a very poor rpg part doens't help with keeping you engaged, at best you mix the eikons ability to search for the most damaging combo and the combat styles are almost all interesting.

 

[LakeOf9]

That's pretty much how every Final Fantasy game plays

Yes but there are other things in other FF games. There are dungeons. There is exploration. There are mini games. There are new towns and cities to explore. Optional high tier loot to find. Level and grinding opportunities. All of that is used to keep the same core design varied over the play time of those games. This game has none of that. Each town and city is a forced hub introduced as part of the story, there are no mini games, there are no dungeons, no exploration, no optional areas, loot and gear and leveling is controlled by the game and given to you only when the game wants you to have it, and grinding is impossible outside of the hunts which are the one cool bit of side content the game has but also completely divorced from the game’s strengths everywhere else with the storytelling and world building

It’s just a total misfire

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

I haven't played it yet but this sounds like a lot of the core problems that have ruined RPG genres for me in recent years. Something is very wrong with the overall setup and has been for at least a couple generations.

This genre feels like it fell hard off a cliff and no one noticed. To me, even the "greatest" (sales, attention) RPGs of recent years would be lowest tier in earlier generations (back in time of top-down early FF games, Earthbound, anything in that mold up through FFVII-IX era).

The way side-quests are handled is one of the main problems, but it's hard to identify exactly what is wrong. I guess it's like the developers plan a main story as if it's a boring interactive movie, then they just assign another dev team to go in and add a bunch of boring tasks as filler. And so the whole thing always feels twice as boring: main quest is just a stupid mindless move from set-piece to set-piece (yawn, who cares), and in between you do stupid tasks that feel almost randomly generated.

Yes but there are other things in other FF games. There are dungeons. There is exploration. There are mini games. There are new towns and cities to explore. Optional high tier loot to find. Level and grinding opportunities. All of that is used to keep the same core design varied over the play time of those games.

Well said, but when did this really begin to change? I don't feel like Final Fantasy has done this well for a very long time. Even FFVII-Remake fell flat for me in these areas. (I only enjoyed it because I love the old characters and world so much, not sure I'd even like it without knowing the original.)

 

[Belthazar]

The team behind was involved in mmo, maybe it explains the mmo style.?

Of all the things they could've taken from their MMO experience fetch quest was their choice? I mean, they could've put more meaningful build creation and depth... But no, kill x monster/ get y items for z amount of money (which is meaningless anyway) it is.

 

[FoxMcChief]

It really might be, which is a shame, because when this game has such great high moments.

I feel like I have to go through 1-2 hours of boring stuff for like 20-30 minutes of greatness. I’m at a low point right now and it’s getting harder to pick up the controller to slug through the bad stuff.

 

[Certinty]

Couldn’t even make it past the 7-8 hour barrier.

Bland level design and the enemies being repetitive sponges were enough to put me off. It’s like no thought at all was put into most of the game.

Shame because like you said the bosses are great and (so far at least) the story is interesting.

 

[Werewolf Jones]

Playing in battle as Clive is good.

Everything else is bad.

The mundane voiced scenes with zero direction or character animation had me so bored I ended up skipping it all.

 

[Draugoth]

So, whic his better FFXV or FFXVI?

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

The team behind was involved in mmo, maybe it explains the mmo style.?

Building on my post above... maybe this is the explanation for everything: braindead MMOs ruined the RPG genre. It's just when the MMO world took off that good RPGs stopped existing and everything became so mindless. Combine that with an obsession with action-based combat instead of turns or complex systems, and you have a genre that destroyed itself as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Roufianos]

Someone in that dev team should have pointed out that downtime doesn't have to be fetch quests.

 

[FunkMiller]

More and more pleased I decided to skip this and just put another 30 hours into ToTK.

 

[wvnative]

Yeah this is what held me back from really praising it. It's paced like 14 online, either 0 or 11, not much in-between. This needs to be the primary point for improvment if this ends up being the team that does 17.

 

[M.W.]

Tedious: The Game

 

[SlimySnake]

Yh I’ve been skipping all dialogue for the last 20 hours or so and it still drags.

 

[MagiusNecros]

That's pretty much how every Final Fantasy game plays

Other FF games have much better pacing or give a good illusion of such. And are typically engaging party based systems with heavy DnD influence.

FFXVI was made by pulling half of the FFXIV staff and created a DMC clone that doesn't play like any other Final Fantasy all coupled with the bad anime writing and poor pacing of Endwalker.

The issues FFXVI has stems from the devs primarily only having MMO game design knowledge and trying to make a Action game heavy on MMO progression and gameplay elements.

If you like the gameplay it could be great and if you like the story doubly so but if the story comes off as mediocre you don't have much of a game here.

For most players the game is ok but if you have played FFXIV and reached endgame in any capacity you will see all the problems FFXVI has right away.

FFXVI's main failing is that the story starts out strong but gradually gets weaker and weaker. Not the games fault. It's their writing team and their trait of abandoning one idea after the next in favor of something else. Comes off as bad anime.

Granted FF always has had a degree of anime tropes but were executed much better.

Also no postgame content...which is just pitiful.

Locking Hard Mode behind a 50 hour investment probably ain't no cup of tea either. And I think half of that time is watching movie.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Yes, they totally bring down the experience, especially when some of those awful "side quests" are baked into the main story line.

 

[Spyxos]

I haven't played it yet. Try to ignore the side quests and just play the main story for now.

 

[Revolutionary]

Good news: if you can make it through XVI, then you can probably make it through XIV too.

I said it in the OT but I'm half convinced they designed it this way as a primer for XIV.

 

[Celcius]

So, whic his better FFXV or FFXVI?

15 by a country mile imho.
Both are good though.

 

[R6Rider]

FF15 had dogshit side quests, and it seems the ones in FF16 aren't much better.

The more I hear about the game, the less and less I even want to play it in the future.

 

[DenchDeckard]

I think, or hope I'm in the final stretch and it's killing me.

What a mess of a game, incredibly high highs, with the worst lows I've seen in years.

Music is amazing.

Sine wave the game....

 

[DownLikeBCPowder]

It is depressing in many ways, I was really looking forward to this game. I still enjoyed it overall, but yeah so much could have been better/improved upon and a lot of things gutted that I didn't expect (elemental affinity/RPG mechanics/equipment/etc).

 

[Madflavor]

There's two ways I look at this:

• CBU3 wanted to make a 15-20 hour Character Action FF game. SquareEnix freaked out fans would despise a shorter FF game and mandated CBU3 stretch out the length.
• CBU3 wanted to make a 40 hour Character Action FF game, and thought padding it out with MMO style mandatory quests to progress the main story was an acceptable approach.

The former could definitely be likely. But if it's the latter, CBU3 should stick with FFXIV because it's what they're best at, and not touch any future mainline entries. Because that is just an absolute boneheaded decision.

I've grown more annoyed as time has gone on. FFXVI should've been a great game. It had a great setting, a Gigachad Protagonist, an interesting cast, a killer fucking soundtrack, and an interesting premise. But I've never in my life seen a game get so utterly ruined by it's pacing. Fuck the RPG elements. I can live with barebones RPG elements in a Character Action game with tight pacing and a great story.

 

[fart town usa]

I'm at the Isles of Ark after the mini boss fight but I haven't booted it up in a week or so. I have like 50 hours in and probably 30 more to go. I just don't care to boot it back up.

I'll get back to it at some point but the game just doesn't work for me like it does for others. I won't trash it like I did in the OT but people saying this is some kind of 10/10 masterpiece are smoking that good stuff.

 

[proandrad]

Did you know the side quest are optional? You don’t have to 100% a game to enjoy your time with it.

 

[EviLore]

I gave up. I don’t play MMO time wasters, and FFXVI doesn’t respect your time at all.

 

[MagiusNecros]

CBU3 wanted to make a 15-20 hour Character Action FF game.

I'm never going to get my GILGAMESH MUSOU game now. The dream is dead.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Did you know the side quest are optional? You don’t have to 100% a game to enjoy your time with it.

Did you know some are not "optional"? I just wonder why that is? It's almost like they artificially made the game inflated to cover up a lack of content, or something.

 

[skit_data]

I think my main problem was that you got more and more sidequests as you progressed, which felt very strange. The more pressing and urgent the main quest felt in the grand scheme of things the more "hey, could you collect some trivial stuff while slaying some monsters"-quest appeared. Feels like they could have swapped that around to have more of those at the start and just focus on the main story towards the end.

 

[Loomy]

I'll preface this by saying I really liked most of this game. But I do get a lot of the criticism - including this one.

What Final Fantasy game has good side quests? I look at a lot of the criticisms about this game and think "this is what FF has always been". There's been better stories and better characters, but the RPG elements of FF games have been wafer thin since almost the beginning.

 

[Interfectum]

I believe I've progressed through roughly 85% of the game, and I concur with your sentiments... this game oscillates between truly fantastic moments and disappointingly low points. Its inconsistency is striking, and peculiarly, the narrative occasionally decelerates to an almost standstill. It's strange how, amid time-critical main story objectives, Clive is busy rummaging through soil in search of flowers during side quests. These side quests end up disrupting the story's flow quite significantly.

The game seems to have scant regard for the player's time, incorporating the less enjoyable aspects of MMOs, such as grind-heavy tasks and time-consuming activities. What's more frustrating is that it lacks the more rewarding features common to the genre, such as the ability to customize your character as per your preferences.

 

[sigmaZ]

I thought I loved this game when I started it but the more I play it the less I like it

Combat is great and the bosses are amazing, but everything else is terrible. The fact that 80% of the game is MMO side quest caliber fetch questing would be bad enough but I’d be able to put up with it if it at least continued to do what the game is supposed to be good at, which is the storytelling stuff. But holy shit, the production quality of these quests is so bad. Like I just did these quests back to back

Spoiler: mid game story quests

I had to hunt down a bunch of stuff for Mid so she could build her airship, which was already really annoying, but then I had to help Goetz find his lost pass

And these quests are so bad! They don’t even have proper cutscenes or VA, it’s just canned animations!

The actual quest design is bad too. It’s always “talk to this person, go to this place, talk to this person, go to this place, combat encounter”. There’s no variation. It’s all very fetch questy and when the story side of things becomes bad, then there’s nothing left to make up for it since the quests themselves are so bad

Like, I get the concept of having down time in a story, I don’t mind it if it’s done well. I love persona 5 and red dead redemption 2, both of those games are pretty much just down time. But you have to do it well and FF16 doesn’t. And it just comes off as a badly paced mess that I am losing interest in playing as more time goes on. People criticized Ragnarok’s slow sections and I get that, I agree with the criticism but at least they were well produced to help convey the character moments they wanted to show (the character moments sucked, but that’s a problem of concept not execution). Here it’s literally a mid budget ps2 era game with how some of these MAIN STORY QUESTS are.

What a disappointment this game is

Just wait until you do the quest where you talk to eight people in a row with no combat. That's my favorite lol

 

[Werewolf Jones]

I gave up. I don’t play MMO time wasters, and FFXVI doesn’t respect your time at all.

I remember when on release you were making negative comments on it and I was like YO WTF EVILORE IS HATING? You weren't wrong. I kneel.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

I'm the big strapping lad who can vanquish akashic demons and kill a god, and I have a side job of serving people dinner and fetching wood for carpenters.

 

[nowhat]

Sine wave the game....

More like square wave, the drop in quality/compelling content can be so drastic.

I've finished it. I haven't played through all, or much even, of the side content, because fuck that shit. The main plot devolves into quite much nonsense towards end, but I guess that's given. And the Eikon battles are mechanically really too simplified.

Having said that, some of the most memorable boss encounters I've experienced in quite some time. Not due to difficulty or rewarding gameplay, just as a spectacle. The soundtrack really does its job on those occasions as well.

 

[HawarMiran]

yeah this game is basically a AAA FF14 with better combat

 

[sigmaZ]

I haven't played it yet but this sounds like a lot of the core problems that have ruined RPG genres for me in recent years. Something is very wrong with the overall setup and has been for at least a couple generations.

This genre feels like it fell hard off a cliff and no one noticed. To me, even the "greatest" (sales, attention) RPGs of recent years would be lowest tier in earlier generations (back in time of top-down early FF games, Earthbound, anything in that mold up through FFVII-IX era).

The way side-quests are handled is one of the main problems, but it's hard to identify exactly what is wrong. I guess it's like the developers plan a main story as if it's a boring interactive movie, then they just assign another dev team to go in and add a bunch of boring tasks as filler. And so the whole thing always feels twice as boring: main quest is just a stupid mindless move from set-piece to set-piece (yawn, who cares), and in between you do stupid tasks that feel almost randomly generated.


Well said, but when did this really begin to change? I don't feel like Final Fantasy has done this well for a very long time. Even FFVII-Remake fell flat for me in these areas. (I only enjoyed it because I love the old characters and world so much, not sure I'd even like it without knowing the original.)

I think when it comes to side quests it's best to go hard in one direction or gtfo. Like if you are gonna have fetch quests and a whole bunch of random task based stuff, then have a really good quest organizer and do not waste the players time. Allow quests to be completed without having to backtrack to the quest giver every time and allow for certain quests to be completed in advance. Also make sure that rewards are direct and worth the effort (Not giving something that you then have to use to get the reward.)
The other route is to integrate the side quests into the world so that player doesn't even know they are there unless they explore or talk to random people and do not keep a quest log. This adds mystery to the world and encourages people to go off the beaten path more but it's not as safe for casual gamers.

 

[Corndog]

15 by a country mile imho.
Both are good though.

What’s better about ff15 in your opinion?

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

I’ve been a Final Fantasy super fan since ‘94 and I was 100% on board with the shift to action combat, but man I don’t think I’ve ever felt so BORED so much of the time in a mainline FF game.

Feels like it was originally intended to be a 10-15 hour linear action game like DMC, and all the exploration zones, item creation, side quests, walking around talking to people, etc were added in as an afterthought.

That's pretty much how every Final Fantasy game plays

Sure you can broadly summarize practically every JRPG like that but it just feels so bland and by-the-numbers here. So many of the quests (both side quests and main story quests) are just like: go to the next ugly gray/brown outpost on the map, talk to the 3 people with quest markers over their heads and listen to them talk with their slow dialog + unnatural pause after every line, go off to fight a battle in some other location on the map, go back to turn in the quest, go to next ugly gray/brown outpost, repeat….

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

I think when it comes to side quests it's best to go hard in one direction or gtfo. Like if you are gonna have fetch quests and a whole bunch of random task based stuff, then have a really good quest organizer and do not waste the players time. Allow quests to be completed without having to backtrack to the quest giver every time and allow for certain quests to be completed in advance. Also make sure that rewards are direct and worth the effort (Not giving something that you then have to use to get the reward.)
The other route is to integrate the side quests into the world so that player doesn't even know they are there unless they explore or talk to random people and do not keep a quest log. This adds mystery to the world and encourages people to go off the beaten path more but it's not as safe for casual gamers.

This is the way.

RPG design is nothing more than "how to be a good DM" anyway, even if they keep forgetting that the genre owes its entire logic and substance to tabletop gaming. And a good DM doesn't just throw in random things like "hey I need 4 apples from the forest but there's some goblins in the way" because that feels artificial. What you should do is to keep track of several hidden sub-narratives that are happening outside the player's main course (these might be hidden factions, betrayals, weird things about a town or place, etc), and gradually work little effects or hints from these subplots into the characters and environments, so that the players become curious and might decide to pursue the topic -- soon to find that there's a whole story buried behind these little details.

Today's RPGs are made by people who would be catastrophically horrible DMs.

 

[Interfectum]

I’ve been a Final Fantasy super fan since ‘94 and I was 100% on board with the shift to action combat, but man I don’t think I’ve ever felt so BORED so much of the time in a mainline FF game.

Indeed, this game violates my most important principle when it comes to gaming: never be dull. I'm surprised by how tedious certain side quests and even the main storylines turned out to be.

 

[MrStauf]

Which is better 15 or 16 ?
I've only played 15 and i could not believe how short it was 25 hours then done.

 

[SkylineRKR]

When I read about the hideout I was afraid this game was going to be select and clear X area, return to hideout, select and clear Y area, return. And sadly this is the case. The sidequests don't help matters either. And I think the game is trimmed of RPG parts too much. Like having no party, the very limited equipment system, the kind of stupid crafting etc. This game is too bare bones and it does feel like they force feed you fetch quests to extend the playtime as it seems this was destined to be a 15 hour character action game, perhaps not even meant to be a numbered FF. On top of this, the combat is dreadfully easy and braindead on its standard mode.

I never thought I would say this, but perhaps I like FFVII R more. Its combat was challenging on Normal, it kept me on edge. Unlike this one. And in FFVII R the side quests were optional and there were only about 20 or so, they were loaded within a few more open chapters. Rewards were pretty good.

 

[BennyBlanco]

Final Fantasy cycle is real.

FF game gets announced —-> cool cinematic trailer—-> maybe this one will be a return to form —-> they announce there is no turn based combat —-> oh well the combat will be good —-> reviews are positive ——> game comes out—-> “this is finally the good one” —-> dust settles and a few months pass —-> “wow this game stinks” —-> restart the cycle

I gave up with this series after XIII, FFXV and FF7R. At least FFX got a decent rerelease.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

FFXVII might try to be an actin rhythm game, or maybe a first person shooter. lol