Chris Fiorillo

There is more depth in White Orchard than this MMO-ish slog. I'll start with most egregious failure - there are effectively only three enemies in Final Fantasy 16: 1. Small 2. Large 3. Boss 1. To defeat the Smalls, spam your special attacks and limit breaks. Use O to kill healers or flyers first, if you want. Mash square and triangle. SAME THING FOR ALL OF THEM IN THE ENTIRE GAME. 2. To defeat the Larges, get them to 50%, use Green Circle, Green Square, spam other specials, dodge their attacks. Mash square and triangle. Blah blah. SAME THING FOR ALL OF THEM IN THE ENTIRE GAME. 3. To defeat Bosses, see #2 above, but sometimes they have fancy attacks so watch out for those. There are no elements, meaningful status changes, or need for any strategy outside of the above 2.5 approaches. Your equipment (weapon, belt, armlet) upgrades incrementally via formality. The one weapon characteristic/stat is: attack power. No attack speed, element, strengths, weaknesses, etc. etc. etc. Your equipment, also entirely linearly upgraded from bad to better, has two: defense and HP. Some accessories do things that ultimately do not matter because there is no strategy beyond what is described above, nor is there any reason to seek to improve. You can put points into a very limited and generally pointless skills & upgrades, which supposedly improves them but has no actual effect on anything ever. There is no need to ever dodge small enemies because they never attack. There are no enemy attack 'types' outside of ranged or melee, and nothing whatsoever to strategically distinguish one small enemy from another aside from their appearance. You control your dog companion with three buttons. Two are pretty much just "attack" and the other is a vague (and very unneeded healing). You don't control your other companion at all, nor do they affect anything in any way whatsoever. They hardly do any damage and have no health to manage or consider. The side quests are pointless and trite, and get you nothing you would need or want. They reek of MMO fetch quests, which is utterly unforgivable without the extreme depth and breadth of FFXIV, for example. The environments, though beautiful, contain nothing you would ever need or want. Chests contain, at best, mere formalities to upgrading your equipment. Soundtrack is flawless. The story veers into darker territory compared to other FF games, which is fine, but it's all quite weak, cliche, and generally just forgettable when compared to something like The Witcher, which came out 8 years ago. The lore has just been done better so many times and in so many places. I think I'm about halfway through and there are no activities to do outside of the awful, pointless sidequests and the very trite and linear story. The big eikon battles look nice until you reflect on just how shallow they are. Some make rock paper scissors look like chess. At the end of the day, there just isn't any point to this game when there are just so many better and more rewarding experiences out there. I'm not even good at video games, and I have so far never come close to dying or failing a QTE. However the content makes me believe this is not for children. Maybe for someone who has never, ever, played video games... until now. At least it looks and sounds nice. And to clarify, this isn't a 1 star review because it's "not a final fantasy game;" it's a 1 star review because it's an altogether useless endeavor.