#i personally don't think he's the best in xiv but even so he easily is better than a LOT of antags out there

[astrxealis]

SOMETIMES I FIND OUT someone famous i know/kinda know/used to know plays ffxiv and it's like good gods hell YES

[soliloquy-unforgotten]

Final Fantasy XVI - Martyrs, Individualism, and other Review-like Stuff (Spoilers!)

As one might suppose by the title, I've recently finished Final Fantasy XVI. Playing the game I had a lot of Thoughts, which isn't uncommon, and happened to encourage me to create this little blog for me to store these thoughts for posterity. Therefore, while I'm not yet sure who this introduction is even for, at least it's over. Onwards!

I will start this by getting the easy part out, which I have prior dubbed "the Review-like Stuff" - how "good" are the game's, y'know, things. I'll be pretty direct on this paragraph: visually and musically, the game is a whole meal. The scenarios look amazing, the big magical effects look, well, big and magical (in the best way! also very colorful). I just don't dig the character design all that much, personally, but it does deliver on the sort of realistic medieval fantasy air they set out to deliver - and hey, Jill's clothes actually look like functional female fighting clothes! Progress, I suppose. And the music, of course, delivers just as well - Masayoshi Soken, not content with putting out banger after banger for Final Fantasy XIV (the critically-acclaimed MMORPG, etc) decided to grace XVI with a series of adequately epic-sounding tracks, going as far as to reference musical motifs from prior entries in the series and toss us franchise fans some delicious treats. Yum.

Alright, onto the meat of what I actually wanted to write here - the story and gameplay. I'm gonna bundle both of these up because I think they're intertwined to an extent - or at least, some of the criticism I have about the gameplay is a direct product of how they wrote the story. But I suppose I might be putting the cart before the horses here so let's take a step back.

When playing FF XVI, you control a single character - Clive Rosfield, Ifrit's Dominant and certified Chosen One. You get other companions fighting alongside you here and there, and for most of it you're also accompanied by bestest of boys Torgal, but you never get to control any of them, they have no customization in terms of equipment, and actually the effect they have on gameplay is very minor - mostly making it less annoying to fight large hordes of enemies. So much so that you also never choose who's tagging along, they just join or leave the party automatically according to the story beat.

I recall being a bit disappointed when the previous entry in the franchise, XV, came out - because I had three buddies with me for the journey but I never got to play with them, only edit their equips and perform some dual techs with them during fights. XVI seemed to double down on this departure from party member control, straying even further from the molds of a party-oriented game and coming closer to the likes of Devil May Cry, the Witcher, both of the Nier games, and so on. I should note the influence of the first I cited is quite noticeable.

"Alas, Daka, it could not be helped!", I hear you say. "For Clive is one of only eight people in the world who can freely use magic, AND even if he parties up other Dominants, he'll drain their power eventually! So it can't be helped!". Well, voice in my head who is trying to predict an argument, that's still just a narrative choice they made. Had they decided to make it a party-oriented game, they could easily have written the story in a way that doesn't have Clive strip other Dominants of their power (and even that's kind of finnicky, because Jill is still added to the party for the DLC, far after Clive absorbed her Eikon), or just strip them of the power to Prime but leave their magical ability intact. Or have his fellow party members all be non-Dominants like Gav. Or have them share Clive's power through some sort of covenant, like if he could donate them the power of any Eikons he's not currently using (you do end up with five more Eikons than you can wield in combat, after all).

All this to say that they made a very conscious choice in making Clive's journey be so solitary - he wields the power and bears the burden for it, since being magical in this setting comes with a side effect of slowly turning into stone. Even when he has his (long overdue and very awkwardly paced) romantic development with Jill, she doesn't even try to dissuade him from bearing all of the burden himself - just reassured him that she believed in him and would be by his side to the end. Kind of bold words when you're speeding your new boyfriend along the route of becoming an Ifrit-shaped piece of rock, but it sort of cements the narrative that Clive is the very special Chosen One, and it's useless to try to relieve him of his burden - best to simply give him emotional support when necessary and help in whatever ways a mere mortal can.

Eventually, the narrative reveals that what's been killing the land all along (through a drying out of all life called the Blight) is the usage of magic itself. It's been happening ever since a different race discovered magic, ages ago, in what one may call an Original Sin (!) of sorts. Clive's battle is to, ironically, amass as much of the capacity to use magic without crystals into himself as possible, to then destroy humanity's creator, who both discovered magic and gave humans the means to wield it, and finally use all this accumulated power to destroy the ("sinful") practice of magic and die in the process, overwhelmed by the weight of this feat.

So our dear protagonist is, to recap, a Chosen One, born to be the physical vessel of a godlike being, and he sacrifices himself to cleanse humanity of the sins that are plaguing them. You know who else reportedly did that? That's right, baby: it's Jesus Christ.

Did I write several paragraphs just to arrive at this allegory? Perhaps. But pointing out the symbolic connections between Clive and ol' J.C. is important to eventually arrive at my main argument regarding FFXVI and its place in the franchise: it is very Western. It is prominently influenced by an occidental zeitgeist and ideology (which are indissociable from Christianity as a cultural system of rules and values). This manifests in the narrative itself, yes, which also has a big focus on defending "free will" and rejecting what sort of amounts to what one might describe as, uh, spiritual communism; but it also manifests in the gameplay itself, which is both emblematic of this narrative (via having you control a solitary martyr upon whose shoulders solely relies success or failure), but also more literally influenced by the West - with the gameplay mechanics and quest dialogue structure more closely resembling western action RPGs than any other game in the franchise.

My intent here was not to say FFXVI doesn't have any community-oriented themes (many sidequest chains are explicitly about that), but to point out the ways in which the tone and feel of the game reflect certain staple Western values - individuality most of all - beyond the simple fact of the game's European fantasy setting. I'm also not saying that's a bad thing, just that it is a thing, and these are some of the elaborations I arrived at when I tried to ask myself questions like "why does this feel the way it does?". I'm also very particular about not saying things like "this feels or doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game" because this is a franchise that loves nothing more than reinventing itself, and XVI was but the latest one to do just that. And for what it's worth, the game was great! I had a blast. I have my nitpicks about it but, hey, none of them was a dealbreaker.

...I do wanna have a party again for the next one though.

[cew644]

Thoughts about FF16 (Spoilers for everything)

I beat FFXVI last week and have just been thinking, and I need to organize my thoughts. Spoilers for everything: characters, lore, and ending. It's very long and scrambled, so bear with me!

So first things first, I absolutely adored the game. Easily one of the top 5 FF games of all time for me. Maybe even top 3 (my favourites are XIV and IX for context). No game is ever perfect, and I do have some nitpicks.

First, I'll start with the characters.

Clive is just hands down one of the best protagonists in gaming, and it is not even close. He's kind, caring but not a pushover. He wears his heart on his sleeve. Everything he feels, YOU feel. This is in large part due to Ben Starr's absolutely amazing performance. His character works really well for the story they are trying to tell as well. He wants to help people and make the world a better place. Any time deviating from the main quest makes sense for his character and helps really flesh out the world in turn. My one issue with him, and it's by no fault of his own, is that he IS the protagonist. Traditional FF parties do not apply to this game and it does affect all secondary characters.

Jill is amazing. I've seen many people call her boring compared to other heroines in the series, but I have to disagree with that. She's an adult, not a quirky teen or an anime girl with a gimmick to sell figurines. Her arc in Drake's Breath is fantastic, and up until they get to Ash, I don't really have much to say that's negative. But she is, however, the person that suffers most from the shift to a singular protagonist. Because Clive needs to get Shiva's powers, she's written off to the sidelines. Her constant presence and agency are cut out of nowhere in service of Clive, and it sucks. Her absence from the ending is also jarring, but I will discuss that more when I talk about the ending.

Cid is best Cid. He works perfectly to establish the themes and motivations for the cast. The sidequests outside of the main quest are also amazing for fleshing him out and reiterating how important Cid's legacy was to everyone involved. I like that he's basically an anarchist.

Joshua is incredibly charming. I would have liked to see more of him and Jote. He comes in pretty late into the story, but you do get the sense of how sheltered he was in small moments (like with Mid), and it's super cute and goes a long way to show his character. I would have really liked to get a couple more scenes with him. Like a conversation with Clive about Pheonix Gate or why he never reached out to the group. So that leaves things up to speculation. I personally think that he was worried about Clive being possessed or influenced by Ultima. I mostly just would like a bit more closure is all.

Dion is my second favourite Dragoon and character in the game (after Freya and Cid, respectively). In every scene with him, I was enthralled. Every scene with the empire and he was just so well directed. Despite not joining the group until the end of the game, he really feels like one of the most important characters. His resolve to die for his sins pushed me to finish all the side quests I could. Like the hideaway is an airship, and Mid's sidequest was all about making a ship! I really thought we could get a secret ending where we could save him! That being said, he's fantastic. I hesitate to call his death "burying the gays" cause of how ambiguous and open-ended it is (and how everyone could live or die depending on interpretation), and how his sidequest ends, but I digress.

Last is Ultima. Super creepy and inhuman, his demeanour, voice and design all work fantastically to make something so close to humanity but also so far. He is also one of the more Christian-coded Gods we've had in a while. His beef is basically, "I made this garden of Eden and these creatures gained consciousness." It is, in very literal words, the original sin. The way he gains followers is also the self-same "paradise" or heaven that features more heavily in Christian faiths compared to Judaism or Islam. I like the twist that all of it was so that he and his breather (which are a sort of singular mind according to the secret tomes) are just using humanity to get there alone. I DO prefer the earlier high fantasy and political intrigue from earlier in the game, but I think if they were going to do a classic FF god ending, this was a good way to do it.

Just a quick mention for the side characters too. I love them all! They're all fantastically written, and I highly recommend doing all their quests. I also like the "leaders" of the towns. Martha, L'ubor and the Dame are so essential to their communities, and you really feel that. I also liked how L'ubor was very trans-masc coded. It was a cool touch!

Lore-wise, FFXVI is really only close to XIV in terms of world-building. And in some ways is much better. Every part of the game is built around magic and how it functions in this world. It's not just a medieval world with magic added to it. How every nation reacts to, and treats magic is very grounded and unique. The Iron Kingdom was especially interesting cause of how they interpreted the bearers as sins rather than tools. That juxtaposed with the Empire, which reviles Bahamut. And Waloed which elevates the dominants, while treating the bearers the worst out of any of the nations. I'm starting NG+ soon just to read through and get all the lore, cause it's so expansive and well-written.

This all comes with some unfortunate and dark implications. Namely slavery and how it plays into the world. Today, slavery is incredibly tied to race, and it's almost impossible to ignore, but historically race wasn't really a concept. Slavery had more to do with prisoners of war and religion. I'm just saying this to point out that slavery here reminds me much more of Greek or Roman forms and not the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This all leads me to Yoshi-P's comments about the lack of diversity in Valesthia. There are PoC in the Republic, which is important to note. But that being said, I don't have faith that CBU3 could have written a story about PoC and slavery without it coming off horribly, and I think the team knew that. Having PoC as bearers would have made it so that Clive was a white saviour. Having PoC as non-bearers would have been even worse as a sort of white person victimization fantasy. Having Valesthia as an isolationist nation works to tell this story without engaging in colonialism but still relating the message of slavery to free will. In short, it's still messy and could have been handled MUCH better, but I think they knew they were not equipped to tell that story and handled their themes in the best way they could. They could have still probably have found a way to have a more diverse cast too.

The environmental messaging was also excellent. I almost wish we got to see it more. I was really second-guessing myself as we went along, and things kept worsening, but I think that was intentional. The whole theme of freedom and change worked really well in a more grounded and relatable way. As in "change is hard, it will hurt people in the short term, but it needs to be done for the betterment of the future." It doesn't chicken out like FF7 does.

Which all brings me to my interpretation of the ending. But first, I need to bring up Jill again. So I think the writers had a very clear idea of how they wanted the game to end. They said their main theme was brotherhood, and that's obvious. But I don't think they could do that with Jill dying in the final boss, so they just dropped her completely. It REALLY bugs me a lot, and I think is the one area where you can argue that Jill's writing is sexist. Cause it is here! Prior to this point, I disagree though. But back to the ending, It's very ambiguous and up for interpretation, which I enjoy a lot. I'm glad they went this route cause if they did go a definitive ending where Joshua dies and Clive lives, I woulda been pissed. It's still a valid interpretation, don't get me wrong, but just hear me out.

The whole time, Jill goes on about Clive saving everyone else except for himself. It's a cool hook, but I never felt it. Clive choosing how he lived, to me anyway, was helping others. He lived to end the bearer system and destroy the crystals that were draining their world, becoming an outlaw to do that. He did that! Which is why I think he chose to die for Joshua to bring him back. An ending where Clive lives while Joshua dies just does not sit right with me. Maybe it's cause I'm an older sibling too, but even though Joshua didn't die, he never really lived either. He's clearly very sheltered, he doesn't have anyone outside the undying, and he was isolated his whole childhood. The whole reason Clive chose to become his shield is to help bear the burden together. Clive dying to "rebirth" the world where his brother and all other bearers can live freely I think is a beautiful way to end his story. Though I can understand why people may disagree.

Another interpretation I also could get behind is that they all live. Clive just loses his arm to the curse. But I think that's a bit cheap.

Anyways sorry for the extremely long review/thought piece. It's by no means perfect, but it's still an easy GotY for me, it's a solid 9/10. I just needed to lay out my thoughts, and I'm happy to discuss with anyone who wants someone to talk to!

ALSO if they do DLC, I would want it to be about Jill, Dion, Joshua, or Leviathan.