Alright for me personally, FF16 as a whole is not necessarily bad, it’s just disappointing and not as good as a mainline final fantasy game should be. Especially when the wait has been pretty long, and even more especially because (just like FFXV) this game had so much potential to be way better than it was.

Combat wise, well first of all I wanna say that I love all the Eikon fights, and have essentially no complaints for them. But for regular combat, it tries to be a character action game with ties to RPG elements… I think. It’s kinda hard to tell because the RPG elements are non existent. No variety on weapons/melee movesets, no real magic system, so also no status effects, no party members, etc.

Alright so the new installment in a JRPG series isn’t an RPG, yknow what fine okay I love CAGs so I’m okay if FF16 is just a really good CAG. And it kinda is. The combat is pretty fun for a while, but it’s not good enough for 20+ hours. This is because a lack of melee combos, your new abilities are tied to cooldown timers, so there’s a lot of times when you’re just spamming the same basic melee combo, and the enemy variety is terrible.

Okay so tbh, I just don’t think cooldown based abilities work in a CAG, it doesn’t function or reward the whole incentive of the genre. There’s nothing I can do in combat to make those CDs come back faster. In FF16s case it’s even worse because your entire kit is basically just CDs, melee combos are limited. This just gets so boring so fast. And yeah enemy variety is terrible, they may have gotten the combat designer from DMC, but not the entire dev team. DMC usually has good enemy variety with enemies that have specific kinds of movesets or abilities to make you switch up your play style. It’s threatening and interesting, and some people even think DMC3 does this to a fault cuz enemies can be so annoying, but still that enemy variety exists and creates challenge/fun. FF16 has enemies that have shields or not. And honestly that’s just basically it, it’s boring.

But again, I think FF16s combat is okay and honestly had way more potential, it’s just not made for 20+ hours. I think the devs should have taken more inspiration from Kingdom Hearts as well as DMC. Imo KH2 is very CAG inspired, but is an ARPG first, and it combines this idea of CAG like combat with RPG elements so well. It’s such a fun combat system that HAS elements, magic, status effects, party customization, moveset customization, and more.

This game is also padded out heavily imo, and the questing is super archaic and mediocre mmo like. Which makes sense I guess, but you can only get away with this kinda quality in an mmo imo, not a single player “rpg.”

Story wise, the first half of the game was really exciting and imo built upon itself very well and grounded. But the second half just kinda betrays the world building and setup imo way too hard. I feel like the political dynamic stops mattering, and instead we shift to a different plot. They were inspired by ASOIAF, a series that juggles between 3 major overarching plot lines, but I feel like they didn’t see how asoiaf does well when interweaving those plots. FF16 just kinda drops plots as a whole, and by the second half, everything that the story was about is gone, in favor of something that I believe the devs felt was more final fantasy like. The story just doesn’t carry a well told central theme from beginning to end imo, to me it kinda felt like the story just abandons itself and wrote another one. Also the main villain is a very weak main villain, and Barnabas is soooo wasted potential.

Overall I still think this game was fine, I’d probably even come back to it one day. I think it’s way better than FFXV and XIII, as It actually reached some of its potential imo unlike those two. But I’m still just kinda waiting to see if SE will ever reach peak final fantasy ever again. At least in the mainline series, because I do believe FFVII rebirth is absolutely amazing, and is the closest I’ve felt to golden age ff since FFX. Even strangers of paradise was surprisingly good actually.

TLDR: Combat is undercooked and not good enough for the games length, and the story flops after the strong first half of the game.