1. Can you play the game solo now? I know in one of the earlier updates - I have no idea which one - they started flirting with letting you go through dungeons with AI companions instead of humans. Is this more widespread now?
2. Is it easy to start the game over from the beginning and can you trade between your two characters?
I ask because I'm considering starting the game again. Pretty daft, I know, but I loved Final Fantasy XIV only I haven't played it for so long I can't remember anything that was happening or where I was or anything. I'm thinking of starting again with a fresh character and just dipping into it once a week or so to keep it fresh, rather than what I was doing previously of playing it for months straight and then not touching it for a year and having no idea what was happening.
@AgentCooper The problem is I want the pin more than anything they have for sale 😅
That Persona 5 black and red t-shirt would be cool without the P5 logo. Joel's shirt is cool too but it costs as much as a game. Oh well.
@JohnnyShoulder@Matroska Yeah it can be a bit hit and miss, though I’ve bought a couple of long lasting items over the years which is to their credit, my peace walker hat is still in daily use after a decade or more! Hopefully they’re not as ‘limited’ as they say? Say like those bloody N7 flipflops haha
Ok that demo was very very good. I’m a big fan of how they’ve merged the classic fantasy with more modern grimdark tendencies in a way that doesn’t feel naff. The combat’s pretty good too. It’ll probably be a while before I play it though.
Just finished the FF XVI demo as well. It was bloody amazing! Love the characters and the story. The combat feels really good. My favourite parts were definitely the boss fights as it's here the combat truly gets to shine. It's just so satisfying!
Some of the sections are truly awe-inspiring. My god, imagine playing this game in the 90s. You'd be absolutely blown away! I'm blown away now lol. This is how a modern Final Fantasy game should be.
I've already preordered the game. Cannot wait until Thursday!
I’m loving the new FF so far, but the use of the F word just feels like it’s trying to be edgy and feeling. It feels out of place and feels like the writer thought he could do something that ends up feeling cheap.
A guy with powers shows and saves the MC and someone he cares about. “F***, F***”. Such a wonderful observation and such great FF dialouge
Don’t get me wrong, the story and characters are great so far, but in regards this one thing it felt like the writer was trying to write an M rates final fantasy for the sake of it instead of writing a FF game that happened to be M.
Finished the FF16 demo and it convinced me to buy the game. Felt like the demo started pretty slow, but man it went places by the end.
The combat is where the game sings for me, everything else is fairly serviceable, but it just feels so damn good to play. At least so far.
I'm only a couple of hours in and its felt like a bit of a boss gauntlet, but every fight is so enjoyable. So far the difficulty has remained fairly low, and the combat makes me feel awesome, even though I know I'm probably not that good, as I am rubbish at these sorts of games.
It takes some very well tuned mechanics to make a player a low skilled player feel really awesome, without just handholding them and making everything a QTE. It feels like every game like this these days wants to be a "Souls like", but this seems to be really zigging away from that trend. Here are to more games making you feel powerful and bad AF.
I'm really enjoying FF16 thus far. The things I like are the pacing and the bite-sized nature of the game. There are constant story moments and intense combat sections. Not to mention that the levels don't feel too long and you travel by a world map instead of walking from place to place so you don't need to travel long distances. It almost feels like this was meant to be a portable game given its structure. I'm glad that not all developers feel the need to make a game massive and can instead focus on providing a fun as well as epic experience, which is what FF16 is.
Granted, I've heard that the game can take upwards of 100 hours to play through so maybe it opens up later on. But at least it doesn't feel overwhelming right now like most games tend to be nowadays. I don't want to start up a game and spend hours in menus, doing side quests, talking to people etc. At first I want the game to grab me with its story and gameplay. Then when it clicks, I'll want to spend more time with the game. Hopefully that will be the case later on.
That has been one thing for me so far in FF16, it has this weirdly dated feel to it. If you told me this was a remake of a 15 year old PSP game, I would believe you. The game is a lot of fighting through barely window dressed corridors and tiny arenas with no real verticality or any real memorable features, it'll just be a lot of grassy circles or concrete circles. This was common action game design around 2010 and earlier, but we've sorta moved beyond it now. Same with how traversing the world is all map based.
There isn't inherently anything wrong with this, in a world of endless open world bloat FF16 may be the perfect antidote to those most fatigued, but it does give the game an uncannyness to it. It is very reminiscent to me of Dragon Age 2.
Interesting thoughts so far on FF16. Having not started yet (and unsure when I’ll start it, possibly weeks), and also choosing to skip the demo, I’m liking what I’m hearing from you all so far. The one concerning thing is the mundane environmental design as @Pizzamorg points out, but like you say I’m actually pleased to hear the game has a bite-sized approach, as described by @LtSarge I certainly have plenty of open world large map exploration games to choose from. Is it similar to MGS5 where there are missions you choose and then when you drop into one you have an objective to complete in order to further the story?
@Jaz007 I also echo the pet peeve of shoehorned mature content or language just for the sake of filling some kind of quota. I know the developers said they didn’t want to be held back by shooting for a lower ESRB rating, which I can appreciate, but Square-Enix’s recent output with Forspoken highlights how incongruous cringy dialogue can ruin a narrative, and ultimately the entire game. Fingers crossed that the dialogue has the appropriate depth and nuance going forward.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution Yeah I guess that'd be a fair comparison, although FF16 is much more story-focused than MGS5 so the levels feel more interconnected in FF16. It's also worth mentioning that whenever you "finish" a level, you'll be brought back to the world map and can teleport back to your base in order to buy items and upgrades. So it's indeed like MGS5 in that regard.
The result of an approach like this is a more focused experience with constant epic moments. I've only played 7 hours so far but it's easily my GOTY. This game is basically a Final Fantasy fan's wet dream.
Not really a spoiler but I'll black it anyway.
The reunion of Clive and Torgal was so disappointing. I hate it in games when scenes show lack of emotions when there should be floods of them.
I really liked the Skill Up review on youtube. he has good and fair points I believe and confirms some of my worries I had based on trailers; characters and party members, the flashy combat, RPG aspects, etc. I'll wait for a sale. hope you enjoy your time with FFXVI.
Yeah it is funny, because watching Skill Up's review (and some of the other more critical reviews that are now coming out of the woodwork too), it is hard to really relate to what he is saying when you are early into the game. An initially slow opening gives way to a multi hour gauntlet of boss encounters, set pieces and grand battles captured in gorgeous, cinematic, cutscenes. It takes a while to get to 60, but once it gets there, its pedal to the floor for hours on end. In the best possible way.
Every set piece would easily stand on its own as a highlight of any other game, and here they are constantly stacking these, outdoing themselves every time. How can this game be as flat as Skill Up made out? It is just not possible, I am having so much damn fun!
But then exactly how he says it in his review... it happens.
This opening rush of spectacular... spectacle just... ends. And ends so unceremoniously. The villain we have been chasing through this opening stretch of the game is felled, Clive catches up to the audience on a big twist that for us was resolved hours ago and there I go from fighting Gods in a battle straight out of the latest season climax of One Piece to being dropped into this semi open world hub space, where I am doing mundane tasks like grabbing soil for people (which is just walk up to exclamation mark and press x four times) or killing x number of monsters or whatever. Just mindless, busy work, MMO style filler nonsense. We just hurtled at 120 mph right into a wall.
And much like an MMO, the rewards for these are these myriad piles of currencies and materials, but they all mean absolutely nothing. Even when you get to use boss materials in crafting weapons, they don't unlock any new abilities or anything, they just put the number up of your damage and basically function as a cosmetic.
But even then, if you go the Forge and combine three lunar dust, with 1 meteor orb and one cheese croissant you can give your base sword you started with plus one that gives it more damage than that shiny new boss sword you made, so... great.
You also get three accessory slots, which offer passive buffs to either you, or your skills, but I dunno, everything about this system is bad. You only get three slots, so whenever you get an accessory that buffs just one of your six skills, why the hell would you ever use that if you only have three accessory slots for your entire character? Why does this system exist? Who thought this was fun and fit for purpose?
And then the skill tree, my word, it looks like they threw that together during the morning before the game went live. When I first started playing I assumed it was so barebones because I only had one set of abilities, but no, unless some later Eikons open up the tree, this skill tree is the most nothing skill tree I might have ever seen in a game.
And the whole time in this zone, I was just absolutely floored by how dated and how double AA this all felt. This feels like it was made by Spiders, rather than square, this is Greedfall with polished graphics. If this wasn't a Final Fantasy game, I don't think it would be getting the scores it is getting.
And its a shame too, because the story is excellent so far, the vocal performances are stellar, even with the basically non existent progression and itemisation the combat and set pieces are really phenomenal. But I dunno man, running around a landmarkless, detailless, barely a few metres wide, collection of nondescript greenery looking for lost slaves so I can get three more solar crusts to give me a whole extra 3 hp on my armour (when I have 2000 hp in my pool already at base) is just killing my vibes, man.
I'm nearing 20 hours of playtime. While the pacing has definitely slowed down, I'm still enjoying the game a lot. I can't stop playing it, it's just nice to play through a more linear game. The levels do open up much more later on but there aren't too many distractions if you just want to get to your next objective. The side quests are your typical mundane tasks like collecting stuff or defeating enemies but I did discover some interesting ones later on that focus more on the narrative aspect. It does also feel rather nice to run around in the levels, fight enemies and explore instead of only doing story missions. At least they're introducing this part much later on (7-8 hours into the game) to provide some variety to the formula.
Moreover, it's just absolutely incredible how epic the story missions are and that there are so many of them. Not to mention epic boss fights with fantastic music, it all comes together to deliver a truly awesome experience.
The only thing I'm really missing is more party members who travel with you and deliver entertaining banter. Hopefully that will happen soon.
@LtSarge Maybe you can go back and actually finish Final Fantasy 7 Remake after you're done with 16.
I've only gotten to play it for 4-5 hours so far, but I'm highly enjoying it so far as well. I had the big early story point spoiled well beforehand about the mother being bad, but it's not a big deal as you can see it coming from a mile away. Regardless, my only real disappointment so far is the fact that they botched the performance mode, but at least it still plays really well in Graphics mode since I'm guessing it was intended to be played in that.
I've started getting early side quests already, but they are so simple so far that it's not a big deal or anything. Silly, but they do allow you to get to know the people at the Hideout a little bit.
I will say one other thing, and that would be how heavy handed the motion blur is. I'm not one to get physically bothered by it, but there is so much of it at times that I had a hard time even really following what was going on during the Eikons of Fire fight scene when Joshua gets killed. It's not so much that it was so chaotic either. It's just it's simply hard to see because it's so blurry. It was an epic scene, but would have been even better if you were able to turn motion blur off. It's more of a nitpick than anything, but it still is a shame you can't turn it off.
@KilloWertz It's actually quite interesting to compare FF16 with FF7R since both are very linear FF games. FF7 definitely has a better cast of characters but you can spend way too much time in the menus managing materia and weapon upgrades. That's my primary issue whenever I start up the game and probably why I lost motivation to play it. FF16 on the other hand keeps thing more simple and I commend it for that. I mentioned that the game doesn't feel overwhelming compared to other AAA experiences and it's still the case, even now that the game has opened up more.
I honestly feel like games keep getting more and more complicated nowadays. There's too much customisation. I just want to jump in and play the game, not sit around in menus.
Combat is also more fluid in FF16 compared to FF7R, which isn't that surprising considering FF7R has both turn-based and real-time gameplay. But I personally prefer the combat in FF16.
Is graphics mode objectively better than performance mode? I haven't noticed anything wrong with performance mode, although I don't even know what I should be looking out for.
Also, a tip for people playing FF16: if you pause the game by hitting the Options button during a cutscene, you can click on the touch pad and read some lore on the things you're seeing on the screen (individuals, locations etc.). Didn't know that at all until I found it out by watching a streamer play the game.
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