FINAL FANTASY XVI

Graphics are beautiful. Voice acting is decent. Plot and world are much more grounded and less whimsical than is typical for FF (though they go a little overboard with having everyone dying all the time); I haven't decided what I think about that, but they do a good job writing characters' dialogue and actions to match their reasonable motivations for the world that they're in. In that sense the world feels more thoughtfully self-consistent than any other mainline FF game. All in all, the non-core-gameplay fundamentals exceed expectations. The problem is it's a walking simulator with a shallow action-combat-minigame stapled to it: there is no meaningful skill expression and no challenge to be overcome. Best available weapons and gear at any given time are just made available without effort or tradeoff. Combat is all generic action-game 'press this button to close distance and hit, press this button with the right timing to perfect dodge' stuff; enemies who are supposed to be trained soldiers will hang back and maybe move in to take a feeble swing once every five seconds or so, like generic mooks in a Batman game. In the event you actually manage to lose to a boss, they'll just drop you back into the same phase of the same fight with replenished curative items; you just respawn with the boss already down to 25% health or whatever, so you don't have to improve or re-strategize or anything. In case that's not enough, combat-trivializing easy-mode-accessories are dropped into your inventory at the very beginning even when you choose the 'action-focused' mode, as though the game doesn't think its own combat is worth engaging with either. In other words, the gameplay part of the game is actually a complete formality, and the game seems apologetic for even interposing this quantum of gameplay between the endless series of cutscenes it actually wants to feed you. If they wanted to make a movie they should have just made a movie. A final fantasy game in which the entire *game* part is a challenge-free facade cannot be accepted. It's unfortunate, because there really are lots of cool features and work that have been done here in here; just the lore-navigation interface is a fascinating and innovative little thing, and I don't want to discount the work that was poured into various aspects of this title. But games need to have *gameplay*, and no amount of polish can make up for that omission.