Morning Folks! Last night I wrapped up Final Fantasy XVI and I have to say for the most part it wrapped things up in a satisfying manner. There are a few things that happened that I would prefer not to have happened, but that is going to be the case with pretty much any story-driven game where you are not given any real control over the narrative outcome. Did I complete everything? No, as I got closer to the end I stopped doing side quests because I wanted to push through the story and see how things wrapped up. The game has a newgame+ mode that I might partake of at some point, and there are two DLCs that I have yet to explore. Will I actually do that? Potentially not given my track record with actually returning to narrative games that do not have variable bioware-esc outcomes.
The last chapter of the game was pretty freaking dark and maybe overstayed its welcome a bit. This is a problem that I have with a lot of games where they feel like they need to escalate the amount of nonsense that the game starts throwing at you, as you get closer to the finale. The escalation in the number of encounters didn’t feel terribly meaningful… just more busy work that I had to complete in order to move on to the final encounter. This is not an FFXVI-only problem, as pretty much every narrative game seems to feel like quantity is needed to make you feel like you have accomplished something. In the last third of the game, I would have honestly been perfectly fine if it was just watching the story unfold before me because that is why I was playing not for anything on a mechanical level. I pretty much standardized on the Phoenix Power Set as the one I enjoyed the most and rarely ever changed tactics. I am that guy who usually completed Doom using nothing but a shotgun because it was the weapon I enjoyed using the most.
The game was gorgeous and the story was fairly lavish. It feels sufficiently Final Fantasy in that it hits a lot of the high points that are always there. There is a Cid and a Mid and we have a ship named the Enterprise, etc. We fiddle about with Crystals, though the interaction with them is pretty much the inverse of every other Final Fantasy game. The world however also feels sufficiently unique, in that It would be interesting to see more content set in this universe. I would love to see another game follow up after the events of this first game, to see how the world has changed in lieu of the ramifications of the final chapter. I guess however, that is probably the sign of a good story… that you end up wanting more of it.
Was it my favorite Final Fantasy game? Honestly… I am not sure. It is certainly up there in the upper echelon of them, but I am not sure it will dethrone the way Final Fantasy VI made me feel the first time I played through it. I do however really love the characters that we were presented and the subtle nuance of them. I said before that this was a much more adult tale that was being told, and I still feel that. As fantastical as the wild kaiju battles were at times… the story itself was grounded in the human condition and the struggle to live a life free of tyranny. The best stories are essentially fables, and this tale could absolutely be abstracted into a bedtime story. I am extremely interested to see where the next mainline Final Fantasy game goes from here.
Yesterday was also the launch of Dragon Age Veilguard, and while I wanted to wrap up Final Fantasy XVI first… I did get a bit of time with the game. I thought I would be terribly clever and sit through the lengthy shader compilation process that took roughly thirty minutes. However… each time you boot up the game you have to go through a similarly annoying shader verification process. It went much faster but it is still really frustrating given how much I hop in and out of games. I am hoping given time they will patch the game to improve this process a bit. The positive however is that once you are in the game, it appears to be running smoothly as you shunted all the shader nonsense to the start-up process.
There have been a lot of YouTube videos in the lead-up to this release lamenting how Dragon Age is a bad game for one reason or another. Largely I think this is folks that simply cannot cope with the stylized graphics. While I agree that they did the Kunari wrong with this graphical treatment, the Humans, Elves, and Dwarves all seem perfectly cromulent. I was able to create a sufficiently “Belghasty” character complete with a nice beard, black hair, green eyes, and a scar over my left eye. I was also able to play my favorite Dragon Age faction the Grey Wardens again, so already the game is getting pretty high marks for me in the things I really care about the most.
Combat has been fun enough, and the world is really nicely rendered. Overall I am pretty pleased though admittedly I am only about an hour into the game through what is essentially the initial call to action. I can play a sword and shield Warrior type, and combat feels fluid enough thus far. I am not looking for some irrational challenge level, I just want something that is snappy enough to feel like it is not dragging down the story. Basically, I am in “pleasantly surprised” territory because I had some significant fears about what this release was going to feel like. Essentially if you are a Dragon Age fan and are in it for the story and the romance options, then I would say ignore the YouTube doomers and play away.
I am not sure how active I am going to be blogging my journey. I always feel weird when I am playing single-player games because I don’t really want to go full spoilers… and there is only so much vague posting that you can truly do on a game without giving away core details. I took a break yesterday for this sort of reason because I did not have any sweeping summary of my thoughts about the adventure yet in Final Fantasy XVI, nor did I really want to talk about details about where I was in the game. I figure the same is probably going to happen with Dragon Age Veilguard. So fair warning… the blog posts might be a bit spotty for the next week or so.
