Final Fantasy 16 review roundup: 'A bold new benchmark for the series'

pcgamer.com:

Final Fantasy 16 is almost here… well, not for us. But you know, for PlayStation 5 owners it's almost here. We're going to have to wait a little bit longer for the latest entry in Square Enix's long-running RPG to grace our beloved PC setups, unfortunately. How long, you ask? I dunno. I'm not even sure director Naoki Yoshida knows. First, we weren't getting a PC port at all—please buy a PS5 wink-wink nudge-nudge—now the answer seems to be that we're definitely not getting it as soon as console exclusivity lifts, but it's happening at some point. 

Perhaps one of the benefits of missing out for an undetermined amount of time is being privy to all the reviews and initial reception far in advance. Am I coping? A little, but the reviews are in from a ton of sites and while general critiques are aligning across sites, there seems to be quite the score spread. There's a bit of a mixed response to its Game of Thrones-esque story and the side quests haven't quite hit with everyone. It definitely errs on the higher end of the scale though, and with Final Fantasy 16 currently sitting at a very impressive score of 88 on Metacritic, here's what some of our rivals have to say about it.

Eurogamer: 3/5

We're kicking off with Edwin Evans-Thirlwell's review for Eurogamer, coming in the middle of the pack score-wise. He had high praise for the game's boss battles and Devil May Cry-style action combat, but lamented its excessive worldbuilding and sidequests. The lore library that tucks away all manner of information was criticised, too. «It's all grandiose rather than helpful and thankfully, you can mostly ignore it. The same can't quite be said of all those sidequests, which confer useful items, crafting materials and XP, and besides