Final Fantasy XVI has a neat trick to help you follow its epic story

theverge.com:

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

I am a person who often struggles with vast, world-spanning fantasy stories. I just can’t keep track of all of the people and places and other proper nouns that make up the world. The result is that I spend a lot of time reading wikis to help me get through things like The Lord of the Rings or The Witcher — but that’s not very helpful in the moment when I’m watching a pivotal scene unfold. But Final Fantasy XVI, which just launched on the PS5, has a helpful tool to make it a whole lot easier to follow its complex tale.

The feature is called Active Time Lore — a nice play on the Active Time Battle combat system of past games — and it’s sort of like the X-Ray tool offered by Amazon Prime Video, only for a video game. It works like this: at any time during a cutscene, you can pause and hit the touchpad, bringing up a web of all the important characters, locations, and events related to the current scene. So if you have no idea who, say, Ramuh is or the importance of The Kingdom of Waloed, you can get a brief refresher.

It looks like this:

This was especially useful during the early hours of the game when characters call each other things like “Dominant” or “Bearer” as if you have any idea what they’re actually talking about. What’s great about it, though, is that it doesn’t take you out of the experience for more than a few seconds. Instead of pulling out my phone to read a wiki (and probably getting distracted by some kind of notification), I can just quickly catch up on things without leaving the game. The speed and seamlessness help keep me