Final Fantasy XVI is launching tomorrow, but the press embargo has already expired. You can read Kai Powell's full review (9/10) for Wccftech here:
Final Fantasy XVI heralds in a new standard for Japanese role-playing games and while the RPG components themselves are limited by Square-Enix standards, it's the narrative and gameplay that exceed all expectations. What begins with kingdom-wide subterfuge and destruction ends with a world forever changed and the player, as Clive Rosfield and Ifrit together, are the driving force to see it all through until the end.
Digital Foundry also posted an interesting and lengthy technical analysis narrated by John Linneman. While most of it is filled with lavish praise for the game's excellent art style and great rendering of cutscenes, characters, and particle effects, the presentation has a few downsides.
For example, the internal rendering resolution drops very low. The quality mode can range between 1440P and 1080p, but the performance mode goes all the way down to 720p. What's even worse is that DF reckons Square Enix is using AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1 for some reason instead of the much better FSR 2. This produces mediocre upscaling, resulting in artifacts and blurriness.
Performance mode also features much lower quality shadows than quality mode, and it also adds pop-in. On top of that, it doesn't even deliver on the frame rate side, failing to improve upon the Final Fantasy XVI demo and staying consistently below the target 60 frames per second threshold during exploration. However, the 60 FPS target is indeed reached during combat, which is when the resolution drops to its lowest. Still, playing with quality mode is recommended due to the far superior image quality,
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