Final Fantasy XVI’s accessibility features come at an unfortunate cost

theverge.com:

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

With Final Fantasy XVI’s new, action-focused combat scheme comes a new suite of tools that assist with making that combat easier. These tools were billed as the game’s accessibility features but weren’t tied to a menu setting; rather, they were special rings you could equip that were already in your inventory at the game’s start. When equipped, each of the five rings assisted with one facet of the game’s combat.

I loved this approach to Final Fantasy’s combat. Though the series hasn’t featured turn-based combat since Final Fantasy X, a lot of players — myself included — have been slow to adjust to the series’ action-RPG pivot. These rings, then, feel like not only an assistive tool to help players with different levels of abilities but also a way to ease in folks who want to play Final Fantasy but can’t quite manage the breakneck pace of the game’s combat.

However, while the rings are undoubtedly a step in the right direction, they are no substitute for making a game with real accessibility features. And the rings themselves present a different kind of problem as they punish players who use them.

There are five “accessibility rings” in total that are in your inventory when you start the game. The Ring of Timely Strikes simplifies Clive’s wealth of attack combos into a single button press, and the Ring of Timely Assistance automatically issues commands for Clive’s pet companion, Torgal. The Ring of Timely Focus slows down time right before Clive will be hit with an attack, giving the player a bigger window to execute a dodge, while the Ring of Timely Evasion automatically