Review: Final Fantasy 16 is an incredible action game that doesn’t quite deliver the RPG heritage

videogameschronicle.com:

‘Legendary’ is a term that’s thrown around in the video game industry far too frequently for its relatively short existence.

Although storied, due to the rapidly changing nature of the medium, plenty of titans of the early days of the medium remain as firm in the public consciousness as they once did.

Unlike plenty of contemporaries that have either been lost to irrelevance, Final Fantasy is a totemic franchise and one that seems to be able to weather any storm. Rarely outside of Nintendo’s stable of unimpeachable giants has anything in gaming maintained such staying power for over 30 years.

With Final Fantasy 16, Square has developed a game with the swagger and show-stopping confidence, even if it won’t please every fan that’s been on the journey so far.

Set in the world of Valisthea, Final Fantasy 16 follows Clive Rosfield as he attempts to atone for a catastrophe in his youth that saw his family ripped apart and marked him an outcast.

The game is very clearly narratively and aesthetically inspired by Game of Thrones, but aside from in the early game when things get somewhat bogged down in names and places, Final Fantasy 16’s story is engagingly told, with some central mysteries that are built frequently to great reveals. It threads the needle between interpersonal melodrama and screen-filling excess perfectly, at least in the game’s main story content.

Final Fantasy 16 is an action RPG that leans far heavier in the action department than it does the RPG. With an all-new combat system helmed by Devil May Cry veteran Ryota Suzuki, it’s the best the series has ever played by some distance.

It’s a bonafide action game that may not sit mechanically at the top table with like likes of Bayonetta and Ninja Gaiden, but the fact that