Final Fantasy 16: It looks great! Do I get to play any of it?

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Square Enix as well as the Final Fantasy franchise just generally speaking.

It was one of my first loves FF was, and I feel that a lot of the time when I pick up their latest release I do so in the hopes that they will somehow be able to return me back to what I enjoyed about it so much in the first place. I discovered Final Fantasy in Final Fantasy 2 on the SNES and enjoyed most of their games through the early 2000's where I don't even remember what it was called but it was one of the last ones that had some semblance of turn-based action in it.

These days, and especially in 16, there is nothing turn based about the gameplay at all and this is fine.

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The game follows a story of some sort and the only reason why I say "some sort is because I was forced to sit through about 1.5 episodes of Game of Thrones sort of action while only actually controlling the various characters for a few minutes here and there.

I get that we need to establish the lore and the revenge arc especially on the part of Clive and his brother Joshua but man oh man do they take you out of the action frequently.

Other than the tutorial, which I will admit is done quite well, you don't really take control or even need a controller for most of the first HOUR of gameplay. I mean you don't really even have a choice about which direction you are going to travel in, inside a city, until 40 damn minutes.

Is there really a huge market for things like this? I don't know about you but I actually want to play a game. I always say "if I wanted to watch a movie I would watch a movie."

We are introduced to all the major characters one by one and this is a good thing I guess, but IMO it takes entirely too long and since for the most part you can't skip dialogue line-by-line you have 2 choices: Endure the really slow moving story or have no idea where you are in a space and time. It brings the old meme to mind when I do skip cutscenes.

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we are a full 50 minutes into the game before there is an area that even remotely resembles a video game where you can control which direction you go but even then, this is a linear level that attempts (poorly) to create the illusion of choice. In all actuality there is zero reason why they couldn't just advance you to the first goblin encounter right out of the gate...

And of course there is an extensive cutscene that lets you know that these are goblins and you have to fight them.

The combat is fluid enough and I actually like it. Now if they would just let me do it every now and then. For every minute you spend actually needing to use the controller -and it is intentionally very very easy at this point - you will spend at least 10 minutes watching cinematics that just go on and on and on and on.

At a full 1 hour and 15 minutes into the game you briefly get to control Joshua and he is a magic user of sorts. I really enjoyed this part of it even if it did take me a full movie worth of time to get to this point.

This joy was short lived though because soon after you are put through a cinematic battle that is intentionally very easy to win and then you no longer control Joshua. Maybe you get to do so again later, but I can't really see myself continuing to endure what is estimated to be around 30 hours of so of mostly cinematics.

At around the 2 hour mark you encounter what is the first actual city where you can interact with vendors and upgrade your gear and what not. There are a ton of dialogue options here but great googley moogley the last thing I want at this point is to read and watch optional story elements. It's been 2 hours at this point and I have maybe controlled about 15 minutes of the action.

This is why I don't really like Final Fantasy games anymore and while I would bet that there probably is one hell of a story in there as this is the most "grown up" Final Fantasy that I have ever seen, i'm not going to suffer through 25 hours of cinematics for 2 hours of gameplay.

If you enjoy this sort of adventure I mean you no ill will or criticism, I just don't get it. I don't understand why someone would pay $70 for a really really long movie that lets you use the controller ever now and then.

There are deeper aspects to this game such as customization of your character but I was so annoyed at the point this became an option that I just let the system auto-attribute the points for me. I can't imagine the patience level of someone that would mess around with that especially when it could be several more hours before you ever even get to see what difference it makes.

I'm really happy that this game was free with my PS-Plus account. I swore of Final Fantasy games after I paid full price to be a day-1 player of FF15 and I don't think Square even bothered to finish making that game before they released it.

I think that this sort of thing is for some sort of modern audience that I am not a part of. I will not delete it from my library yet but I found myself groaning on the sofa so much and at one time shouting "f**king get on with it already!"

This is the opposite of what I game for and while I will commend them for their fantastic graphics and great voice acting, go make an anime if that is what you want to do.

To me it feels dumbed down, repetitive, and formulaic