Anyway... I'm like 67% into FF XVI but... I fucking hate this game but I'm gonna finish it. It's an extremely bland, focused tested piece of garbage with soulless characters who are boring and uninteresting. Clive and Jill are the two worst Final Fantasy characters I've ever seen, her entire character arc to kill those who made her commit war crimes was the most tragic thing I've seen in fiction in years and not tragic in a good way. This game has zero fun and has literally no Japanese influence whatsoever.
The fact Yoshi-P thinks JRPGs are a derogatory term has sealed his fate for me, stick to getting money from FF XIV kiddies because single player focused isn't your forte. The side quests are boring, the cutscenes have zero life, the voice acting from Clive is monotonous maybe the worst FF protagonist by a clear mile. The only shred of hope and quality was Ralph Ineson as Cid who as far as I'm concerned is the best Cid in Final Fantasy, brought a charisma and sense of fun to the role.
The fact the game just info dumps when your hound turns into a super hound goes to show the level of quality writing in this game. Show don't tell, but it just tells you everything. Actual narrative fail 101. Also the Eikon battles are just 2009 game design to the max, turret section, on rails running section, basic smash X to attack then dodge rinse and repeat gameplay. Masayoshi Soken has been caught plagiarizing once and that Titan fight definitely feels lifted from a Nine Inch Nails song on top of the battle theme sounding similar to FF VIII. Dude is clearly a hack.
I mostly concur with your assessment of FFXVI, but I strongly disagree with the bolded section. Part of the issue here is that Yoshida went for a "Western" feel without truly understanding what that means. He brought onboard a bunch of people who worked on "The Last Remnant" (the last S-E attempt at a "Western RPG") but ended making many of the same mistakes that doomed that title. Recording the English dialogue first and then re-adjusting the Japanese script based on the English localization was good (it's why Koji Fox gets a writer's credit) but using Japanese actors to do the mocap ruins the whole exercise.
It's the same issue with FFVIIR - who actually used the same mocap actors. Jill and Tifa are coded as Western women, one modern and the other medieval, but both sit like the Japanese ladies with whom I used to take the ferry from Aomori to Hakodate - legs firmly placed together, back fully erect, almost like
seiza. Their body language is also all wrong, with the usual cutesy, "teehee" gestures one sees in Anime. That's not a problem in highly stylized games with an anime look, but it's excruciating when done with photorealistic models.
The script is extremely try-hard as well. I almost threw my controller thru the TV when
Joshua exclaims "
CONFOUND IT! The hour is much too late" in that plummy British accent. There are better ways of going for a medieval feel than this. Wish they'd brought back Tom Slattery and Joseph Reeder, who translated FFT: War of the Lions. What they did with that script was magic:
"T'is your faith and birth that wrong you, not I." is such a perfect line, encapsulating all the major themes that run through the game: blood and destiny, the wretchedness of a rigidly class-based society, etc. Nothing like this happens in FFXVI. The tone is all over the place. One moment Clive is like "
But to die according to one's own truth... our world shall not allow us this privilege." and the next he's like
"I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" People did curse in the middle ages, but if you're going to use "CONFOUND IT!" as a curse, might as well go all the way.
I think one can see that they had the seeds of something truly great in XVI - it starts out pretty strongly. But it gets sillier and sillier as time goes by. I really enjoyed my first 4h with it, but the narrative pacing is uneven, and the stiltedness of the dialogue soon starts grating.
I have a soft spot for VIII though
