cashew | FF16 is a really confused game

So, I'm watching FF16 cutscenes at the moment (because I'm curious what the director of FF14 would do with a single player RPG) and everything I was dreading is coming true. The sidequest system is terribly implemented, the storytelling is utterly incoherent, and thematically the story is just so utterly devoid of anything interesting to say it's kind of painful.

Of course, I haven't actually finished the story yet, so we'll see how things go, but at the moment, I'm kind of really annoyed at the handling of the world building and the extremely questionable themes at the foundation of the story. At first, I thought this was going to be a more character-centric Final Fantasy entry, a deviation from the more allegorical storytelling that FF series usually favors. But, as the story drags on (and boy does the plot drag thanks to a terrible sidequest system and incoherent timeskips), I'm starting to get more and more skeptical about where the story is going.

To get to the specifics: a core part of the FF16 story is about building a world that uses magically gifted people as slaves. Then the story goes on to show you how terribly cruel people are to these enslaved magic users and how there's an entrenched dehumanization of people with magical powers. The problem is that this is nonsense. Slavery, specifically chattel slavery, reached institutional stability through othering. The idea is that a certain group is the "other" based on an arbitrary tribal line: race, ethnicity, nation, whatever — and that allows the rest of society to think of the othered people as objects and deprive them of their personhood. However, in order for enslavement to work, the othering divide has to be unambiguous and difficult to overcome. If the "other" can randomly pop up in any tribe, then the denial of personhood would constantly be questioned. This in turn threatens the stability of slavery as an insitution, because once you start seeing a slave as a person rather than an object, it becomes ethically impossible to justify enslavement. Such questioning would risk the stability of the ruling class (the "master") because they can no longer justify the denial of personhood to the out-group.

Now, in FF16, the story clumsily tries to show how "mean" people are to the enslaved magic users, as though people being "mean" is the reason for slavery and not because of, y'know, political and economical convenience. Then, the story further muddles its political message by showing how the "masters" suddenly turn friendly once they learn the slave belongs to an influential person. This is hilariously bullshit, because while this is how people act to servants (who — while are considered of a lower caste — are still human), this is not how people treat slaves. Slaves are objects, devoid of personhood and humanity. Will you treat someone's car with more courtesy just because it belongs to a rich person? I mean, you'll definitely be more careful not to scratch or dent it, but you're not going to suddenly be polite to a car. The same is with slaves, because that's what enslavement entails: society has agreed that slaves are not people.

What's worse is that FF16 proceeds to show the enslaved liking the good masters and wanting to remain enslaved to their good masters; it's only the mean masters who makes them want to run away. This is...I have no words to describe how immensely stupid this is, because, just in case there's people who are still confused out there, slavery is bad due to owning people like objects, not due to having mean masters. How are we in the 21st century and this basic concept is still unclear? Owning people is immoral, regardless of how well you treat them.

So...yeah. I have very little faith in FF16 right now. At least I didn't splurge $500 on a PS5 and $70 on the game. I'm so very turned off by modern gaming right now.