cashew | Tuesday, June 27th, 2023

I'm still not over how annoying FF16 is, so I'm going to drill down to a really tiny, specific issue that sort of illustrates the bigger picture of why FF16 is such a failed single player RPG.

( Cut-tagged for length. )

Conclusion:

FF16 uses narrative choices of MMOs that stem not from storytelling deliberation, but are the unintended results of technical limitations specific to MMOs. In a single player game without an MMO's limitation (persistent world, shared assets, millions of players all at different levels of progression), the narrative could and should have used traditional RPG storytelling tools to convey pertinent world building information without having to resort to stuffing the lore into a free-floating appendix.

At this point, I am reminded of the criticisms toward FF13 for having a lore log. But the difference here is that FF13 is an easily understandable story without ever having to open the lore log. You can find out more about the world, the gods' war, the formation of Cocoon, but it's not important to understanding Lightning's frustrations at being thrust into the role of a guardian before she was ready. Meanwhile, FF16 stumbles awkwardly through a story of Medieval White Europeans coming to grips with "slavery is bad" for the very first time. And the protagonist learns all this through a series of unconnected fetch quests that asks the player to go kill X many killer bees then get berated by those mean, mean slave owners.

Cringe doesn't even being to cover it.