#and-i-never-found-anything-to-do-with-all-those-crafting-supplies-i-kept-finding — Public Fediverse posts

I’ve finished playing Final Fantasy XVI after completing the storyline and all side quests and hunts. It was a visually-stunning but stiltingly-animated JRPG romp with a more adult tone but childish treatment of themes and characters that ultimately satisfied mostly on the back of its real-time action battle system. Spoilers follow.

This is my Active Time Lore Appreciation Paragraph. I will hear nothing bad said about Active Time Lore as the ability to pause any cutscene at any time and be able to remind myself what the heck is going on is invaluable to me and anyone else who can’t devote hours every day to keep a game fresh in the mind. Plus, it helps flesh out the things that no character would ever say but might be bloody interesting to know, like the symbolism of the Sanbreque Imperial Flower gobbin. There’s always a tension in high fantasy between building a world Not Like Our Own but having to make it comprehensible to an audience that only knows our own world. Add in a visual show-don’t-tell medium like video games, and your narrative lens is almost exclusively through characters that already know everything about their world. You can dump in an amnesiac or isekai in a high schooler to give yourself someone to explain the weird and interesting stuff to… or, if, like Final Fantasy XVI, the narrative doesn’t want that, you can, like Final Fantasy XVI, be careful to keep the fantasy word salad to a minimum while providing backstory via Active Time Lore. Very nice.

This is my Vivienne’s Table Appreciation Paragraph. When at your Act 2 hideout you can review the entire cast in relation to each other and the map as it currently sits with motions of important characters and forces. So outstandingly helpful for all the same reasons as Active Time Lore.

A pity I never actually needed either of them.

The story and themes of Final Fantasy XVI are kinda boring. You’re the chosen one who falls from a privileged position to one of an oppressed class who then discovers that oppression is bad, actually. Through a mentor figure you are given an opportunity to fight back for yourself and your fellow people, but in no way that upsets the status quo that resulted in the existing power dynamic. You have a romantic subplot in which you are the subject and she is the object. Nobles (as in bloodlines) are noble (except for the evil one), and bloodlines are the best way to supply the right to lead (except for the evil one who is destroyed by it). In the final boss fight you kill god.

You know, the usual.

It keeps feeling like it wants to say something. It wants to liken crystals to oil, or something. It wants to liken the subhuman classification and treatment of Bearers to slavery or the treatment of indigenous peoples. It wants to liken the Blight to climate change. …but maybe that’s me wishing it had the will to say anything about anything at all, as there’s certainly nothing I saw in the text that would suggest this. Which is disappointing.

And it’s not afraid to treat the audience maturely. (And I don’t mean the sideboob and abattoir’s amount of gore.) It’s willing to supply two philosophies at odds with each other and not immediately resolve which one is “better”, most notably when the Templar-equivalent researchers sacrifice their brethren instead of the mission and Clive is all angry about it. Unresolved tension between schools of thought! Like maybe there isn’t a clear answer to every conflict?

Except that the mechanics of the game really hold it down. With no branching narrative, there’s no choices of meaning. With nothing but a sword, there’s no way to choose diplomacy or intrigue or cleverness to resolve things that are needed to progress. It is a fun sword to swing, mind: you spend an awful lot of time inside the battle system and it does satisfy. Attacks and abilities land solidly, enemy designs are sufficiently varied to keep it interesting, bosses hit like a dumptruck only after obvious windups. It’s fun in that realtime battle way: can you read and react in time. But when the battle is done it is sorely disappointing to be shown that not all bandits are bad, actually… and then immediately have more battles with bandits where you kill them really really dead (well, maybe they don’t die. There’s no clarity about whether “defeated” or “slain” actually means dead.).

What isn’t disappointing is the visual fidelity. The landscapes and humans are very well modeled and textured. Clive’s hair is really pretty, and moves exceedingly well. The draw distance appears infinite, and I only found one vantage point where the grass tiled diagonally: the rest of the wild and built world looked and felt like it had some supreme attention paid to it. (Except the water. Water’s hard. Though Horizon: Forbidden West had better water.)

The performance-capture-driven character animation is also a visual treat. Expressions, emotions, tiny gestures… the performance-capture cutscenes are well-directed and acted with motions and emotions small and large expressed exceedingly well in most cases. Jill checks her boot for mud just before the akhashic marlboro (sorry, they’re called “morbol” now) fight. Leaders wishing for deniability hide their mouths when talking. They paid attention, folks.

But there’s a sharp decline in animation fidelity once you’re out of performance capture. At my count there are three conversation systems: performance-capture cutscene, lip-flapping (though it’s clear the engine’s trying to match mouths to phonemes, it’s failing), and shopkeepers (who only voice the first line. You get to read the rest). None of them support branching dialogues. All but the first are really awful to look at, especially coming from Horizon: Forbidden West, let alone The Last of Us: Part II. Especially when they use a lower-fidelity system for Important Story Moments. Especially when the writing is so gosh-darn wordy that I can cut off characters mid-line and the same information is conveyed. For a game with nothing to say, it spends a lot of time saying it.

And it’s bonkers that they got the water reflections around the hideout so wrong and specifically turn the camera to frame them on the elevator. And how their inverse kinematics never seem to place people’s feet actually on the surfaces they’re standing on.

The voice acting is most excellent, though. You can really hear the cast giving it their all, and Clive has some truly emotional scenes that are sold convincingly (even if sometimes the animations don’t live up). Which is why it’s disappointing that Ultima can’t seem to decide whether to pronounce the ‘u’ in Mythos.

The score was nice. Maybe over-orchestrated for how thin the story and setting turned out to be… but maybe they were playing for the concept over the execution. No one told them they didn’t need to bring their A game and their forty-voice choir.

I still like it better than the XIII sequels. I like that they told a whole story, unlike XV. I like that they’re trying to age their series with its audience. I like that they kept chocobos and the victory fanfare and sixteen-bit sprites for some menu stuff. I really liked Cid.

I was disappointed that the visual fidelity couldn’t be supported at framerate. I couldn’t unsee how bad the lip-sync and water was. And worst of all, I can’t forgive that they had this world and cast and budget to say something and chose to not.

Recommended for fans of Final Fantasy and other RPGs that don’t have their hopes set too high.

https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2024/04/05/so-ive-finished-final-fantasy-xvi/

#andINeverFoundAnythingToDoWithAllThoseCraftingSuppliesIKeptFinding #finalFantasy #sif #soIVeFinished #videoGame

I’ve finished playing Final Fantasy XVI after completing the storyline and all side quests and hunts. It was a visually-stunning but stiltingly-animated JRPG romp with a more adult tone but childish treatment of themes and characters that ultimately satisfied mostly on the back of its real-time action battle system. Spoilers follow.

This is my Active Time Lore Appreciation Paragraph. I will hear nothing bad said about Active Time Lore as the ability to pause any cutscene at any time and be able to remind myself what the heck is going on is invaluable to me and anyone else who can’t devote hours every day to keep a game fresh in the mind. Plus, it helps flesh out the things that no character would ever say but might be bloody interesting to know, like the symbolism of the Sanbreque Imperial Flower gobbin. There’s always a tension in high fantasy between building a world Not Like Our Own but having to make it comprehensible to an audience that only knows our own world. Add in a visual show-don’t-tell medium like video games, and your narrative lens is almost exclusively through characters that already know everything about their world. You can dump in an amnesiac or isekai in a high schooler to give yourself someone to explain the weird and interesting stuff to… or, if, like Final Fantasy XVI, the narrative doesn’t want that, you can, like Final Fantasy XVI, be careful to keep the fantasy word salad to a minimum while providing backstory via Active Time Lore. Very nice.

This is my Vivienne’s Table Appreciation Paragraph. When at your Act 2 hideout you can review the entire cast in relation to each other and the map as it currently sits with motions of important characters and forces. So outstandingly helpful for all the same reasons as Active Time Lore.

A pity I never actually needed either of them.

The story and themes of Final Fantasy XVI are kinda boring. You’re the chosen one who falls from a privileged position to one of an oppressed class who then discovers that oppression is bad, actually. Through a mentor figure you are given an opportunity to fight back for yourself and your fellow people, but in no way that upsets the status quo that resulted in the existing power dynamic. You have a romantic subplot in which you are the subject and she is the object. Nobles (as in bloodlines) are noble (except for the evil one), and bloodlines are the best way to supply the right to lead (except for the evil one who is destroyed by it). In the final boss fight you kill god.

You know, the usual.

It keeps feeling like it wants to say something. It wants to liken crystals to oil, or something. It wants to liken the subhuman classification and treatment of Bearers to slavery or the treatment of indigenous peoples. It wants to liken the Blight to climate change. …but maybe that’s me wishing it had the will to say anything about anything at all, as there’s certainly nothing I saw in the text that would suggest this. Which is disappointing.

And it’s not afraid to treat the audience maturely. (And I don’t mean the sideboob and abattoir’s amount of gore.) It’s willing to supply two philosophies at odds with each other and not immediately resolve which one is “better”, most notably when the Templar-equivalent researchers sacrifice their brethren instead of the mission and Clive is all angry about it. Unresolved tension between schools of thought! Like maybe there isn’t a clear answer to every conflict?

Except that the mechanics of the game really hold it down. With no branching narrative, there’s no choices of meaning. With nothing but a sword, there’s no way to choose diplomacy or intrigue or cleverness to resolve things that are needed to progress. It is a fun sword to swing, mind: you spend an awful lot of time inside the battle system and it does satisfy. Attacks and abilities land solidly, enemy designs are sufficiently varied to keep it interesting, bosses hit like a dumptruck only after obvious windups. It’s fun in that realtime battle way: can you read and react in time. But when the battle is done it is sorely disappointing to be shown that not all bandits are bad, actually… and then immediately have more battles with bandits where you kill them really really dead (well, maybe they don’t die. There’s no clarity about whether “defeated” or “slain” actually means dead.).

What isn’t disappointing is the visual fidelity. The landscapes and humans are very well modeled and textured. Clive’s hair is really pretty, and moves exceedingly well. The draw distance appears infinite, and I only found one vantage point where the grass tiled diagonally: the rest of the wild and built world looked and felt like it had some supreme attention paid to it. (Except the water. Water’s hard. Though Horizon: Forbidden West had better water.)

The performance-capture-driven character animation is also a visual treat. Expressions, emotions, tiny gestures… the performance-capture cutscenes are well-directed and acted with motions and emotions small and large expressed exceedingly well in most cases. Jill checks her boot for mud just before the akhashic marlboro (sorry, they’re called “morbol” now) fight. Leaders wishing for deniability hide their mouths when talking. They paid attention, folks.

But there’s a sharp decline in animation fidelity once you’re out of performance capture. At my count there are three conversation systems: performance-capture cutscene, lip-flapping (though it’s clear the engine’s trying to match mouths to phonemes, it’s failing), and shopkeepers (who only voice the first line. You get to read the rest). None of them support branching dialogues. All but the first are really awful to look at, especially coming from Horizon: Forbidden West, let alone The Last of Us: Part II. Especially when they use a lower-fidelity system for Important Story Moments. Especially when the writing is so gosh-darn wordy that I can cut off characters mid-line and the same information is conveyed. For a game with nothing to say, it spends a lot of time saying it.

And it’s bonkers that they got the water reflections around the hideout so wrong and specifically turn the camera to frame them on the elevator. And how their inverse kinematics never seem to place people’s feet actually on the surfaces they’re standing on.

The voice acting is most excellent, though. You can really hear the cast giving it their all, and Clive has some truly emotional scenes that are sold convincingly (even if sometimes the animations don’t live up). Which is why it’s disappointing that Ultima can’t seem to decide whether to pronounce the ‘u’ in Mythos.

The score was nice. Maybe over-orchestrated for how thin the story and setting turned out to be… but maybe they were playing for the concept over the execution. No one told them they didn’t need to bring their A game and their forty-voice choir.

I still like it better than the XIII sequels. I like that they told a whole story, unlike XV. I like that they’re trying to age their series with its audience. I like that they kept chocobos and the victory fanfare and sixteen-bit sprites for some menu stuff. I really liked Cid.

I was disappointed that the visual fidelity couldn’t be supported at framerate. I couldn’t unsee how bad the lip-sync and water was. And worst of all, I can’t forgive that they had this world and cast and budget to say something and chose to not.

Recommended for fans of Final Fantasy and other RPGs that don’t have their hopes set too high.

https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2024/04/05/so-ive-finished-final-fantasy-xvi/

#andINeverFoundAnythingToDoWithAllThoseCraftingSuppliesIKeptFinding #finalFantasy #sif #soIVeFinished #videoGame