Final Fantasy XVI (16)

I dunno, I felt like 7R in particular was lousy with bosses where you could only do damage if you filled the break gauge. The whole thing became a slog and turned me off the whole game.

I really couldn't be bothered with 13. I don't mind linearity - 10 was nearly as linear and I love that game - but the lack of any towns or NPC's, and a cast I didn't find particularly interesting, meant I've never got past a dozen hours or so.



I'm actually not too fussed about the playing as other characters thing.

The combat looks very “press a button and watch cool shit happen” rather than an actual action combat game with combos and shit.

I give it a meh.

I hope that's not the case, although the accessibility options suggest they'll give you the tools to do this.

Being totally honest it's the visuals that I'm drawn to, if the story and gameplay are half decent I'll be happy.

Shame this and Zelda are released so close together.

As someone who has never played anything but FF demos and they've not really been my thing I watched the SoP and thought maybe this will finally be one for me. The sheer insanity of the Kaiju stuff was eye opening.

Think the facial animation is a bit lacking though but maybe I shouldn't compare everything to HFW.

No controllable party members sounds bad on paper until you realise that it if the combat has even a little resemblance of DMC combat then adding controllable party members to the mix would be too much. You have a dog that can do commands, that's good enough for me. Don't think the FF15 comparison is fair as that game was just 'Hold down circle to win' for every fight, looking and feeling exceptionally floaty. If anything, I'd say they took a bit of inspiration from Nier Automata in combat and offering grand setpieces that play like different games entirely.

To be clear, when I say controllable party members I mean having the option to switch to them, not even necessarily during combat just in general. I'd obviously not want to force character switching on anyone, and actually giving orders to two or three extra people at once while keeping up with DMC style combat would indeed be ridiculous.

pierrepressure mentioned that if the AI is good then it's fine. I can agree with that to a point, but the footage shown didn't exactly reassure me that the AI party members could keep up with what you could do. Again though, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

At the end of the day, that's far from my biggest concern about the gameplay. I've played plenty of games with meme-y party AI or no party at all and enjoyed them just fine. Most of my hangups I can probably only decide on one way or the other after hands-on experience anyway, which is why I'm really hoping for a demo sometime.

It was mostly a comment on how, despite having to add that option in two games post-release already (so I can only guess there was demand for it, otherwise why bother) they still didn't just add it from the start here, inviting the same complaints again. Only time will tell if my concerns are founded or not, and I certainly hope they aren't and this turns out awesome

Didn't they confirm it had 'gold' for the June release a month or so ago?

Foolishly I am thinking about pre-ordering.

Yeah, went gold on 31st March - Yoshida specifically mentioned 16 going gold an hour before he presented the FF14 live letter that day.

Can't say I'll miss chocobo racing. Seven remake was pretty bare bones in terms of side content and didn't suffer for it.

The cool thing about 10 is that, whilst it was very linear, it was also nearly entirely connected - there's a few areas you can't return too, but if you want you can pretty much run all the way from the last boss to the start of the games, with only a couple of ferries required. That gave it a really good sense of scale and felt more like a real world.

13 felt like a series of disconnected corridors.

I'm not too bothered by the lack of mini-games in 16, most of the times I've just ended up ignoring those. And some have just been bad.

I remember at the time the devs of XIII said they took inspiration from Call of Duty of all things in order of presenting the story. Except COD usually has some shit going on in the background, maybe a set piece or two, which was something that wasn't there in XIII.

And let's be real, XIII's story is pretty bad. Even XV, which is clearly rushed at the second half of the game onwards feels better.

Demo goes up at some point today apparently. Can save your progress for the full release.

It's up!