Two things about the PlayStation 5 reveal events in 2020 stood out to me: Mark Cerny asking people to send him pictures of their ears for audio development and, a few months later, the reveal of Final Fantasy 16. I don’t know if anything ever came of Cerny’s unusual request, but I did follow every bit of news about Final Fantasy 16 after that. It was the reason I bought a PS5 and even upgraded my age-old monitor. When I finished the game, my impression was, “Yep, that’s a Final Fantasy all right!” and when I started talking to other people about it and reading impressions, I was surprised to find how uncommon that assessment was. Something about Final Fantasy 16 made it somehow worse than other Final Fantasy games. It was a sign of how far the series had fallen. It was uneven, trying too hard, unrecognizable, messy. The thing is, it doesn’t get more Final Fantasy than that. The series’ legacy is one of big risks and failures, but they were easier to accept when they weren’t the Final Fantasy of an entire console generation.
For all its F-bombs and brooding darkness, Final Fantasy 16 isn’t that different from its older siblings. Oh sure, it looks different and plays different. But the philosophy behind most of those differences is entirely in keeping with the way Square Enix made Final Fantasy games for decades — namely, never repeating a central conceit for two games in a row. Final Fantasy 16 ditching the traditional party was a controversial choice that longtime fans decried for cutting out part of Final Fantasy’s identity. It was also a completely natural and expected change after how party-centric Final Fantasy 15 was. Was it the right choice? I don’t think so. Not when the game also presents Jill, from the start, as a co-protagonist with as much reason to fight as Clive, if not more. But it was an understandable change.
Likewise, Final Fantasy 15‘s action system is comparatively stripped back and bare, and that’s what Square aimed to improve with Final Fantasy 16. Whether it’s worth keeping or fit for scrap is irrelevant in that context and is probably something Square Enix wouldn’t even know without at least giving it a try first. Look how the Esper system from Final Fantasy 6 evolved into the AP system in Final Fantasy 7 and then turned into something completely different in Final Fantasy 10. Even Square Enix’s mandate that Final Fantasy 16 be designed with Game of Thrones and a certain kind of Western audience in mind isn’t that far off from how Square approached making Final Fantasy 7 as a (for the time) cinematic spectacle. It just didn’t work as effectively this time around. The important distinction, of course, is that Final Fantasy 7 wasn’t the Final Fantasy for an entire console generation like Final Fantasy 16 was, so it didn’t carry the same weight of expectation and was subject to far less scrutiny.
That makes a big difference, as it’s hardly the first time a risky experiment had less than ideal results. No middle ground exists for Final Fantasy 12‘s gambit system — folks either love it or loathe it — and Final Fantasy 13‘s restrictive, hallway-like world design might make thematic sense, but still presents environments that are boring to navigate. Final Fantasy 2 is just Star Wars, but where you beat your friends up to make them stronger. Final Fantasy 4 forgets Cecil is the main character in the game’s back half and goes a bit silly with Golbez, the villain, not unlike Final Fantasy 16‘s own story shift and surprise villain reveal. Final Fantasy 7 has no idea what its plot is until the last third of the game. Final Fantasy 8 is a mechanical mess. You can go through the entire series one by one and find at least one glaring problem (and probably a lot more) in every game.
It’s not just, “Hey this part is a bit weak, but whatever,” either — like, for example, not clicking with Triple Triad and getting on fine with the rest of Final Fantasy 9. These are deep-rooted imbalances you can’t separate from the game’s identity, and if they were released now, there would (or should) be just as much critical discussion about them as there was about Final Fantasy 16 when it launched.
But in the ’90s and 2000s? Of course Final Fantasy was a trendsetter in a market it helped establish. Of course the noble rogues and moody child-soldiers stood out more than all the weird jank and bizarre storytelling that marched alongside them. There literally was nothing else like Final Fantasy in video games. Even during the SNES era, Square’s teams had years of experience over rivals like Capcom and Bandai Namco, and it showed in the scope and ambition of their games. The PS2 era was replete with RPGs, and some excellent ones at that. But your Tales of the Abysses and Radiant Historias were all missing some element of Final Fantasy‘s ambition and panache. Everyone was still playing catch-up to Square Enix, so its brand image of being the preeminent RPG remained unchallenged. Hence why Sony showed off the PlayStation 3 before the console’s launch by presenting a Final Fantasy 7 tech demo, advertising the idea of the series and not a specific game.
And that was the crucial misstep with the PS5’s launch lead-up, when Sony and Square Enix got caught up in the idea of Final Fantasy and lost sight of what the series is actually like, putting far too much pressure on one game to be what it never could be. When you or I start a Final Fantasy expecting some kind of revelatory epic that puts the olde bards to shame — which, in fairness, is how Square Enix positions the series — it’s a self-defeating exercise. That’s not Final Fantasy. It’s just the memory of an impression that you, and the series, can never recreate again. There are more games from more studios, more visions of what an RPG can be, of how games can tell stories that resonate, of what makes combat fun, of good world design — so much more of everything and so much less time to spend connecting with it. Wasting time and money was always a problem, obviously, but when there’s 10 other, better games you could’ve spent those resources on, the faults of the one you did play stand out a lot more sharply.
Square Enix does need to re-evaluate what Final Fantasy should be. There’s no question of that. But the series’ problems didn’t start or even get much worse with Final Fantasy 16. They’ve been here all along.
