PS5
Shattering the crystalware
Numbered Final Fantasy games don’t come around often, and the last few single-player ones have been – let’s be honest – abit of a letdown. But if those suffered from the poison of development hell and feature creep, then FFXVI has 99 antidotes stocked to cure those ails. Respecting the series’ history, it moves Final Fantasy forward with twitchy, satisfying real-time combat and impressive performance-led storytelling.
The way FFXVI builds on the RPG behemoth’s legacy is like poetry – it often rhymes. From the map-heavy politicking of Final Fantasy XII to the way the Mothercrystals forming the backbone of Valishthea’s geopolitical climate are explicitly related to the elements that make up the world (and an encroaching blight) like in Final Fantasy V, there’s no mistaking the family resemblance. Yet FFXVI is also a game where you can have your doggo companion knock an enemy spinning into the air for you to teleport-dash up to and slam back into the ground with a plunging sword strike.
CLASH OF THE TITANS
But the pixel-DNA is inescapable. There’s a moment in Final Fantasy IV when hero Cecil arrives in a village of summoners and, tricked by the corrupt king he serves, reduces it to cinders. Encountering a young survivor, he tries to save her only to learn he’s responsible for the death of her mother. The girl loses control, summoning Titan, who levels the area, deforming the overworld and upending the valley with impassable chunks of rock. FFXVI’s opening echoes this, beginning in medias res with protagonist Clive thrown into the midst of a crumbling landscape as Shiva and Titan level a battlefield around him. His Bearer assassin squad, The Bastards, are tasked with taking the ice queen’s head. What was once represented in the abstract by sprites on a very-much-not-to-scale map is now fully realised, throwing us in the middle of jaw-dropping action again and again.
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