Maybe a content warning on this one for discussion of a scene that heavily allegorizes sexual assault.
So even though I won’t technically get to this game in this project for a hot minute, I figured I would still talk briefly about my experiences playing Final Fantasy XVI, which I just finished doing.
I started playing FFXVI in late November after my birthday, and it has taken me a little over a month, or 77 hours, to complete according to Steam. Since this is the title – it and the reception to it – that catalyzed the whole project, I was a little bit nervous going in. I was also unsure if I would actually even finish the game, as I don’t technically have a computer beefy enough to play it, and no PlayStation 5 is incoming in my near future. I subscribed to GeForce NOW, and while the game was playable on this service I can’t say I had the most wonderful time with it; I was constantly fighting network lag, stuttering and Nvidia’s prohibitively short inactivity timer, which would sometimes start counting down in the middle of cutscenes and almost invariably logged me out if I stepped away for longer than a few minutes.
Charitably I would describe FFXVI as a well-meaning game that took liberal influence from Game of Thrones and other sort of hyper-“realistic” “prestige” media; uncharitably I would say it’s a fucking hateful mess whose redeeming qualities are only present in spite of everything the game does to be as awful as possible. Somewhere in the middle is where I’ve found myself lately, especially as I’ve been nearing the end of the game: Final Fantasy XVI starts off incredibly dour, finds something nice to latch onto and build some extra scaffolding with in the middle, and then dispenses with all worldly concerns entirely in the final act. It still holds onto some mean-spirited embers as the credits roll, and then the post-credits scene kind of just falls flat entirely.
The “Magic Users-as-a-Racialized Minority” thing sucks. It also doesn’t have a whole lot of gas, especially when Clive and Crew’s focus shifts midway through from “liberating Bearers from their specific oppressions, namely chattel slavery” to “liberating all of Valisthea from the oppression of the Mothercrystals in a mostly-symbolic, bootstraps-ish way.” That said, its presence hangs over the game from start to finish like a stink cloud, largely buoyed along by the echoes of that one interview Naoki Yoshida did where he talked about how he didn’t want to put any people of color in his fantasy Medieval Europe, because of the implications—and then proceeded to include an area that looks an awful lot like the Middle East and Northern Africa in the game, populated entirely by white people, and then decided to make the Welsh-accented far-Northerners that only feature in the game’s second DLC a couple shades darker than everyone else…. but I digress. Leanne at Zweiteturm goes into this much more comprehensively.
The thing that bowls me over the most about Final Fantasy XVI is the way it handles women. Casual – and even blatant – misogyny is nothing new in the Final Fantasy franchise’s history, but the series is just as well-known for having incredible, nuanced and complex women characters, like Yuna and Terra, Princess Garnet and – of course – Lightning Farron. Just about every woman character in FFXVI is objectified, brutalized, instrumentalized as an asset for Clive’s use, and – even up until the very end – sidelined for our special boy.
These were criticisms I’d heard from the minute the game came out, but it wasn’t until I witnessed the extent of the brutality with my own eyes did I actually understand how wretched this game is when it comes to women. Our first post-intro encounter with Jill Warrick, the Dominant of Shiva and soon-to-be Clive’s closest companion, is watching Clive beat the shit out of her with his sword and injure her so extensively it takes several in-game days for her to wake up – at which time she just fully forgives Clive and agrees to go with him on his little penance quest. And then there’s the appalling moment when Clive’s “Mythos” powers awaken for the first time, and he “inadvertently” rips the essence of Garuda from an unwilling Benedikta Harman. The scene where this happens is one of the most unsettling scenes of this nature I’ve seen in any game – and it’s followed up by a scene where some bandits are implied to attempt to sexually assault her, resulting in her mind breaking and the last vestiges of Eikonic power in her going berserk.
This whole sequence of scenes fucking sucked, I hated seeing them, I hated playing them, but mostly, I hated how it basically went uncommented on. like ah yeah, damn. sometimes this shit just happens. It is what it is. Oh word??? Fuck off. Everything else kind of pales in terms of obscenity, but echoes of this utter disregard abound.
To the game’s narrow credit, the tone does lighten after the five-year timeskip between Act One and Act Two. I found a large chunk of this section – mostly just missions to dismantle Mothercrystals interspersed with side quests to improve the Hideaway, Clive’s secret base and the haven for the Bearer resistance – to be perfectly pleasant and a marked improvement on Clive’s whole personality and demeanor. Chasing materials for Hideaway botanists to improve their de-Blighting work, doing favors for the blacksmith and shopkeeper, Blackthorne and Charon, respectively – it’s nice in a mindless sort of way that Final Fantasy XIV sidequests have been. But more than that, it’s the acknowledgement that Clive has more to care about than just himself now that really makes a difference in likability pre- and post-timeskip.
The end of Act Two into Act Three basically fully removes all mundane concerns from the chessboard. Instead of giving a shit about the plight of Bearers, or navigating the complex, volatile and shifting national dynamics as the world plunges into chaos, our attention is fully diverted toward Ultima, the game’s “divine” extradimensional “True Bad Guy.” I don’t want to be mean, but it’s very hard to give a shit about Ultima’s plan to destroy humanity, because, in spite of all his access to incomprehensible technologies and boundless knowledge and power, he’s as short-sighted and provincial as any garden-variety idiot villager we confronted over Bearer treatment in Act One. Facing him is like facing Sephiroth if Sephiroth was also just President Shinra. And so as we’re carried along to the end, everyone says their goodbyes, the protagonists make appropriate sacrifices, and the world is saved. Aether, Magick, Bearers and Dominants are removed entirely from the world, which is allowed to bloom back into a lush garden, and the events of the game are written up into a story by a major character under the title “Final Fantasy.” And thus does the age of the crystals pass into myth.
Cool, I guess.
I’m sure I’ll have more specific “Children of Lightning” thoughts about FFXVI when I get closer to talking about it in the project timeline, but I will say this: I really hope that if they have FFXVII in the works, they go in a different, more positive direction, and make a game that isn’t just “Grimdark Sony Prestige Drama” but with the Final Fantasy branding slapped on it again. I know they’ll never go back to ATB or turn-based combat, but I hope that whatever they end up cooking with in the future is more rich and rewarding than this, a system that makes Nier: Automata‘s combat look like you need an engineering degree to use. I hope the next Final Fantasy game doesn’t treat women like shit or use hamfisted allegories for racial violence. Til then, I’m going to play something a bit more lighthearted, like Fantasian: Neo Dimension.
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