Poll of the Day > My thoughts on the Final Fantasy XVI demo

(+) Yeah! (+)

Demo finally dropped late last night, played it a couple hours ago. So first of all, you all know I'm a big Final Fantasy nerd, I've played all of them, I've been very excited for this game, so I might be a bit biased, but I'll give my honest assessment of what's here. I was playing on graphics mode, with english voice acting.

The demo has two parts to it, but it mostly covers the first couple hours of the game, essentially it's the prologue. It opens very strongly. A lot is going on here, introduction to the characters and world, they do some interesting world building with the branded and using crystals for magic, we get intrigue, secret alliances, sex, and a taste of the conflicts and wars happening across Valisthea, and of course the big Eikons stomping around. It drew me in very quick. Combat is fun, it's quick and snappy, dodging and countering attacks feels good. You can heal with the press of a button, even when you wouldn't think you'd be able to, like being knocked back from an attack. Maybe it's because I have a little bit of experience playing action games like this, but I found the combat to be easy. I never felt the need to equip any timely accessories. I did occasionally get hit, but I never felt like I was in danger of dying. Fighting the random mooks and trash monsters I never really felt challenged, but fighting the big monsters and bosses was a lot of fun and kept me on my toes, and it felt good to chain dodges together, and following it up with a dash and a big attack to stagger the enemy. This is the same team that makes FFXIV, and I could feel it in some fights, with the big glowing aoe markers and big tells and windups. This feels like a very accessible action RPG, and I think that's a good thing. Voice acting I thought was for the most part pretty decent, but sometimes the lip syncing on the models was a bit off.
And actually speaking of the models, the visuals in general I feel are just okay. The character design is there, textures look adequate, but something about the faces looked a little too plasticy. Environments look okay so far, but I could tell the couple of zones I went to were small and I could kinda make out where the map ends and the skybox begins. And yes, this is not a big open world game, or anything like that, maps are distinct loading zones. But loading was quick because it's a PS5 game. Monster design I thought was pretty good, the goblins reminded me of the FF1 goblins. Actually a lot of the stuff I saw reminded me of past FF games, like the castles look like a 3D interpretation of the castles from old 2D FF games, so that's pretty neat. There's two moons in the sky, one small and red. I felt like I was playing Final Fantasy. There was a problem I noticed with the performance though. Towards the end of the demo, I noticed a distinct dip in performance, I noticed some enemies just popped into place, and there were some significant frame drops during a big cinematic boss fight sequence. Maybe these problems don't exist in performance mode, but in graphics mode they were definitely there.
Without going into spoilers, this is a pretty dark game though, pretty violent, also maybe a bit edgy. Some of the cutscenes and battle sequences characters were throwing out the occasional "shit!" or "fuck!" which doesn't really offend me, but it also doesn't really make a game feel mature, you know? Just sounded a bit out of place. I hope they focus a lot on the politics and intrigue, because this was clearly inspired by Game of Thrones, and that's the stuff that made Game of Thrones good in the early years. But I want to see more of the story, I want to see where this is going.
There's also the second part of the demo that opens up after completing the prologue, which takes you several hours further into the game, and lets you play with more Eikonic abilities and loadouts. The fights here are pretty fun, and it made me interested to see what else the combat has to offer. In the launch presentation last night they showed an elite hunt mark and showed a lot of different abilities and customization options and some different playstyles, so I'm curious to try these things out.

In the end, it was a pretty good demo. I got a good 3 hours out of it, which is pretty significant for a demo. Again my biggest gripes are just okay visuals, and the performance problems that only occurred in a specific location. But from what I've seen, I think this will be a good game, not an amazing game. But I'm still excited to play it.

So far do you think it's better than FF7 Remake or FFXV?

Better than XV for sure, want to play the full game before I fully judge it.