The Highs and Lows of FF16's Combat

  The first experience of combat in Final Fantasy XVI, featuring a young Clive training with a wooden sword, gives a small taste of what is to come. You learn all the basic moves that continue to benefit you for the rest of the game: your melee combo, ranged magic attacks, magic bursts, parries, and dodges. The dodges, in particular, were my favorite part of the combat--they feel very responsive and intuitive while still being very challenging, and it always felt very rewarding when you got multiple dodges in a row. The player gets to learn more in the first dungeon, where Torgal, Clive’s trusty canine companion, who can heal Clive and augment his combos with a finisher. (One thing to note is that even at the higher difficulty, the game gives you rings that can do your combos, automatically provide healing with potions, and can complete the Torgal combos without your inputs. I consider this a great move for accessibility, though I question why button remapping was not a possibility if accessibility was a priority for them). This is the core of the combat in FFXVI, and it is overall very fluid, though it does get stale the longer you progress in the game and the more mobs you have to grind through.

What makes this game’s combat special is the Eikonic Abilities. After the introductory portion, Clive has access to abilities of the Eikon Phoenix. You can use points you get after winning battles to unlock and power up more abilities that you can then use in combat. Shift strike, which does not have a cooldown, is a versatile skill I mainly used as a gap closer. The other abilities you unlock do have a cooldown, and I intuited that I should get the hardest hitting abilities to use when enemies are staggered so that they do even more damage. You unlock abilities of more Eikons at critical story junctures.There is a hotbar where you can map a total of six Eikon abilities with cooldowns, along with three of the basic abilities that do not have cooldowns. You can also reset points you put into Eikon abilities to level up and try others instead without any consequences.  I personally enjoyed Megaflare and Odin’s abilities the most, as they changed the gameplay flow significantly. The customization available for those abilities is virtually limitless, a massive upgrade over the equivalent systems in FFX-XV. Additionally, there is a berserker ring that enables the player to do more damage when they execute a Precision Dodge, which made dodging even more satisfying for me. Some of the bosses even had mechanics that didn’t utilize the combat at all, such as Titan and Bahamut, which happened to be my favorite fights; they were very cinematic and thrilling.

By the end of the game, I had an overall decent experience with the combat. It was very forgiving while still being challenging. I appreciated that there were multiple checkpoints during fights, and I felt the need to play as defensively as possible due to the limited potions you can carry (in comparison to FFXV, where I felt that there was no need to play too defensively as you had nearly unlimited access to potions from the beginning). However, I found the mobs tedious, and I didn’t understand the purpose of most of the Eikon abilities. Many game journalists agreed, finding the core combat shallow. With the inevitable comparisons to Devil May Cry, which has received universal praise for its combat, I was curious about how the combat in FFXVI could be pushed further. To my surprise, the Eikon abilities could be used for a variety of combos far beyond what I, or (I assume) the majority of the playerbase, was able to achieve. The issue with XVI’s combat is that it does not incentivize the player to reach deeper into the combat system. You are able to fully complete the game--even at harder difficulties--with a very shallow understanding of the combat without ever realizing that there are more possibilities to have fun with the combat. Especially given that this is not a franchise that typically leans on action, some guidance in the training grounds encouraging more experimentation with combos would have gone a long way in helping people new to the genre have a more enjoyable experience. Additionally, something like the style rank in DMC5 would have not been remiss either. DMC5 prioritizes and encourages move variety through the way it presents its combat, which FFXVI does not do, despite its combat being similarly rich with sufficient knowledge. 

Overall, Final Fantasy 16’s gameplay is a rich blend of series staples and snappy action combat that the majority of its players will only experience on a surface level, which is a shame.