I thought it was one of the worse games I’ve spent time on in the last few years. I’ll repeat some of your points below for sure.
The pros for me were:
-Backdrops were gorgeous.
-Music was top-tier.
-Technically well-designed (I only run into 1-2 very minor bugs during my playthrough and had no performance issues).
The cons were basically everything else.
Story:
-The game story lacks cohesion. There are plot threads that get dropped randomly and never picked up again. Some examples here are: (a) the medicine girl is a recurring character that has no real purpose (really, anyone could’ve healed Dion at the end), (b) the Fallen are just kind of around but stop being developed after a certain point, © so much of the game is spent on the plight of Bearers yet that gets completely side-lined in the final act, (d) Leviathan is missing for some reason, (e) there is a lack of characterization for the Eikons considering how important they are to the game’s premise…they just kind of exist and that’s all you need to care about. These are just off the top of my head.
-There are other plot holes too. For example, when Jill is kidnapped Clive and Joshua just say “oh it’s cool, we still feel Shiva so we know she’s alive.” If that’s the case, why did Jill and Cid not feel the Phoenix the entire time Joshua was thought to be dead? The game also makes a big deal about how turning into Shiva is harming Jill’s body and Cid is shown to be turning to stone because he primed Ramuh too many times. Yet when you see Jill naked, her body is totally pristine for some reason. Joshua spent years gathering info on Ultima yet has no further info to give once he joins up with Clive. Early-game Joshua also conveniently wears the same hooded outfit as Ultima for some reason that’s never explained.
-Overall, the story relies on too many overdone anime tropes instead of going for something original. A lot of the plot can be guessed before it happened (e.g., Cid dying and the hideout being destroyed in that one mission were not shockers at all). Plot points like Barnabas being too powerful make no sense because Clive just goes and beats him the third time despite not really being that much more powerful (yes, he got access to Shiva but the game doesn’t really communicate this being a big power level increase, certainly not to the point where he can completely turn the odds in his favor).
-The ending falls flat too. It’s basically a rehash of the ending to Mass Effect 3.
-The characters are pretty badly written. Cid is retroactively made into a master inventor in the latter half of the game despite it never being mentioned before. Jill doesn’t really do anything noteworthy either. Even the part where she is trying to prove herself, her only purpose ends up being making an ice arena for Clive to fight in. Any characterization doesn’t come until side quests that are literally right before the last boss.
Game Systems:
-I struggle to think of any system in the game that actually worked well. Too much of it felt very half-baked.
-Side quests were almost all terrible and killed the pacing of the game. I recall one moment where Clive says “wow we really need to hurry” (I think this was to save Jill) right as the game opens up like 10 new side quests for Clive to complete. SqEnix already established that some quests are considered urgent quests where you aren’t allowed to free roam, why wasn’t this one? The same issue happens right before the last mission where the game dumps a bunch of side quests on you, sort of killing the momentum of the game. Now, granted, some of those endgame side quests were much better than the early game ones because they actually took the time to characterize the people Clive’s been interacting with the entire game. I just can’t help but feel that they needed to be spaced out better.
-Similarly to the above, being able to teleport to the hideout at almost any point really kills the immersion of story missions. Oh, you’re running into the windstorm to fight Garuda? That’s ok, take some time to teleport across the world to buy more potions.
-The maps themselves are pretty boring too. Sometimes quest objectives are 2 feet away from the quest start point. At some point, I ran through the desert map for like 30 seconds straight without encountering an enemy. The second part of Ash is just an empty field with no points of interest.
-Dungeons are almost all just straight hallways connected to giant rooms where you know the next batch of enemies will spawn. There is minimal opportunity for exploration.
-Stats don’t matter. The game only has 4 stats: damage, stagger, defense, and HP. It’s not clear how much of a practical upgrade a 225 damage weapon is over a 215 damage weapon in terms of killing speed so upgrades don’t even seem that impactful.
-Because of the lack of stats, the gear doesn’t matter because the stat upgrades they provide are so minor. There aren’t a ton of options to the point that I crafted some gear from a quest fairly early on and didn’t find an upgrade until like 10 hours later. Most of the accessories are pitifully weak (e.g., 10% damage to 1/6 of your skills that has a high cooldown).
-Related to the above, the loot also doesn’t matter. Most loot is crafting materials but there is almost nothing to craft so they just end up sitting there. The rest of the loot is stuff like 10 gil when I’m sitting on 400k or potions when I’m at full stock + full HP. Very rarely do you actually find a piece of gear in the wild and when you do, chances are that you already crafted something stronger if you’ve been keeping up with your side quests.
-Party members don’t matter. They don’t do much damage, they don’t have health bars to micromanage, they can’t be equipped with gear, often times they don’t even talk. I couldn’t tell you how many times I forgot that Jill wasn’t following me on a quest. I don’t even know why you have the option to control Torgal because nothing he does feels impactful (for example, compare this to Astral Chain where your pet is an integral part of your combat). I’d rather they just let me add more items in the quick slots that Torgal takes up so that I don’t have to pause the game to use a Stoneskin Potion.
-Trash mobs don’t matter because you can just spam square to get through these fights without taking damage. Often times, I would just use the Phoenix ultimate skill and put down my controller while one-shotting the entire encounter. They give very little in terms of exp/skill points so you can just skip most of these. I ignored basically all open-world mobs and ended my playthrough at level 49 anyway.
-Elite/boss combat really boils down to spamming your Eikon abilities off cooldown because they do so much more damage than your auto attack combos (of which there are almost none). However, since these abilities have long cooldowns, you have very low lows between the high peaks while you wait for your abilities to come back. Most of these encounters play out the same way where you try to stagger the enemy as often as possible and then wail on them while they just sit there.
-Loadout diversity is poor too. Ramuh and Bahamut specials really don’t feel like they belong in an action game, meaning that Phoenix/Garuda/Titan is the optimal combination until you are well into the endgame. The game is also very stingy with skill points and there is not much to upgrade so you can ignore these for most of the game. Mastering abilities doesn’t matter when you don’t really have any other Eikons to mix/match to. By the time you have enough skill points to experiment with mixing up skills, you’re about 90-95% through the game. And at that point, you realize that most skills are just bad anyway so there’s no point in using them.
-Speaking of skills, there’s so much hidden info about them that makes it hard for players to actually make informed decisions. What does 3 star damage mean? What is the cooldown of skills? If I upgrade a skill to “increase the number of hits,” how many more hits am I getting? How many did I get at the base level?
-Overall, the game was just way too easy too. I don’t know why the hard mode is locked behind finishing the game once. Though to be honest, I thought it was such a slog that I probably wouldn’t have finished the game if I had to endure it on a harder difficulty. I think the combat needs a lot more depth to be engaging enough, no matter the difficulty.
Anyway, it’s a competent game, just very lazily put together and poorly thought out. Not sure if their development was rushed or what.
It’s still better than FF15 though…
One other thing that was pretty mind-boggling to me re: accessories was the ones that increase healing. I had a green one from the early game that increased potion healing by 40%. I later realized that it only applied to the “potion” item and not all potions…because I got a purple item that increased the high potion healing by 25%. So (1) that was not clear at all and further goes to show how little thought went toward game clarity and (2) if you did the math, you actually get more total healing from running the green one over the purple. The only time it’s worth it to use the higher level purple accessory is if you’re already using the other one (i.e., use both at the same time). I really don’t think anyone on the dev team did the math on this.
Also, one of the endgame legendary-tier accessories in the game literally increases all damage you deal by 5%. That’s beyond boring. It might have been nice as an early-game drop but it’s literally the best-in-slot endgame items.
Good point re: deus ex…there happens to be a note in a child’s doll that solves all your problems. I forgot about that but I think it was probably one of the single worst plot devices I’ve seen in recent years.
There are definitely ways the game could have made fun gear. For example, gear that makes a Phoenix skill do more damage after you use a Garuda skill. Stuff that helps you synergize your Eikon choices better.
As much as Stranger of Paradise gets memed, it would have been really amazing to see a similar gear/job system in FF16.