Both XV and XVI forced my hand in dropping them roughly halfway through, but I’ll give XV this, it didn’t seemed to be ashamed of being part of a RPG series. XVI’s RPG elements, the ones that are even there, are so barebones that it’s honestly insulting to fans of this RPG series. It’s the fucking Paper Mario: Sticker Star of the Final Fantasy series.
Cid (and we all know what happens there) and the music are the only noteworthy things in XVI. Everything else is so lackluster. Jill? Barely any character agency. Gameplay? Almost every Platinum Games and Devil May Cry and such are better than this weak attempt at a character action game. Party system? Pretty much non-existent, and the game looked for any flimsy excuse to have Clive alone anyway. Exploration? Oh yes, a few Gil and crafting materials you have already have a massive overload of that you don’t need, yaaaaaaaay. Villains? Underdeveloped. Also, I love seeing several awesome-looking locales in the distance or in a cutscene and then the game telling me to go fuck myself if I actually wanted to go there myself. Worldbuilding? Shit, and no I’m not going to a part of the base to read a book that explains everything, none of the other FFs had this issue. For fucks sake, even the map doesn’t properly label countries and such.
Also, Clive’s personal character story is so questionably similar to Velvet’s personal character story in Tales of Berseria, including having several plot twists be near identical, but Velvet’s character story and twists were handled FAR better, in fact those plot twists in XVI were so incompetently handled I assumed there was going to be another twist to justify it, but no, the XVI writers were just that shit at their job.
Give me this revenge-obsessed lead over the poor man’s substitute any day of the week.