Review: ’Final Fantasy XVI’ Is Still Final Fantasy, With More Blood and Butts
I have seen a chocobo killed in high definition. During a scene early in Final Fantasy XVI, the latest entry to Square Enix’s long-running series of fantasy role-playing games, one of the iconic oversize birds is suddenly struck down with a sword. The Final Fantasy mascot screams a horrible avian scream as it dies, collapsing in a gout of blood and flapping its wings in pitiful death throes. Far from their prior appearances as kart-racing cartoon characters or as chirruping livestock bred in convoluted mini games, the chocobos of XVI are feathery warhorses, as likely to provide characters with rides across the game’s battle-scarred landscapes as they are to end up victims of the story’s frequent massacres.
That first chocobo death is a good example of XIV’s tone. Brutal and nostalgic in equal parts, it seems possessed of a self-conscious drive to dramatically separate itself from its predecessors’ lighter tones with a thick coating of grit and spilled viscera. It may seem, at first, like a labored, Happy Tree Friends–style exercise in “maturing” a series whose main entries typically abstract, sanitize, or simplify the cause and effects of warfare for a young adult audience. And yet, once players have grown accustomed to the game’s grimmer tone, Final Fantasy XVI demonstrates that beneath a patina of blood and brooding, it bears striking similarities to past Final Fantasy games.
After establishing the basic layout of its fictional world through the viewpoint of Clive, hard-bitten member of a magical special forces team on a battlefield assassination mission, XVI flings itself back in time to fill in the protagonist’s backstory. It does so by exploring a formative, traumatic moment from his teenage years. Among the bloodied chocobos of this flashback, there are also soldiers cut down in splashes of gore, political intrigue, and a pivotal scene punctuated by heaving sobs and guttural cries of torment. When the present-day plot resumes, it hardly lets up.
