Survivor (2009) - I went on a bit of a buying splurge recently and picked up a bunch of Wii games I missed out on back in the day. Since I'm a big Survivor fan I decided to check out the Wii game based on it.
Yeah that was a mistake. The game kind of sucks, sadly. It's structured similarly as the show, where you do a Reward Challenge, an Immunity Challenge (Your victory from the Reward Challenge helps you here btw), and then finally you vote somebody out that doesn't have Immunity. The Challenges are basically just standard goofy Wii gimmick minigames, and voting is pretty self-explanatory. As far as I can tell they don't have Hidden Immunity Idols or other advantages from the show worked in either, which is kind of boring.
The biggest thing that kills it though is that NPC's don't have kind of like, stock character to them. There's no really scheming against them or anything. You could do really something cool if they actually felt even remotely like, real people, but they don't. Survivor Wii ends up being more like a bad Mario Party knockoff than anything that actually feels like Survivor.
Final Fantasy XVI (2023) - Absolutely nothing about this game worked for me. The art style, the combat, the characters, the acting, the music, the story- nothing. It's one of the most nothing experiences I've ever forced myself to finish.
It's difficult to even know where to start with this.
The combat is just low grade Platinum style in vein of NieR: Automata combat except with even less character customization options, boring Platinum style "perfect evades" (It's somewhat similar to dodging in Resident Evil 3 Remake. I think it works alright in that game but I'm not a fan of those kinds of dodges in action RPG's since they tend to mean bosses don't have even remotely interesting attack patterns to learn.), even dinkier combos than Automata's, and you can only have up to six abilities equipped at a time on a cooldown (Mean KH Birth by Sleep, a fucking PSP game, let you have up to 8 equipped at once by the end of the game). On top of all that the enemies are very easy but very tanky and take too long to kill. I don't have a problem with them being easy since FF games are meant for broad audiences, but the the fights themselves are often just a slog. I much prefer combat in Dark Souls or higher difficulty levels of the better Kingdom Hearts games where either you or the boss is going to go down fast. Instead games like FF16 just have you wailing on a dude for 5-10 minutes that probably isn't going to kill you unless you forgot to stock up on Potions or something. It's just not even remotely engaging combat.
Of course there are big "Eikon" fights where you play as the classic FF Summon Ifrit fighting other FF Summons, but those are just an even further stripped down version of the game's regular combat or just shallow spectacles filled with QTEs. It's so funny to compare this to RE4 Remake which went out of its way to remove QTEs that the original RE4 had, meanwhile, FF16 feels a bit stuck in the past.
I honestly could forgive most of this if the game were more engaging in other areas, since most FF games are pretty damn easy anyways barring occasional roadblock boss here or there, but FF16 still falls flat.
The art design is just a very generic medieval setting, with honestly not much that is very striking. The only kinda unique thing about the game are these giant crystals that are in major areas of the game's world, but that's hardly new in Final Fantasy.
The music honestly doesn't really stand out much to me either. I normally think of FF games have at least decent OST's (Even a much maligned game like FF13 had a pretty great soundtrack), but 16's mostly doesn't stand out much which is notable since it has something like 200 songs. Really the only one that stood out to me was the Eikon battle theme but that was about it. Apparently people like composer Soken's work from FF14 but having not played that game I don't get the love.
The story though is my biggest problem because it's just very, very flat overall. In first 10 hours it goes from seeming like emotionally driven revenge story about guy seeking revenge for murder of his father and brother > 13 year time skip > to guy thinking he was the one who accidentally murdered his brother after going berserk as an Eikon > to realizing brother is actually still alive and everything is cool and there's no resentment whatsoever. Dad? Who even is that lmao > 5 year time skip > lol we're off to fight bad guys now for the next 30 hours.
That's been the main character Clive's arc more or less, and it's not even remotely compelling. The whole game feels like it's designed in a way to undercut any sense of drama in favor of stoically just fighting the next bad guy slaver and it's really boring in all honesty (I've even seen the "omg my brother I'm seeking revenge for is still alive" work well as a plot twist in a different game before, so it's not even that as a premise that's inherently bad since it can be played well for drama. FF16 just does it extremely poorly). Clive is the only character you control too (Similar to "character action" games that Platinum makes, or stuff like Devil May Cry) beyond like a 20 minute segment in the prologue, and while occasionally you have "party members" they almost never have ANYTHING to say about what you're doing. If you do one of the game's many, many sidequests for example they won't often chip in with comments or anything like that. This is partly because one of the party members is Clive's pet dog. The second person most often to tag around is Clive's love interest Jill who has even less personality than the fucking dog does. She has like zero chemistry with Clive and almost no goals or even personality of her own. Like she's not even head over heels for him really, she doesn't even have personality in that sense. She just kind of blandly exists as Clive's girlfriend or whatever. The game is just allergic to having much in the way of character or party dynamics.
I kinda think they were relying on more superficially mature presentation in place of any realized characterization. Yes characters can swear like sailors now, get naked and have sex on screen (But breasts and genitals are still covered of course), and die in more gory fashions. They're clearly imitating aesthetic and general narrative style from likes of Game of Thrones and Witcher 3 here. When those were at their best though, they had underlying character work and writing beyond basic titillation. Even in past FF games, a character like Tifa from FF7 hasn't been lusted after since 1997 just because she has huge boobs and a short miniskirt- she had actual personality and interests. She was involved in love triangle, she was keeping huge secret from the party about Cloud's past, and keeping that secret affected her, also when you first meet her in the game she's a member of the terrorist organization AVALANCHE and woah you might have ethical feelings about that etc. In FF16, I don't think anyone is going to care about Jill after 20+ years even though she stabs a dude in one cutscene and gets naked in another. There's little to invest audience into the character. Jill's notable here as the main heroine, but most of the characters are like this to some degree (Female characters in particular are just shafted in general. FF16's attempt to recapture Cersei Lanister in particular is just embarrassing). Even games actually designed to sell you on the sex appeal of their characters understand you have to create an emotional connection in the audience to at least some extent too to really get an into a character's pants (Whether its in finding a character fun or alluring or pitiable or whatever else), but somehow FF16 just completely doesn't understand that.
Again I could forgive all that even if story were at least thematically interesting, but the takes on slavery here don't really interest me (The way they hop from slavery to FF7 style eco-terrorism minus any of that game's moral ambiguity is kinda weird too), and the later pivot from all that to "lol evil God existing is also like living under slavery when you think about it" just doesn't land for me. I will say its hilarious that the evil god in this game is voiced by the same Game of Thrones actor that played the bad guy in Xenoblade 3, and just like in XB3 the name of the final dungeon is even Origin.
Anyways on top of all that FF16's story is very badly paced. I mentioned the game having many sidequests, but you often have similar tedious fetch quests as part of the MAIN QUEST, often inbetween the bigger story moments. Of course you can't structure a story as going climax > climax > climax, you need down time in between. But the down time should be better than finding materials to build a boat for a newly introduced character who you're told is the daughter of another character that died several gameplay hours ago and from what I can tell never mentioned even having a daughter (Who just steals the fucking boat you guys made anyways), or spending 20 minutes finding a stolen passport so you can pass through city gates, or delivering food or whatever. You could spend time building character or whatever instead of this shit.
But FF16 makes this even worse because in-between main story missions you're constantly coming back to a main base the characters occupy called the Hideaway, where important story cutscenes happen, there's a basic shop, you can pick up sidequests and Hunts etc. The Hideaway (Particularly the second version the characters use) fucking sucks because of its basic design and Clive being so damn slow to fucking move. So many times I'd take a sidequest and have to run around the Hideaway to find another NPC who was just going to send me somewhere else anyways to get some shitty items (But not without some needlessly elongated dialogue first. We're talking several minutes of conversation just to tell you to like, pick some flowers or something). There's no point in this game from what I can tell where you can start a sidequest having already found whatever items you'd need already, so there's no point in exploring the game's few open areas ahead of time.
The kind of bland British dub doesn't help much either. It's honestly kind of sleep-inducing to me, but people seem to eat up British people reading off tedious dialogue as long as it has a slick enough presentation. Truly the worst of the English's crimes against humanity. The uh, directorial style of the game feels like it's imitating western AAA games too on top of all that, which is not my personal favorite style in the world.
Supposedly the devs that made this game also made FF14, and man I cannot imagine myself going through an even more drawn out version of FF16. It's legit some of the least fun I've ever had with a video game. It's not even that the game was like a technical mess or janky or anything, but it was unable to connect to me at all. So I'm probably going to just flatout give up on the dream of beating every mainline FF game.
Blah.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris