Final Fantasy XVI: A beautifully flawed masterpiece that blessed us with Torgal.

The narrative, characters, combat, graphics, side quests, HUNTS, the ability tree. No matter what I was doing, it was almost always extremely beautiful, exciting, & fun. Most importantly, it all felt extremely well-polished & bug-free aside from some minor performance issues here & there.

I rolled credits twice: my 1st playthrough was on 'Action-Focused' & my 2nd (*New Game+) was on 'Final Fantasy Mode', which made the game feel incredibly fresh, despite having already played through it all once before, due to Final Fantasy Mode making adjustments to the quantity, difficulty & type of enemies you fight throughout it. I hit 100% in-game completion & finally popped my platinum trophy at 126 hours of playtime total. For those who don't want the details & just want to know whether or not you should get it - there you go. Yes. You should absolutely get it.

For those who want a little more details, the game was definitely amazing & well-worth the money imo. I genuinely loved it & had more fun during my time with it the last month than I had in awhile. But that also isn't to say that it didn't/doesn't have SOME issues. In the end, the issues were just so miniscule compared to the amount of enjoyment & fun I had from start to finish that anything that was a minor issue or frustration to me at first, quickly faded out of existence, never to be seen again & I completely forgot all about it until writing this review. The first small issue I had was that the a decent amount of the side quests through out the beginning of the game were pretty lackluster & even boring at times. HOWEVER, like I said, after you progress enough through the story to start meeting more prominent side characters, you'll be able to start doing side quest chains for them which end up becoming full fledged story arcs that I would have thought were in the main story if I didn't KNOW they were merely side quests. So, after awhile, my biggest issue that I seemed to have with the game literally just fixed itself & I went from procrastinating & putting off the side quests, to actively completing every side quest that I could before progressing the main story quests even. There was also a potential for your PS5 to give overheating warning messages while in Quality mode, during intense & demanding cutscenes or fights. However, if you're playing on performance mode, I don't think you should have much to worry about, if it isn't already fixed for Quality by now too anyways. I did get the warning a few times while in Quality mode, but if I switched to performance, I wouldn't get it anymore & it would continue to run fine.

Lastly, the controversy regarding the change to action focused combat is just absurd to me. Stop it. All of you. This is Final Fantasy as usual. Every single iteration of final fantasy innovates & changes it's core mechanics & even the combat systems. That's what makes a sequel, a good one. Innovation. Whether it's the hybrid combat of FFVII Remake, Action Focused FFXVI, or Old-School Turn Based doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not systems have been innovated on & improved upon from their previous version - & that it FEELS like so.

Final Fantasy XVI is a beautifully flawed masterpiece & Torgal has no equal.