Conclusion

Final Fantasy XVI is an action RPG developed and published by Square Enix, set in the sprawling world of Valisthea. You play as Clive Rosfield, a warrior who embarks on a quest to unravel the mysteries behind the destructive force of the Eikons, ancient and powerful summons. The game's narrative is filled with political intrigue, betrayal, and epic confrontations between kingdoms, which reminded me of Game of Thrones and The Witcher. Unlike classic Final Fantasy, combat is in real-time with no pause option, which means it's more like an action RPG, a mix of fast-paced melee and magic abilities. Additionally, strategic use of timing and positioning is required, similar to Devil May Cry. Gameplay is a mix of map traversal with a lot of cut-scenes, which I found quite distracting, I do like the influences of other RPG games, like the Witcher, and their morally gray characters—a nice addition to the usually somewhat simplistic good-and-evil world of Final Fantasy. The big boss fights are clearly inspired by Dark Souls, but difficulty is much closer to a typical Final Fantasy game.

So far I've been having fun in my playthrough, but I definitely had to use Cheat Engine's Speed Hack feature to make things progress faster, especially walking is extremely slow, for no apparent reason, other than to make this a "458965896 hour game." Oh, and if you wonder whereabouts the savegame location is in FF16, they are in My Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XVI but disguised as .PNG files—not exactly user-friendly.

Graphics
Graphics are "alright" for 2024. I can definitely appreciate the high production quality—levels are intricately designed, but often extremely linear with invisible walls everywhere. The map designers did a great job placing shadows and fog to create believable environments with great atmosphere. The game came out last year, as a PlayStation 5 exclusive and that clearly shows—this is not even close to the looks of modern Unreal Engine 5 titles. There's a huge difference in quality between the real-time rendered cut scenes and the normal gameplay. The cutscenes look very good, especially here, insane production value—these are like movies. Facial animations are a bit stiff though, and the cutscenes run at 30 FPS, with motion blur, even when you turn off these limits for "normal" gameplay. This is terrible, because it makes the cutscenes look extremely stuttery, especially on a high-refresh rate monitor. There's some community fixes that solve these problems, but regardless, this really shouldn't happen in 2024.

Some maps have very nice real-time dynamic lighting that looks great, but overall the quality of light and shadows is lacking, ambient occlusion could also be much improved.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
Unlike many recent titles, especially those utilizing Unreal Engine, Final Fantasy XVI does not suffer from shader compilation issues or shader stuttering. The game has a "compiling shaders" screen at the start, which takes quite long, around three to five minutes depending on CPU performance and GPU architecture. This happens only once, or until a GPU or GPU driver change. Once you are through that, startup is really fast, you can click through all the logos and titles. Level loading is pretty fast, too, thanks to DirectStorage. The game offers two main difficulty options "story focused" and "action focused." On top of that you can equip rings that make you auto-evade enemy attacks, heal automatically, command your pet or slow down time before having to evade—I like. This opens the game to a wide range of players, of all ages and skill levels.

Effects & Upscalers
Final Fantasy XVI has support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. There's also support for Frame Generation for both NVIDIA and AMD, DLAA is supported, too. Distracting effects can be disabled, but cutscenes always have motion blur enabled. When upscalers are enabled you can adjust the additional sharpening, or turn it off completely.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements of the game are definitely on the high side, especially considering the graphics. It's still not as bad as on other recent AAA titles in 2024. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, ultra settings, without upscaling, you just need a RTX 4070, RTX 3080, RX 6800 or RX 7800 XT. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 3090 ti, RX 7900 XT or faster. 4K60? That will be a problem. Not a single card in our test group can reach 60 FPS here. Even the mighty RTX 4090 gets just 54.1 FPS. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the second-fastest card, with 43.6 FPS, faster than the RTX 4080 Super. Thanks to Frame Generation and upscaling it'll be easy to get 60 FPS on most hardware configurations though. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a larger outdoors area, with vegetation, some water and your companion NPCs in sight. All GPU vendors have released game-ready drivers for Final Fantasy XVI.

Settings Performance Scaling
The performance scaling of FF16 is quite bad, going from ultra to low, you can increase FPS by only +25%, +40% in some best-cases, depending on the map. This is a surprisingly small range, and what makes things worse is that even at lowest settings the game almost looks like ultra—the differences are pretty minor. Some might say "isn't that good?" In my opinion having different settings should provide a meaningful choice that ideally would let me go down to graphics from 15 years ago, with an appropriate boost in FPS. If the game practically looks the same on all settings and FPS is similar, too, then why even bother with settings? Black Myth Wukong handles this much better, letting you triple the FPS with just settings.

VRAM
Our VRAM testing shows that Final Fantasy XVI does use quite a lot of VRAM. While that's no problem at higher resolutions, because the cards have plenty of memory, with almost 10 GB at lowest settings, 1080p is a bit much. I'm quite sure that the reason is that this game was developed as PS5 exclusive, then ported to PC. The PS5 has 16 GB shared memory for graphics and CPU, which means there's plenty of memory available, so why even try using less? On the PC things are different, here an infinite number of hardware combinations exist and the mainstream gamer typically has 6 or 8 GB of VRAM. At 4K, VRAM usage of 12 GB is alright, even 14 GB with Frame Generation should be ok, because only the most powerful cards will be able to reach acceptable FPS at that resolution. Once you enable upscaling, the actual rendering resolution drops and VRAM usage is much lower, too. Our benchmarks confirm that even at 4K with 8 GB there is no VRAM bottleneck in actual gameplay—the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB runs at virtually the same FPS as the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. However, on AMD things are different. We can clearly see that RX 7600 XT and RX 5700 XT, our only 8 GB AMD cards, clearly fall behind the rest of the pack at 4K. I suspect that this has to do with how AMD manages VRAM, vs what NVIDIA does.

Overall, FF16 is a great addition to the Final Fantasy Series and definitely worth playing. If you're a fan you probably bought a PS5 last year for your playthrough, everyone else should definitely check it out on PC, thanks to the improved graphics experience without the terrible upscaler on PS5. The game is not perfect though, it's a bit too much hack-and-slash action RPG for me, there's very little focus on gear and customizable character development and the pacing is a bit slow, sometimes oddly so. Maybe a bit like Starfield, where you had those amazing OMG moments, and then you wondered "why am I supposed to waste my time with this?" Still, overall a good game.