Final Fantasy XVI Should Have Won Game of the Year 2023

Baldur’s Gate 3 won Game of the Year in 2023, only just stealing it out from under the title that should have clearly won it, Final Fantasy XVI. I’m lying of course. FFXVI wasn’t even in the running. This only furthered my perspective that the game awards are an effort in futility. How can you have a ‘best game’ award and leave out one of the best titles of the decade? Instead, you have Resident Evil 4, a twenty-year-old game with some prettier textures; Tears of the Kingdom, a glorified expansion pack; And Baldur’s Gate 3, a mid RPG.

Okay, I’ll admit I’m being deceptively aggressive here. I actually really enjoyed all of these games. Resident Evil 4 is a great revamping of the old title but I would say it doesn’t even stand up to its predecessors: RE2make and RE3make. Tears of the Kingdom added enough to the core loop of Breath of the Wild that it is now a completely redundant game, which is quite an achievement but it’s hard to argue that the playing experience is any different between the two.

Final Fantasy XVI Should Have Won Game of the Year for its kickass battle system

How did games like Sea of Stars, Hi-fi Rush, and FFXVI get pushed out of the running to only be given a couple of audio awards and Best Indie? I feel like they were done dirty. Maybe they didn’t want a couple of indie games in the ‘best games’ category. It’s discriminating and wrong, but fine. FFXVI, though, was hands down the best game of the year. Before I explain why, I first have to tear into Baldur’s Gate a bit. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything too bad about your favorite game.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Absolute Trash

Nah, I’m only kidding. What BG3 does well, it does spectacularly well. The combat is fantastic. The way it lets you strategize your equipment with your spells and abilities gives me the same feelings I used to have as a kid playing Yu-Gi-Oh. And each spell has as much utility outside of combat as it does inside. So if there’s something to do out in the overworld, you’re limited only by your imagination of how to approach it.

I certainly won’t criticize BG3 for how sexy it can get

It does the best job I’ve seen in years of providing a role-playing experience. Instead of all these pseudo-RPGs that give you dialogue options that don’t change anything. I played a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 with my cousin and it was remarkable just how different our campaigns were.

Out of curiosity, I made a safety save then let my character be tortured to see if I would die. But at the moment before my death, I was saved by some random teleporting NPC that seemed like she would be an important end-game character. I recovered my save and carried on where I was, now I’m at the end of the game, and that NPC hasn’t shown up at all. So that’s a complete plot line that I’m not gonna get to see and I’m kind of guttered. There’s your replay value right there. I’m already thinking about starting a new campaign once I’m done with this one just to see what happens with that NPC.

The sheer effort that had to be put into the writing and voice acting is breathtaking. For those points alone, I can understand the hype. But while it’s spectacular in its good areas, it’s horrible in its bad areas.

Game of the year, right here

It’s a Glitchy Mess

This picture of an NPC with a portion of her cheek stretched off-screen should be enough to convince you but that’s the beginning. I find it surprising that a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can be completely canned for its glitches then a few years later, this glitch-fest wins game of the year. No wonder developers are always on edge when their games get released. There were graphical glitches all over the place. Sometimes your attacks just won’t register and there’s no explanation as to why. The animations are janky as hell. Some even mess with your quests. I went into a dungeon and saved some captives then afterward, mid-sentence of them thanking me, they would become hostile and attack me. No matter how many times I reloaded the save, they would always attack. Even Cyberpunk didn’t have any glitches that actually broke a questline from my memory.

I lost count of how many times I saw this screen

I felt like a genius though because I fixed it by invoking another glitch. Earlier in the game, I noticed that if a character stays in their animal form after combat and there’s a cutscene afterward, they’ll stay in their animal form during dialogue and it looks really stupid. I had a character stay in his bear form during a scene of dialogue and all that was on the screen during the whole interaction was a close-up of his fur. Anyway, so I thought I would layer glitch on top of glitch, and by some miracle, it worked. I turned one of my characters into an owlbear and the NPCs didn’t get angry with me. Maybe it wasn’t a glitch, maybe they just really like owlbears.

Now her eyes are missing, they really don’t like this NPC

Core Loop Issues

You may think that the core loop of Baldur’s Gate 3 is the combat. It isn’t. Combat makes up about 30% of the gameplay. The majority of your time is spent running around the maps looting and managing inventory. Putting aside all the random inconsistencies – if a creature is the shape of a human, it’s a humanoid … calling it a ‘monstrosity’ shouldn’t mean my Hold Person spell is ineffective! – and the glitches, BG3’s biggest issue is that the inventory sucks. Most of your time is spent sorting through loot and the only thing you’re doing is checking if new equipment is any good then equipping it or adding it to your wares for selling if it isn’t. You can make inventory management fun, Resident Evil 4 managed to do it, so it has no right to be so boring.

Get used to this window

What’s frustrating is that it’s not even optimized. I try to sort my pack by type so that I can select all the food items and send them to my camp quickly and easily. So why are they still all jumbled up among the other items? You can pick up pouches and packs to help keep things organized, but you can’t rename them or change their color so it’s hard to remember what holds what. If your character picks up too much stuff, they get encumbered by all the weight. But you can send an infinite amount of stuff back to your camp and access your camp at any time so why the hell is the weight limit even there? All it does is add unnecessary time to item management.

The item management in BG3 is by far the biggest issue but there’s another issue that’s more close to my heart: the books.

The Books

There are many books in BG3, each of which is a struggle to read. They’re treated more like loot to be sold rather than something worth reading. D&D is a nerdom of writers, surely they could’ve come up with some cool system to make the books in BG3 relevant to the gameplay. So far all they do is progress a sidequest if it’s the right book and are sold if not. The way the books are designed, reading them takes agency away from the player and distracts them from the core loop. That’s how you make something that isn’t going to be read. I feel sorry for the writers.

Gaming’s cutest psychopath

Imagine if they’d done something cool with them. What if there was some quest where you have to piece together some lost lore by collecting books and actually having to read them to figure out something important about the world? And it could aid you in gameplay. Imagine if, at the start of every Act, there were like a meter of knowledge or collection of books necessary to complete a sidequest that gives you information on how to beat the boss at the end of that Act.

Hell, you could even just Pokemon it and do a ‘collect all the books’ thing. Then people will be incentivized to do things like steal books, or adventure into a library just because there’s gonna be some good books there. I am a fantasy writer. I’m here for the lore and worldbuilding, and all that cool story stuff. But Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t do anything to incentivize you to read and learn more about the world. It’s a shame.

Final Fantasy XVI Should Have Won Game of the Year for its amazing visuals

So Why FFXVI?

Alright, enough hucking dung at BG3. Final Fantasy XVI was a wish come true that I hadn’t realized how much I wanted until I had it. A complete resurrection of one of the best gaming franchises from the death of mediocrity and bad design. Ever since FFX, Square Enix has seemed hell-bent on driving their flagship franchise into the ground. Turning it from a collection of 8s and 9/10s into a factory producing consistent 5s. This one title has completely reinvigorated my love for big swords, spiky hair, and killing god. But it doesn’t deserve GOTY because of the flutters in my heart. It deserves it because it’s groundbreaking for the gaming industry.

FF’s sexiest protagonist, fight me

Genres and RPGs

FFXVI innovated its mechanics in a way I haven’t seen before. Pretty much every genre has been incorporating RPG mechanics into their games for over a decade now. Every game has EXP and leveling up and skill trees or whatever. But they don’t do much to marry the RPG mechanics with the genre of their game. The RPG stuff is only ever there to provide avatar strength and give the player a sense of progression.

FFXVI creates a perfect symmetry between its action mechanics and RPG mechanics by giving each its own domain. For the action side, they did what they should’ve done years ago. They brought in someone who knows how to make an action game. Ryota Suzuki brought his expertise from Capcom to his role of Combat Director on Final Fantasy XVI and created one of the most satisfying battle systems I’ve played. It belongs alongside games like Sekiro and Sifu for how great the combat is. But it doesn’t stop there. They bring over a level of strategy from the RPG realm that provides enough complexity that you can completely change the way you approach every battle encounter.

Ryota Suzuki knows what he’s doing

With simple design choices like not being completely locked in when you choose how to spend your ability resources, you can switch things up whenever you’re out of combat. Choosing the abilities and Eikons that best synergize with each other. The best thing about this setup is that FFXVI doesn’t just ask you be to good at strategizing. You have to also be skilled enough to pull that strategy off during combat. Every ability and Eikon has its own skillful execution. So it marries smart thinking outside of combat and reaction time during combat. It’s brilliant.

The Writing

I would be negligent if I didn’t mention the writing in FFXVI. The world is deep and rich with fantasy. The characters are complicated and gripping, and their dialogue is fantastic. FFXVI is one of the only games that has been able to make me interested in side characters and sidequests. Sure, gameplay-wise, a lot of the sidequests do that annoying RPG thing where you have to go collect flowers or whatever. But every quest has a battle encounter involved with it which is the game’s highest point so that’s appreciated.

This game is stunning

The sidequests further enrich the world and provide both context and satisfying payoffs. The main villain is perfectly creepy and the buildup to the final battle is perfectly paced. It has tones of battling slavery and discrimination that are fully felt and powerful. There are a few minor bits here and there that feel a little hollow. But in the pie chart of the good and bad writing in FFXVI, the bad slice is more like an imperceptible sliver.

Why Was FFXVI Snubbed?

I can almost feel all the eye-rolling directed at the Final Fantasy fanboy over here and I get it. There are a few contentious points about FFXVI that seemingly put a lot of gamers off considering that it was review-bombed to heck shortly after the game’s release. I think it went from like 90% to 70% in only a few days on Metacritic. It’s back up to around 90% now so that’s good. But for a time, gamers were out of sorts about FFXVI and I want to try to understand the complaints.

FFXVI’s battle system is both flashy and fun

FFXVI Is Not an RPG

One big complaint is that Square Enix is ‘taking a step away from their RPG roots’. Which I somewhat agree with. FFXVI is definitely more action than role-playing. What I don’t understand is why anyone was expecting otherwise. Square Enix stepped away from the RPG format for Final Fantasy years ago. FFXIII is quite possibly the last actual RPG they made, and even that is actiony. Final Fantasy XV wasn’t an RPG. FFVII Remake wasn’t an RPG. What are people even talking about? Even all the footage of FFXVI before release was of action-packed gameplay. If anything, XVI pays more of a homage to old-school Final Fantasy with its tone, being much more of a traditional fantasy world than the more futurist fantasy worlds of other modern Final Fantasys.

These fights are so satisfying

FFXVI Is Exclusive to PlayStation

So? Spider-Man 2 is also exclusive to PlayStation but that got nominated for game of the year. Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Wonder are exclusive to Nintendo but they got nominated for game of the year. None of these games got review-bombed and every year has a myriad of exclusive releases that don’t get review-bombed.

Is it just random? If so, that’s a real shame. I don’t know how they pick their nominations at the game awards, but I assume that reviews play a big part in it. And if that’s the case, something as arbitrary as a review bomb can have dire consequences on a game’s success. Perhaps the whole system needs a bit of a change-up. Or who cares? Game awards are dumb.

Just look at how fun this game is!