Of course I'm emotionally invested in the expendable secondary characters, what do you take me for

So I've started playing FFXVI! So far it's very pretty, but suffering from a terrible case of "I can work out exactly how to get into all of these outfits, is this really a Final Fantasy game?"

(Listen, the fact that it's pretty makes how inanimate the expressions are even more jarring. Why do people only move their lower jaws when they talk! Talking is a full-face action!)

I can't put my finger on what's niggling at me about this game. It's not "Oh, this doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game" because there's no one unified thing that defines a Final Fantasy game, right? The whole point is that each main game is a different aesthetic, setting, artistic direction, combat system, whatever – the commonalities are in details like summons and magic, and the broad strokes of "Let's kill god" as a plotline, but anything between those two levels is different. You can have a high tech world where everything is run by machine (XIII) or a modern-ish tech level (VII, VIII, XV), or quasi-medieval Europe (I-V) or something between the extremes (VI, IX). But something about it is pinging at me and I can't put my finger on it. ... Maybe it's the muted colour pallette. I tried to argue with jilliferium about the use of colour but the longer I play the more desaturated everything is.

The rant jilliferium and I went on while I was playing was basically that it's not WEIRD enough. Like, consider IX (jilliferium's favourite), X/X-2 (my favourite), or XII (my second favourite). Full of weird little guys! You've got hypello and bangaa and guado and seeq and moombas and whatever Quina's got going on – weird little guys! So weird! And sticking to all humans all the time isn't boring necessarily, but man, you could get so much weirder with it. I guess having multiple species would distract from the story about oppression and slavery they're trying to tell? But it's still strange to see only one species in a Final Fantasy game.

Mechanically: I love that there's a story mode, because if I wanted to play a game where I need to know how to do combat I'd go play a soulsborne. I've also equipped the rings of Helping You Dodge and Automatically Use Potions, which means that my loadout is never going to change because if I unequip those I will just die.

Anyway, spoilers through to the aftermath of Drake's Fang.

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