Final Fantasy XVI Is Still Final Fantasy, With More Blood and Butts

The franchise wanted to grow up. But at its heart, the game is true to tradition, both for good and ill.

I HAVE SEEN a chocobo killed in high definition. During a scene early in Final Fantasy XVI, the latest entry to Square Enix’s long-running series of fantasy role-playing games, one of the iconic oversize birds is suddenly struck down with a sword. The Final Fantasy mascot screams a horrible avian scream as it dies, collapsing in a gout of blood and flapping its wings in pitiful death throes. Far from their prior appearances as kart-racing cartoon characters or as chirruping livestock bred in convoluted mini games, the chocobos of XVI are feathery warhorses, as likely to provide characters with rides across the game’s battle-scarred landscapes as they are to end up victims of the story’s frequent massacres.

That first chocobo death is a good example of XIV’s tone. Brutal and nostalgic in equal parts, it seems possessed of a self-conscious drive to dramatically separate itself from its predecessors’ lighter tones with a thick coating of grit and spilled viscera. It may seem, at first, like a labored, Happy Tree Friends–style exercise in “maturing” a series whose main entries typically abstract, sanitize, or simplify the cause and effects of warfare for a young adult audience. And yet, once players have grown accustomed to the game’s grimmer tone, Final Fantasy XVI demonstrates that beneath a patina of blood and brooding, it bears striking similarities to past Final Fantasy games.