Final Fantasy 16 has a novel approach to the age-old ‘accessibility versus difficulty’ conundrum

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Alongside review scores, whether Game Pass is good or bad for the industry, and the ethics of crunch (it’s bad), difficulty options are one part of the games discourse that just won’t go away. It’s a cycle; on the launch of a game like Elden Ring, or Demon’s Souls, or Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty – look forward to that later this week – the inevitable back-and-forth about games difficulty will arise. Some people think that games like Elden Ring are pure examples of difficulty in games; that there should be no easy mode, that it would eat away at the integrity of the experience and somehow ‘ruin it for everyone else’.

Others maintain that every game should have a suite of difficulty options, should let you waltz through the experience on ‘story mode’ if you want to – ignoring the meat of the gameplay in order to better soak up the overall experience. Usually at the cost of the developer’s intention with the game at large. For Final Fantasy 16, the developers have, hopefully, come up with a solution that placates both camps – that lets players experience the game as intended, whilst providing support for some players that may need it.

Final Fantasy 16 deviates from the series’ history a little when it comes to combat. FF16 eschews the turn-based setup you’d get in classic titles – and, a little bit, in Final Fantasy 7 Remake – in favour of a completely action-based affair. Think more in terms of Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, and you’ll have the right idea. Combat is fast, it relies on you swapping between movesets on the fly, and you need to weave in dodges and parries with rhythmic timing in order to win even the most bog-standard encounters. It’s not something that everyone is going to be comfortable with, off the bat.

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