Clive takes a moment to personally welcome you to the Hideaway. You'd think he had better things to do, but he insists on doing everything himself, down to the smallest errand. The man needs to learn to delegate.
Let's talk about Final Fantasy XVI.
I have complicated feelings about Final Fantasy XVI. I found the early trailers offputting. They seemed to focus a lot on spectacle and very little on character, which concerned me, as the characters tend to be my main priority in Final Fantasy games. For a while, I wasn't sure whether I would play the game at all.
The demo managed to persuade me to give the full game a try. I still wasn't sure about the characters, as they felt a little generic to me, but I was pleased to see that Clive had been given very personal, character-focused motivations.
(I was also pleased that Clive suffered hideously. I like it when the protagonist has a terrible time.)
My ultimate verdict: Final Fantasy XVI is a good game, very polished. The battle system is fun; the worldbuilding is interesting. I thought the huge number of sidequests really hurt the pacing, though; I wonder how different the game would have felt if I'd skipped all the sidequesting.
I didn't love the characters, which is a shame; I liked Cid a lot, but nobody else made a strong impression on me. The lack of a traditional party might have made it harder to connect with the characters. Clive does travel with other people sometimes, of course, but they somehow never seem very present; they don't have conversations or team up for attacks in the way the Final Fantasy XV characters do. Final Fantasy XVI feels very focused on Clive and Clive alone.
I did think minor characters were nicely fleshed out, though, which is important for a game that's ultimately about the value of community; you need a lot of memorable side characters if you want to pull that off! I was also impressed by how subtle and natural the body language in cutscenes felt.
In everything but the eikon battles, which are big on visual spectacle, Final Fantasy XVI feels like a toned-down Final Fantasy. The character designs, the characters' personalities, the body language, the environments: everything is more muted and more realistic than I tend to expect from the series. And, to be honest, I've never picked up a Final Fantasy game because I'm in the mood for realism. That's not a problem with the game, exactly - there's nothing wrong with trying something new, especially in this series, which is famous for constantly reinventing itself - but it does cause Final Fantasy XVI to jar slightly with my expectations.
Final Fantasy XVI isn't a bad game, by any means, and I enjoyed my time with it. But it's not really what I look for in a Final Fantasy game.
That said, Clive's voice actor Ben Starr is a big fan of Final Fantasy VIII, and that alone raises Final Fantasy XVI several points in my estimation! A man of taste. You can see him talking about his relationship with Final Fantasy VIII in this YouTube video.
Although my relationship with Final Fantasy XVI is a complicated one, I did write a few fics about it! If you're curious about my Final Fantasy XVI fanfiction, you can pay a visit to Harpocrates, but be warned that it's all just pairing Clive up with other characters in increasingly weird combinations.