In a year of rushed and unsatisfying launch experiences, Final Fantasy 16 stands apart. Here's the digitalfoundry tech review:
With new worlds to explore, characters to meet, and battles to fight, all paired with a world-class soundtrack and a sharp presentation, Final Fantasy 16 arrives in excellent condition and gives players exactly the experience the developers intended. It's one of the most polished games we've seen this year on a technical level, taking into account elements from visuals and audio to technology and performance.
Interestingly, the characters aren't meant to be photorealistic; they're basically focused on the Square-Enix house style of character design. Fancy hair, smooth skin, and detailed outfits are key, but at the same time, FF16 is more grounded than usual, striking a middle ground. The facial and hair rendering certainly stands out to me - they don't use a strand-type hair system, just the usual alpha texture maps, but the design is sublime.
In practice, this allows character self-shadows to be so clean and generally free of artefacts, as traditional shadow maps normally struggle to resolve fine detail - but Final Fantasy 16 looks pristine. The shadows also have proper contact hardening, so the closer you are to the shadow caster, the sharper and more defined the shadow. All those little crevices you'll find around the model are perfectly shadowed.
Square-Enix doesn't quite avoid this, with exceptionally detailed, beautifully directed A-tier cinematics that use high-detail models and smooth animation with minimal clipping alongside excellent per-pixel motion blur and glorious bokeh depth of field.
There is one elephant in the room to discuss, however - the motion blur. Personally, I'm a big fan of the motion blur and selected shutter speed in this game, which accentuates Clive's movement and lends the game a cinematic appearance that elevates the overall presentation. However, based on the demo, not everyone agrees, and players should be allowed to disable motion blur if desired - at least during gameplay.
Unfortunately, as you'll find out, depending on your settings, it may not always be at its best in regards to image quality and performance. Final Fantasy 16 offers players the choice between quality and performance modes, with both using aggressive dynamic resolution scaling and TAA to reduce shimmer and noise. Quality mode is typically 1080p to 1440p, upscaled to 4K, while performance mode seems to top out at 1080p but often drops lower.
Weirdly though, I discovered something very strange about this mode - the frame-rate dips while running through the world, but the moment you start combat, the frame-rate rockets up to a near-perfect 60fps. The second Clive puts away his sword following combat, we're back to poor performance.
Ireland Latest News, Ireland Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Dragon's Dogma lead says Final Fantasy 16's thrilling combat is his 'personal masterpiece'The combat designer behind Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon's Dogma reckons Final Fantasy 16 is his best work to date.
Read more »
Final Fantasy 16 and Starfield are making players want to buy current generation consolesFinal Fantasy 16 and Starfield are making players want to buy current generation consoles Starfield FinalFantasy16 SquareEnix Bethesda
Read more »
The Tower of London will display a Final Fantasy 16 sword in its Royal Armouries | VGCThe Tower of London will be displaying a replica of the Invictus sword from Final Fantasy 16 in its Royal Armouries for the next month.
Read more »
Square Enix staff have been asking the Final Fantasy head for a Final Fantasy 6 remake | VGCSquare Enix staff have reportedly been asking Final Fantasy boss Yoshinori Kitase for a remake of Final Fantasy 6.
Read more »
Final Fantasy racer Chocobo GP quietly relaunches as complete titleSquare Enix has quietly updated its Final Fantasy racer Chocobo GP on Switch as a complete package. Back in December, t…
Read more »