I've tried every fix known to humankind to get this game to run above 40fps without major stuttering or fps slowdown and literally nothing has worked. Demo was beautifully optimized, main game however is currently unplayable. What a shame. I'll change my review once a fix is implemented but considering people on forums have been asking for years, I'm not hopeful.

I've got friends with lower end rigs than mine and they can run it perfectly fine. I have no clue why I can't and at this point it's become to frustrating to play.

I'm too disappointed to write a longer review.
Just know this: the quality drop-off in this game is monumental. You might enjoy the demo and the initial stellar writing and pacing, but I'm 36h in now and have been getting more and more frustrated at the game since 10h ago or longer. For every 5 minutes of cool stuff that happens, there is now 55 minutes of the lowest quality MMO-style game loop you can think of. If you played the main story of FF14's Dawntrail expansion, you'll know exactly what awaits you. The combat doesn't hold up either and is only bearable, because it's easy.

This is just a personal opinion, everything is amazing about the game except the gameplay. I hate the new style. I miss turn based combat, even 12 I liked. Unfortunately with the way these games are going I won't be buying anymore final fantasy games.

oh my dear lord... the pacing in this game is painfully off. one moment you fight a god, the other you are looking for a geriatric farmer that wandered off.

sometimes, the game allows you to play instead of making you watch a cutscene which is nice.

the performance is the worst I've seen in recent years for pc ports. the fps dips can become intolerable.
do not buy this crap.

If you're looking for the next FF15 - this isn't it. Story is extremely linear, no room for exploration, no need to nook & cranny explore since treasure is a giant shiny object, making them impossible to miss. If it weren't for the graphics and lore, this game would be a 0/10 on the Final Fantasy scale. Don't waste your money unless you truly just want to play a movie since that is all you do. Run a few steps - 30 mins of cut scenes followed by 1 fight that you literally just hold the X button. Boring, not challenging, not a good example of the FF franchise at all.

"A Disappointing, Cutscene-Heavy Experience"

Honestly, this game just isn’t that good. Final Fantasy XVI feels more like a cutscene simulator than an actual game. There’s a cutscene for almost everything. You might be out in the world on a mission and want to jump over a simple log—cue a cutscene just for that. In town, you’re sent to speak with four NPCs standing next to each other, and instead of a single group conversation, you get four separate cutscenes—one for each interaction—followed by yet another when you leave the area.

Combat is equally underwhelming. Surprisingly, random monsters in the open world are more enjoyable to fight than the major bosses. Boss fights often transition into long, cinematic sequences midway through. You fight a boss down to half health, and then the game takes over with a flashy cutscene where your character finishes the fight with little input from you—aside from occasionally pressing a single button. It’s frustrating to invest effort into a battle only to watch the rest of it unfold without any control.

Gear progression is also lackluster. There’s no sense of building power or customizing your playstyle. Damage increases in a linear, pre-determined way, making most equipment feel pointless. The game hands you what it wants, when it wants.

I was bored out of my mind for most of the experience. I’d estimate that 75% of the game is just watching cutscenes—and I mean that literally. I finished the campaign and reached level 50 because I wanted to give it a fair shot. Now that I’ve completed it, I can honestly say this was a boring and disappointing game. I do not recommend it.

oml. this game could be so damn good if they just fixed its optimization for the PC port. This game looks and runs amazing on consoles, I played it on my PS5 and it was so fun. But the thing was I don't play on my ps5 enough to grind out so I bought it on PC instead. I have a 3070, Ryzen 5 5600x, 32gb of ddr4 ram and two SSD disks. And somehow I'm running this game at 20fps all the time. I put DLSS Super Resolution at ultra performance and it changes almost nothing, and even when I put on legacy super resolution I get MAYBE 50 fps but the game just looks like a handfull of pixels at that point. The game could be great if they just fixed its performance. I waited so long for them to update it but since its pc release theres only been three minor patches and none of them made a difference. The story is okay, with the open world feeling forced. Side quests are bland, but the cutscenes are super nice and the combat is amazing as well. The combat was the main thing that kept me played, and I was able to force myself to play under the legacy super resolution for awhile but eventually the game just became so hard to run it was unplayable for me. The only time I could run the game sufficiently was when I closed every single application in the background, wallpapers, discord, etc. And ran it as the first application off my pc launch. If I had been playing for awhile and later decided to hop on FF16 I'd have to restart my computer first. I could appreciate the game a lot more if I could get high frames with medium graphics, but after 38 hours of trying I assume it's not going to happen. Also the shaders take hours to generate.

My honest opinion at the time of game end;

The ending almost brought me to tears. This game has an incredible story and world around it. Absolutely solid voice acting as well. For the most part.

That being said, Final Fantasy XVI disappointed me in a couple of different ways that made it hard for me to get through the game, while also having me sort of beg for it to be over a little over halfway through.

Gameplay is not very endearing. Your general (mostly) standard hack 'n slash ARPG button masher. "A/B" combos, and there's also a jump button. Not much strategy required. While you do have various magic abilities at your disposal, this game is not similar to others in the franchise (on that front in particular). From what I could tell, it made no difference if I used certain magic abilities over others when attacking enemies. I.E.; Fire VS Ice, or Thunder VS Aero etc. All these magic abilities simply deal different amounts of damage. There are certainly difficult fights where an almost elementary understanding of basic action strategy is necessary, but depending on your character level and gear, it's not really required.

On the subject of character leveling;

Side quests and world battle encounters were not motivating enough, or intriguing enough (to me) to have me spending much time working to gain experience, gil or materials to focus on upgrading gear and abilities. Which again, didn't seem necessary anyway.

The soundtrack was another area that failed to impress me.

There are a few really great moments where the music hit just right. There are a couple of cut scenes in particular that I can recall, wherein the jams were perfect for the ambiance, emotions and story telling. However, early on in the game, I quickly realized this was not a trend. Some tracks were reused many times, for battles mainly, and I found the various region themes underwhelming and uninspiring.

Overall, my opinion is this:

In a forum I'd read prior to playing the game myself, someone had stated "This is a good game, but not a good Final Fantasy game", and I have to agree with this statement. If not for the commonalities of very specific Final Fantasy "Gods" and other related features (items, accessories etc.) this game could have been just as successful as it's own stand alone ARPG.

At the end of it all, I enjoyed the game for what it was, and was satisfied with the ending, but I wish that I could have enjoyed it enough to be more invested in the other aforementioned aspects that make the majority of the game what it is.

I would not recommend this game to players looking for a typical Final Fantasy experience, but rather, to players looking for a more simplistic action role playing experience.

Too laggy :/

Play this game, but not on PC. I very much enjoyed this game but I cannot recommend this version of it.

A short review of the game itself minus the issues I had.

Characters, music, spectacle, and voice acting are all 10/10 absolutely superb.
The story imo has some issues not least of which is the admittedly somewhat aging of Yoshi-P's method of storytelling, but it is what it is.
The gameplay is extremely mundane and repetitive without the use of mods, and despite how good some mods may be, this is where we run into issues, because to use mods (I assume, at least) you must play this on PC. Do NOT do that.

I spent several hours trying to make the game run even somewhat acceptably through the use of the PC fix mod, and while it did work for the most part, after even more hours of tinkering I could not get it to be consistent. While my PC may not soar past the requirements of the game, it should also not have struggled nearly this much. I've quite literally never played a worse PC port in my life. Cutscenes would play in slow motion while jittering around which unironically may cause seizure for photosensitive players, while the audio still played as normal. Immense lag in most "open world" free roam areas, stuttering, screen tearing, and lag which felt oddly as though I was lagging in an online game despite this game obviously being a single player experience.

Near the very end of the game there is a sequence that was so unbelievably bad that I had to skip 3-4 cutscenes that were minutes long each, filled with exposition because they were completely unwatchable. The fact that I have to go to YouTube to watch cutscenes of a game that's currently running on my PC is unacceptable.

If you simply must play this game and have no other way of doing it, download the PC fix mod, change your monitor refresh rate to match what you put in the mod file, swap the in-game refresh rate setting to what you've decided on, and pray.