Thanks to its liberal use of the phrase “**** **** *🀅***”, multiple gory beheadings, and dry attempts at sex scenes within the first few hours, tries its damndest to be more mature than any other entry in the series. ‘This isn’t your grandad’s Final Fantasy’, it shouts, chucking Clive’s naked buttocks in your face whi🥀le staring wistfully at the box set on its shelf.
As grateful as I am for Clive’s ass, Final Fantasy 16’s attempts at being adult feel forced, like it’s trying to squeeze every last drop out o🦂f its saucy 18+ rating. Despite this desperation in its largest moments of darkness, there are a few small moments where its mature themes have not only managed to make me contemplate my own existence but have also shone through as some of its best. That’s rig൲ht, even better than Clive’s shiny cheeks.
Around ten hours into the game, Clive finds himself in Northreach, a much fancier part of Valisthea defined by stuffy nobles and luscious farmland. Outside of being your first chance to see how the one pe💦rcent live since leaving Rosaria, Northreach is the most open area so far, with vast fields overlooking the sea surrounded by roaming Chocobo and monsters for Clive to slay. You’re finally free to explore and take things in.
As beautiful as Northreach is, something instantly felt off. Most of Final Fantasy 16’s explorable areas have jolly backg♛round music, but the main theme of Northreach is a discordant buzz that oozes dr💮ead and hints at something darker happening beneath the grassy plains.
It was in these grassy plains where I stumbled across a little girl named Lisette crying out for her lost pet Chloe, who is described as having “beautiful white hair” and beiꦍng “such a good girl”. Although I’d mainly been ignoring side quests to focus on the main story, my hero complex took the wheel and I instantly offered to help look for the pet and hopefully make Northreach a little brighter in the process.
After a little bit of searching through the fields, an older woman pointed me in the direction of a windmill close to Lisette, which seemed ♐like a fine place to check for a dog, chocobo, cat, or whatever weird animal they keep as pets in Final Fantasy. I practiced my cheesiest hero’s smile en route to the windmill, but I should have been practising my mournful head shake instead as I stumbled upon a dead woman lying on her front, with ashen-white skin indicating that she’d relied on magic too much. A death all too common for bearers in the realm of Valisthea.
As it turns out, Chloe wasn&rsquꦗo;t an animal at all - she was a bearer, Final Fantasy 16’s term for magicians or sorcerers. 🐼Lisette kept her as a slave and forced to use her magic until she died. She wasn’t the first either, as Chloe was just a name that Lisette used for all of her pets, seemingly unaware or uninterested that each new bearer was a different person. It’s an incredibly depressing moment that’s only made slightly better by the bollocking that Clive gives Lisette, who ends the quest crying next to the lifeless body and hopefully taking stock of her spoilt little life.
Final Fantasy 16’s attempts to be mature and shocking are usually obvious and heavy-handed, but this short pit stop managed to knock the wind out of me unlike anything else in the game up to that point. It captures the plight of Bearers and their position as slaves and playthings for the upper class, while subverting your expectations of roleplaying as the big fantasy RPG hero, something that doesn't fit into the world of Valisthea. I hope there are a few more moments in Final Fantasy 16 that force me to put down the controller and think twice about the world I’m trying to save.