Highlights
- The inclusion of full-on Eikon battles in Final Fantasy 16 is a major highlight, with overwhelming grandeur in visuals, music, and scale.
- The Eikon battles flaunt chaotic environments and rhythmic patterns that, alongside the hair-raising sscore, make combat an engaging dance.
- While the Eikon battles are intense and awe-inspiring, Square Enix's decision to use them as keyframes in the narrative is a wise one, preventing the novelty from wearing off.
Warning: This post contains SPOILERS for Final Fantasy 16
Zoning in to play Final Fantasy 16's opening was like absorbing any other video game appetizer until it wasn’t. The first act pitted two Eikons against each other and blew me away with its overwhelming grandeur in the visuals, music, and scale. The fandom was prepared for a number of changes in Square Enix’s darker, medieval entry within its flagship IP, one of them being the inclusion of full-on Eikon battles where previously they were only summoned for an overpowered attack.
For me, the summons’ attack was always the best part of any Final Fantasy boss battle—from Ramuh’s Judgment Bolt to Shiva’s Diamond Dust—and Square Enix managed to amplify this exhilaration tenfold in Final Fantasy 16. The prologue concluded with a brutal fight-to-the-death between Joshua’s Eikon Phoenix and Clive’s Ifrit (even though we weren’t meant to know it was Clive at the time) and it was the perfect denouement to tease the magnificence of future encounters in the game.
As Clive travels from region to region, destroying Mothercrystals as the savior of Valisthea, every kingdom’s leader must also be thwarted in their human form and in their Eikonic state across separate battle phases. The kaiju dogfights are even longer than normal boss encounters, but none of them disappoint with their grand scale. Benedikta Harman’s Garuda put up her best defense inside a tornado, Hugo Kupka’s Titan grew to an extraordinary size that had you running up the giant’s arm like Ant-Man, and nearly every glimpse of Barnabas’ Odin was a jaw-dropping experience—certainly the Eikon with the best design and presence. After Phoenix and Ifrit set the standard, you could look forward to every Eikon battle in your path, and you just knew you were in for a spectacle each time.
No Final Fantasy battle can stand up to the clash of Eikons in Final Fantasy 16, with the possible exception of Sephiroth’s stand in "the world beyond" at the end of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. The Eikon battles flaunt chaotic environments, and rhythmic patterns to make combat an engaging dance alongside the hair-raising score. Whether the encounter is powered by Hugo’s grief over Benedikta’s death or the bonding of brothers when Clive and Joshua untie their Eikons to defeat Bahamut, each battle stunned me into silence afterward and made my return trip to The Hideaway a blur.
If every encounter was an Eikon fight, the novelty would certainly dwindle, which is why Square Enix’s decision to use these encounters as keyframes in the narrative was a wise one. If every wild encounter turned into a kaiju fight, I’d soon be sprinting past the enemy’s radius to not trigger the battle theme. However, the battle themes present during the Eikon phases are dialed up and designed to get the blood pumping. Masayoshi Soken’s score riffs off of Nobuo Uematsu’s legacy while capturing the epic scale of the adventure alongside memorable character and location themes. The musical element elevates Eikon battles to deafening levels and compliments the nature and tone of each enemy and environment, similar to how Hans Zimmer works his magic in Christopher Nolan movies.
Final Fantasy 16’s graphics displayed the visual wonder during Eikon battles while my ears were bewitched, packing immense detail into Phoenix’s feathers or Ifrit’s charred flesh while displaying the magical attacks from Ramuh or Shiva like digital fireworks. While it doesn’t match the uncanny-valley standard of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, its grittier style hones the medieval fantasy aesthetic and provides spectacular cutscenes that maximize modern visual effects. When it comes to the attacks themselves, my arsenal playing Ifrit was varied and capable of packing a knockout punch to the opponent, but the response time was slowed to make gameplay feel heavy, which was a welcomed adjustment while I fought as a giant beast.
A major criticism Final Fantasy 16 faced upon launch was its comparison to Devil May Cry’s combat, sparking our roundtable debate discussing if the current entry was a ‘real’ Final Fantasy game because of how action-focused it was, with a key point of contention being the idea that these Eikon battles were fleeting moments of fan service that did an injustice to the franchise’s traditional gameplay style.
And sure, many will prefer the quiet ambling in Final Fantasy 8 or the summons’ brief appearance in Final Fantasy 15, popping in to help without overstaying their welcome. These battles in Final Fantasy 16 are loud, heart-racing affairs, and their difficulty level isn’t for everyone especially if you're an anxious gamer, but their ability to make you feel like you’ve transformed into a fire beast is unmatched, making battles between Godzilla and King Kong seem like B-movie encounters from Toho’s Gojira wave in the 50s. If any dev is thinking of making a modern kaiju game, updating King of the Monsters or Rampage for example, developers should take note of Final Fantasy 16’s feat.