After 16 major titles, it’s hard to say there’s one thing that defines the Final Fantasy series. There are constant iconic elements that carry over from game to game, like chocobos, Cids, and moogles, but the form in which they appear is always different. In my mind, it looks like a series of knobs that can be turned up or down depending on who’s in charge of each part. Some people prefer their games with the fear dial turned all the way up, while others want a bit more dungeon and puzzle volume. Every Final Fantasy is someone’s favorite Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy 16 will surely be someone’s favorite Final Fantasy. It’s very exciting, but it’s not my thing. I’m drawn to the epic, melodramatic storylines of Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy 16’s story is engaging and melodramatic, but it’s also dull and boring, and it feels like the game is a waste of time. It’s a shame that this wasn’t satisfying enough for me, as it is a story with engaging combat design and encounters.

Final Fantasy 16 is a fast-paced action game that will have you coming back for more. You control protagonist Clive Rosfield, once the prince of a principality and now a slave soldier, and you puppet-manipulate this guy from combat encounter to combat encounter, between scripted scenes that drive the story and excursions to complete side quests. Final Fantasy 16’s combat director, Ryota Suzuki, has also worked on Dragon’s Dogma and Devil May Cry, and that shows not only in the game’s exciting combat, but also in the ability to replay each level and level up and reach new heights.

Instead of summoning characters like Garuda and Shiva to fight for him, Clive is given the elemental powers of these Eikons. Eikons are the physical embodiment of the elemental powers of very special magic users called Dominants (yes, they’re always called Dominants, no, that’s always been fun). In this world fiction, only the Dominant can summon or transform into the power of the Eikon, and only one Eikon can exist for each element at a time.

As you unlock each Eikon, you get a new set of elemental powers that you can combine. First, you have the Phoenix Blessing, which allows you to instantly close the distance between you and your enemy, and two other abilities; one sets nearby enemies on fire, and the other gives them a flaming kick. These abilities not only drain the enemy’s health, but also help you stagger them during combat, allowing you to attack while they are temporarily incapacitated. These maneuvers are beautifully animated, so we encourage you to use them as often as possible.

The abilities given to each Eikon are as versatile as they are varied. While Garuda draws enemies closer to himself, Ramuh slows down time and gives the ability to hit multiple enemies with powerful lightning. Many unlockable skills change the entire flow of battle. Wisp summons fireballs that swirl around Clive and keep attacking any enemy that comes within range. The whirlwind you get after unlocking Garuda lifts several enemies into the air before slamming them to the ground. By the end of the game you can tweak your skill set to create a true killing machine like no other. At first, I worried that all the customization options would be too much for me, but by the time the credits rolled, my newfound powers felt natural.

I approached every battle in Final Fantasy 16 with the hunger of an animal that couldn’t be fed. No matter how much I hated other aspects of the game, every combat encounter left me invigorated. When traversing some of the open areas of the game’s maps, I sometimes felt cheated by defeating hordes of low-level enemies too quickly. I needed more: to see Clive leap from enemy to enemy, to lean forward, toss enemies into the air, to stab them with his sword, to electrocute them, to light them on fire, to switch between these elements so quickly that the screen lit up everything around me with the colors of elemental magic.

It’s fun just to mess around and see what’s possible and how combat skills complement each other. Once, while fighting a dragon, I was able to summon a lightning ball and hit it with my sword to create even more chains of lightning. The dragon opened its mouth and breathed fire, and even though I needed to kill that damn dragon before it killed me, I dodged it because I had low health. I was lucky. The fire hit my lightning ball and that chain lightning activated and still killed the dragon. I yelled out loud in my empty apartment.

My favorite Final Fantasy games give me things I’ve never seen before. Final Fantasy 16 is full of moments of amazing spectacle. The boss battles in Final Fantasy 16 are some kind of theme park ride. I’ve fought a giant Eikon on a mountaintop and stabbed my palm as it swung at me. I’ve transformed into an Ifrit, a demonic form consumed by flame, and aimed flaming fists at lost pre-race technology. I’ve fought dragons and been catapulted into space, where I beat them to death and then fell into the atmosphere. Even the quick-time events, an aesthetically beautiful but silly addition to most games’ boss battles, add to the thrill. These scenes were incredibly powerful and provided a cathartic moment in the midst of battle.

If every part of Final Fantasy 16 was as good as the boss fights, it would be one of the best games of all time. But the story is honestly boring. It’s not that I dislike the characters; I grew to like Clive through his romance with Jill and found Cid to be a welcome change in a dark, unforgiving story. Many of the quotes during missions also seemed to round out the characters more. The world of Valistia in which these characters live is a real problem, as is the story’s tendency to jump from one traumatic event to the next without rhyme or reason.

The plot of Final Fantasy 16 is one of the most nonsensical medieval fantasy stories this side of the 1960s. It’s obviously inspired by Game of Thrones, but it’s based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and plays every fantasy trope Martin commented on completely straight up. The result is a story where white Europeans discover for the first time in their lives that slavery is wrong.

As far as I know, every country in Valistia relies on slavery to make their economy work. Magic users, known as wizards, are tested at birth and enslaved, and have tattoos on their faces so that anyone can identify them at any time. They are brutally worked to death, bought and sold, and are not considered human by anyone but magic users. Cid recruits Clive with the noble goal of freeing the slaves, but it comes with the tedium of watching as the player watches Clive realize that slavery is wrong. It’s a bit awkward to play a character who only realized five minutes ago that owning humans is wrong, even if the game goes out of its way to show that he’s always been kind to the slaves.

The details of this slavery take up most of the game’s first 12 hours, but this slavery subplot doesn’t make much sense. But don’t worry; this very unpleasant and poorly written subplot suddenly disappears in favor of the threat of the apocalypse. The political situation of the Valistian people is no longer important.

Despite taking so long to build up the lore surrounding the magic system in the game’s many cutscenes, Final Fantasy 16 doesn’t seem to be very interested in slavery or the politics of enslaved people, much less the story in general. Unfortunately, some of the plot details are relegated to the in-game wiki. The emperor of the French-influenced Sunbreak nation is constantly threatening other nations with a very special flower, but you have to read an optional function text entry to find out that this flower is the literal symbol of the Sunbreak nation. That such effective symbolism and character motivations are relegated to an optional menu is a testament to the game’s priorities. Action is the focus, story is secondary.

Worst of all, the plot is the polar opposite of the gameplay. If it’s wooden, the gameplay is lively, if it’s mechanical, the gameplay is imaginative. I fell asleep during some cutscenes, and character dialogue rolled out of my brain like water from a duck. This is not to disparage the voice actors, who do their best to make the material very boring. Particularly noteworthy is Ben Starr’s performance as Clive, as well as Ralph Ineson of Game of Thrones fame. But I’ve seen this exact same story almost back to back, not just in novels, but in movies, songs, video games, and even other Final Fantasy games. In fact, Final Fantasy 16 recreates part of the story of Final Fantasy 14, directed by Naoki Yoshida, producer of FF16.

As the credits rolled, I threw my hands up in the air, but I was not moved by a resolution that I felt Final Fantasy 16 did not deserve. Then, after a few minutes and some practice, I rebooted and started up New Game Plus. I selected the highest difficulty. I skipped all the cutscenes and instead jumped right into the action, assassinating mobs and bosses alike with my specially developed Eikonic Powers. “Why did this game feel so boring now?” I thought. Then I played through the cutscenes and left. I felt my eyelids getting heavy, my fatigue growing stronger and stronger, and finally I dozed off on the couch.