Warning: Spoilers Off applies to this page. Proceed at your own risk.
The Warden of Darkness says hello.
Given its influences from Game of Thrones, Final Fantasy XVI showcases some of the most darkest moments in Final Fantasy history, being the first mainline numbered game in the franchise to receive an M-rating.
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Main Story
A Flame Summoned
- The early story takes its time building up the cast, only to brutally kill most of them in some of the most violent scenes in a main Final Fantasy title, and have the rest either be in a horrible situation afterwards for years of their life or be the root cause of their suffering. No punches are held for any of this. And this is just the tutorial prologue.
- A small moment, but Anabella's handmaidens casually being cut down as she was leaving, with them being unaware of any danger until the swords are already sticking into their necks. The reason? Anabella can be overheard speaking to her handmaidens on Clive's way to meet with Elwin, warning them that if anything happened to Joshua, she'd hold them responsible...and she kept her word. There was literally nothing the handmaidens could have done about the situation, and they were nowhere near Phoenix Gate or any any position to intervene in the events, but despite apparently still being willing to follow Anabella regardless of her betrayal, she had them callously killed anyway in such a manner as it seems she was venting her ire over her son's passing. Anabella doesn't even break her stride when walking away as the handmaidens collapse choking on their own blood, and it shows how utterly disposable the common people are to her.
Unsorted
- The Eikons and their Dominants are this. Any time they fight during wars, it results in soldiers from both sides dying; in a sense, mutually assured destruction. They are hence realistically treated as weapons of mass destruction akin to nukes.
- The battle at Belenus Tor, between Waloed and the Empire of Sanbreque, shows how the soldiers view their factions Eikons and Dominants. They cheer as their faction's Eikon takes the field. And the cheering continues even though those same Eikons' attacks destroy soldiers on both sides. And after both Eikons withdraw, the fighting between the armies just starts up again with renewed fervor on both sides. The Eikons and their Dominants aren't just WMDs—they're WMDs that are worshipped to an alarmingly religious degree. Even the collateral damage to their own forces isn't enough to make the soldiers question if the Eikons are worth rallying around.
- Rosaria under Anabella's regime. What was once a lush medieval paradise is transformed into a parched, harsh wasteland. With Black Shields—a twisted version of the beloved Shields of Rosaria—persecuting and killing Bearers along with anyone who has little success in following the rules, one has to wonder how anyone in the region managed to survive for so long.
- It doesn't come up in the main story, but a sidequest reveals something that is very much unsettling and disturbing about the brands tattooed on Bearers' faces. They aren't just there to "mark merchandise" or tell everyone who is a slave and who isn't; they are also poisonous. The brands are laced with a fatal poison that will kill the Bearer if it enters the bloodstream, discouraging anyone from trying to remove the mark. While Cid and his hideaways have managed to successfully remove the marks, Rodrigue mentions that it's a very delicate procedure that sees "near as many die as recover", and even if they succeed in removing the mark, the recipient is in for a lot of pain afterwards.
- Tarja, in commenting about the removal of Clive's mark, mentions it was done with a scalpel. Given this is a medieval-esque setting, this probably means the most reliable removal method is to basically flay that section of skin off and cauterize the resulting wound, with only herbal anesthetics available that simply partially dull the pain.
- Unlike most other Final Fantasy titles, XVI doesn't shy away from showing visible blood and violence, but one notable example is Clive ending his first fight with Kupka by cutting his hands off. They can even be seen laying on the ground after the fact. Is it any wonder this is the first mainline entry to get an M rating?
- Just everything about Ultima. Aside from all the torment he's indirectly heaped upon Clive since the sacking of Phoenix Gate, as the story goes on you get to see just how his corrosive influence has ruined countless lives and entire nations. This is a God who slowly rotted away Sanbreque from within by skillfully preying on Annabella's desire to sire an all-powerful emperor by hijacking her own new son Olivier and egging her on in her twisted ambitions. And when Dion caught on to his machinations and launched a well-intentioned coup, Ultima single-handedly turned it around into an all-out massacre. He also corrupted the legendary King of Waloed into a deranged fanatic by preying on Barnabas' Incest Subtext towards his mother, and reduced entire masses of people and wildlife into murderous Akashic zombies. The Waloed example bears special mention, given that not only did Barnabas himself become a corrupter who effectively ruined the lives of Benedkita and Hugo, he even gave free reign for Ultima to act as he pleased in Ash (turning it into a nigh-uninhabitable land of death that's crawling with Akashic abominations), and conducted unspeakably horrific human experiments for his master's benefit that would make Sanbreque slavers look like saints. Ultima very much earns his place as the main villain by virtue of the sheer scale and depravity of the horrors he dispassionately inflicts on the very humanity he created, using methods that have very disturbing real-world parallels.
- How Ultima manifests himself prior to his full reveal. While initially appearing as a mysterious hooded figure, what really adds to his creepiness is how he speaks in a distorted alien language for the first half of the game, with the only way of knowing what he's saying being the subtitles shown onscreen. It makes him feel less like the archetypal main antagonist of a Final Fantasy game, and more like an unknowable and incomprehensible evil more akin to Lavos or JENOVA - even if he does turn out to be more like an archetypal Final Fantasy antagonist by the game's end.
- The initial hints towards Ultima's true nature also counts; the Eikon mural found in multiple places throughout the game depicts a winged and horned dark God at the center of all the Eikons barring Ifrit and Phoenix (or so it seems), which comes off as incredibly eerie after most of the game's Nightmare Fuel up until that point came from Realism-Induced Horror.
- How Ultima reveals himself to Clive. He teleports behind Clive, causing him to turn, and the camera follows his gaze to reveal a pale, humanoid…creature with four arms and sunken, lidless eyes. If this is a shock for the player, it's much more so for Clive, whose initial reaction to this is silent fear of something he can't comprehend.
- The state of Ash and the kingdom of Waloed when you finally reach it to destroy the last mothercrystal. Due to Ultima's influence and Barnabas' insanity, the entire kingdom is filled with monsters, and any human you find are either dead/dying or has gone akashic. Clive and Joshua even comment as they approach the mothercrystal how the kingdom was devoid of any human sound.
- The page image follows Clive, Gav, and Torgal finishing up an onslaught of Akashic. Clive gets Gav's attention, and the scout is groaning with frustration that there's more Akashic. But then he turns to see what Clive and Torgal are looking at and gasps, "Ohhh, fuck." Cut to the trio looking up at…a fully-primed Odin, who is looking down upon them from his steed.
Side Quests
After first Time Skip
- The quests in the Royal Meadows by Northreach shows just how grave the treatment of Bearers is in the story's setting, and the game pulls no punches in showing the consequences of dehumanization. Clive's search for Chloe starts by making it sound like she's a lost dog, only for him to find that she's a Bearer who was given to her owner as a Replacement Goldfish for her previous slaves, who were all forcibly given the same name. Later, Clive finds a pair of Bearers who were killed by wolves, and when he finds their owners, he discovers that they intentionally threw them to the wolves to amuse themselves, showing no remorse for it. When Clive confronts them, they're more astonished that a "Branded" is talking to them—revealing that enslaved Bearers aren't even allowed to speak, lest they prove their humanity. All the while, the sequence is underscored by a persistent Drone of Dread to highlight the unsettling nature of what's happening. The game already did much to establish the plights of Bearers as chattel slaves, but the Royal Meadows sequence takes thing to new lows by showing them being treated as nothing more than disposable objects.
After second Time Skip
- If you thought the Bearers had it bad in Sanbreque, you will be unpleasantly surprised that things are, or at least were by the time you get there, FAR worse in Waloed.
- One sidequest takes you to a conservatory where children Bearers were forced to undergo training to become soldiers in conditions so heinous that it was flat out called torture by Clive. Worse yet, those who died were forbidden to be buried in the nearby graveyard. It's very telling how bad things are that the one running the place, upon realizing that one of the bearers he tortured was his flesh and blood, commits suicide out of guilt by having his wards tear him apart.
- Another sidequest takes you to a coliseum-like prison where Bearers are forced to fight and train the kingdom's beasts to the point of exhaustion, with those who die being fed to them, with one of them being a nasty behemoth called the Kuza Beast.
