Video Game / Final Fantasy XVI

Fate will fall.

"It was Moss the Chronicler who said... that the land of Valisthea is blessed in the light of the Mothercrystals... and that it was this light which finally lead our forebears out of the darkness. Yet what they saw in the light gave rise to temptation. Temptation... that ever lures us back into the crystals’ shadow. And thus did our journey begin."

— Clive Rosfield, opening narration

Final Fantasy XVI is a Stylish Action RPG and the sixteenth main entry in Square Enix’s feather-burningly popular Final Fantasy series. It was released on June 22, 2023 for the PlayStation 5 as a timed exclusive with an upcoming PC version with an undetermined release date.

In the land of Valisthea on the twin continents of Storm and Ash, five great crystal mountains known as the Mothercrystals tower over civilization. The Mothercrystals are mined for crystals that are rich with aether, a valuable resource that allows the people to enjoy lives of comfort and plenty. Six kingdoms rule over different parts of Valisthea: The Grand Duchy of Rosaria, the Dhalmekian Republic, the Holy Empire of Sanbreque, the Kingdom of Waloed, the Iron Kingdom, and the Crystalline Dominion. The six vye for control of the Mothercrystals for the power, wealth, and security they provide. In recent years, a threat to all of humanity has crept up on them: the Blight, a phenomenon where the aether in a region is dried up, leaving it a dead wasteland where the water is stagnant, plants do not grow, and animals will not lie. As the Blight slowly encroaches and displaces towns and villages, the nations of Valisthea have stepped up their aggression to flee the Blight and seize territory from each other.

Born into the people of Valisthea are the Dominants, humans born with power over ancient beasts of destruction, "Eikons". There are eight known Eikons, one for each element, and their Dominants can call upon their Eikon's power to empower themselves to fantastical extremes. In especially extreme circumstances, they can even transform into the Eikon, becoming towering beings of magical mass-destruction that can reshape continents and level mountains. Some people hate the Dominants as abominations, others admire them for their power, but all fear them, and they are used as Human Weapons in Valisthea's wars, willing or not. Below the Dominants are the Bearers, humans who can use magic without the need of a medium like a crystal. Unlike the Dominants, Bearers are near-universally loathed; upon their discovery, a Bearer is tattooed on the face and taken by the government, and then pressed into servitude, forced to use their powers for the betterment of society.

In Rosaria, Clive Rosfield is the first-born son of Rosaria's ruling archduke, and the sworn First Shield of his little brother Joshua, Dominants of the Eikon of Fire, Phoenix. However, on the night Clive, his brother, and father are readying for war, they are betrayed by the Empire and the archduke is killed. During the attack, something unprecedented occurs: a monstrous entity emerges from within the castle walls, Ifrit, a second Eikon of Fire; something which should be impossible to exist. When the flames settle, the only survivor is Clive, who is seized by the Empire and enslaved as a Bearer to fight in their military. 13 years after the fall of Rosaria, Clive takes an opportunity to escape the Empire and sets off on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, intent on tracking down the cloaked figure he believes to be Ifrit's Dominant and killing them to claim vengeance for Joshua. Along the way, he'll learn more about himself and his role in Valisthea's fate as buried truths about the Dominants, the Eikons, and the Mothercrystals come to light, and an Awful Truth emerges - for Valisthea, and humanity, to truly be free, the Mothercrystals must be destroyed.

Notably, Final Fantasy XVI is developed by Square-Enix's Creative Business Unit III, the famed development team behind the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, making it the first time the team has developed a single-player mainline Final Fantasy game. Final Fantasy XIV producer and director Naoki Yoshida is XVI's producer. Hiroshi Takai, director of The Last Remnant and assistant director on the XIV expansions A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, as well as development supervisor of the XIV expansions Stormblood, Shadowbringers and Endwalker, is XVI's director. Kazutoyo Maehiro, main scenario writer of A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, is XVI's creative director and penned the game's scenario and script. Hiroshi Minagawa, the art director of XIV, Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Tactics Ogre, and the co-director of Final Fantasy XII, serves as the art director for the game. And Masayoshi Soken, the sound director and composer of Final Fantasy XIV, serves as XVI's composer as well. Also of note is that the game's combat director is ex-Capcom developer Ryota Suzuki, gameplay designer on Dragon's Dogma and Devil May Cry 5. In addition to Suzuki, PlatinumGames, under the leadership of Takahisa Taura, the lead game designer of NieR: Automata and director of Astral Chain, and the development team of the upcoming Kingdom Hearts IV, under the leadership of series co-director Tai Yasue, helped co-develop the game's combat as well.

On August 2, 2023, it was announced that two installments of paid Downloadable Content are currently under development, both taking place before the final battle:^note Requirements to access the DLC are having the main story quest "Back to Their Origin" unlocked and the sidequests "Where There's a Will" and "Priceless" complete.

• The first DLC, Echoes of the Fallen, was released on December 7, 2023, where Clive and his allies explore the Sagespire, a Fallen ruin that contains many secrets and dangers.
• The second DLC, The Rising Tide, was released on April 18, 2024, and features the appearance of the lost Eikon Leviathan and a new field area in the land of Mysidia, as well as a new endgame battle mode "Kairos Gate".

Trailers: Awakening/Reveal Trailer, Dominance/Gameplay Trailer, Ambition/Story Trailer, Revenge/Release Date Trailer, State of Play 2023 Preview, Salvation/Launch Trailer, Ascension Trailer, Requiem/Live Action Trailer, DLC Trailer, The Rising Tide DLC Trailer

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Awaken, tropes of fate:

• Aborted Arc
  • Cid and Jill are eventually shown to be suffering from the "crystal's curse" as their powers take their toll on them, and Joshua is repeatedly emphasized to be in poor health and needs an attendant to take care of him almost around the clock, and exerting his powers is very taxing on him. In all three cases, it serves to hint that their end may be coming soon. However, those of them who eventually die do so for entirely unrelated reasons, and those that survive never shown any ill effects of their powers again.
  • A major theme for the first part of the game is Cid trying to build a world free for Bearers, "where people can die on their own terms" serving as Arc Words for his goal that Clive comes to share in. After the second Time Skip, the main narrative focus is on the Mothercrystals and the Dominants; while liberating Bearers is not entirely forgotten, it's largely relegated to sidequests, and when it comes up in the main questline it's usually incidental.
  • During the first half of the story, a lot of focus is given to how Annabella and her Black Shields are purging Rosaria of its Bearer population and slaughtering any village that gives them shelter. No one in-story knows the motivation for the purges since, while Annabella is bigoted towards Bearers, even she would understand the practical reasons to keep them around, especially as crystals start becoming rarer and weaker. It's hinted that this was part of some greater plot but when Clive and his mother reunite, neither of them bring up the purges and they're never given any type of proper explanation.
  • Cid asserts that the ruling powers of Valisthea know that the Mothercrystals drain the land of aether but silence anyone speaks out or attempts to create alternative ways of living out of fear that upsetting the status quo will weaken their authority. This plot point is never mention again after the second timeskip.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: A rare aversion for the series. The default Level cap is 50, raised to 100 on Final Fantasy mode, but on both difficulties you can expect to finish the game several levels shy of the cap yet not by much. The two DLCs each raise the level cap by 5, and you'll hit the new cap easily enough by playing through them.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: In the side quest "Blacksmith's Blues II", a single-edged blade from distant lands catches Blackthorn's eye. The metal isn't anything special, but he recognizes that the edge is the sharpest thing he's ever seen and could cleanly split a man in half. A weapon collector who bought the blade explains that it was forged by a school of swordsmanship from the Outer Isles who hone the blade with special whetstones until it's incredibly sharp and extremely fragile, so It Only Works Once before breaking.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: In the "Dominance" trailer, a clip of Barnabas and Benedikta having a conversation after most likely having slept together is placed between two clips of Clive showcasing his powers in battle.
• Actionized Sequel: While still an RPG, the combat system is a real-time system influenced by Stylish Action games, with Ryota Suzuki, who did combat design on multiple Capcom games including Devil May Cry 5, Dragon's Dogma, and Monster Hunter: World, serving as XVI's combat director.
• Action Prologue: The game immediately opens up to the Night of Flames and the fall of Phoenix gate, showing the battle between Phoenix and Ifrit. The present-day section of the game also sees Clive and the Bastards starting their mission of hunting down Shiva's Dominant while the Ironblood and republic soldiers slaughter each other in the Nysa Defile.
• Adaptational Wimp: Malboros, a staple Final Fantasy monster here known as morbols. In most games, their signature Bad Breath attack will inflict pretty much every status effect at once, immediately taking the victim out of the fight. Here, there are no status effects to speak of, and Bad Breath is just a plain damaging attack.
• Aerith and Bob: In a meta sense, characters in XVI generally have real names of largely European origin, standing apart from the more fantastical names that appear in much of the series. Even the more outlandish sounding ones like Tarja have real world roots, if not necessarily common in English-speaking countries. Not that there aren't outliers like Cidolfus or Midadol.
• After the End: The world of Valisthea is currently in a Dark Age, as the former empire of the "People of the Sky" has crumbled, and it has taken 1500 years for the world to reach the equivalent of the Late Middle Ages. Clive puts it into another one at the end of the game by removing the last of the Mothercrystals so that the Bearers won't be exploited and the world won't be tempted by their power again.
• Almost Kiss: Clive and Jill are about to kiss in the infirmary...when Gav bursts in with news of Hugo's latest effort to draw Clive out.
• All for Nothing: At the very end it turns out that Clive's body isn't strong enough to hold the power of eight Eikons and Ultima for long, so Ultima's plan to possess Mythos and cast Raise probably wouldn't have worked.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: In all audio languages except Japanese, "My Star" sung by Amanda Achen plays during the ending scene and "Tsuki Wo Miteita - Moongazing" by Kenshi Yonezu plays during the credits. In the Japanese audio, the songs play in opposite order. However, "My Star" is not actually replacing the latter as the game's theme song as, according to Soken, it is Jill's theme.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The final phases of the fight against Ultima Risen take place in a colorful void.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Pretty much everything about the ending is ambiguous from whether or not Clive survived the final battle to whether Valisthea ever truly recovers from the Blight. Even the epilogue isn't very clear on whether it is set in Valisthea's distant future, or if it shows that the entire events of the game occurred in the imagination of a child based on a book he had read.
  • What exactly causes the Blight? Cid believes the Blight is caused by the Mothercrystals sucking up the aether, in reference to how regular crystals draw aether from the area around them. Ultima, on the other hand, claims the Blight predates the Mothercrystals and in fact fled to Valisthea to escape from it while also implying magic is the true cause. In any case, the game doesn't give a concrete answer or explanation.
  • The game makes mention that there are continents beyond the Twins of Storm and Ash, and a couple of characters are mentioned to have come from them. However, their state is otherwise ambiguous: they don't appear on the map, they play no major role in the story, and no one talks about their state because in-story no one has managed to cross the ocean and return to tell of what lay beyond, and the few that came from those other continents in the first place don't talk about them.
• Ambition Is Evil: Anabella takes a range of unethical things to fuel her ambition of siring the perfect child just because her fellow nobles mocked her for Clive not being given any Phoenix powers.
• An Arm and a Leg: Notable examples are Garuda ripping off Ifrit's arm (only for it to regenerate) and Clive cutting off Kupka's hands.
• And I Must Scream: In The Rising Tide DLC, it's revealed that this is the fate of Leviathan's Dominant, an infant named Waljas. He was frozen in time for nearly a century, completely unable to move or interact with the world. But it's implied that he was conscious the entire time, angry and terrified at being imprisoned by his own family, so that his aether may be used to create a new Mothercrystal.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Right before flying off to the final battle, Clive tells Jill for the first time that he loves her, and she responds in kind. She manages to keep a Stiff Upper Lip until his departure, at which point she lets herself collapse and sob for his return.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If Clive is maxed out on a healing item when he finds one in the field, he'll automatically use it so the item isn't wasted and players don't have to worry about coming back for it. Additionally, the player is restricted from leaving dungeon-type areas until they're completed, or else they start over from the beginning, but every level has healing items convenient placed along the way, oftentimes before or after a particularly difficult sequence of enemies or a boss.
  • If you get a Game Over fighting certain bosses or story fights, restarting will not only bring you back to the last checkpoint within the fight itself, but automatically restock all your healing items. You're also given the opportunity to open the menu and adjust your gear and abilities before continuing.
  • The Active Time Lore is meant to offer such a mechanic for the story content; during most cutscenes, pressing and holding the touchpad will call up a menu of characters, places, or events, that are relevant to the current conversation, so players don't get confused trying to follow the narrative and can quickly brush up on subjects that may not have come up in a while.
  • When you replay a level, your treasure coffer data carries over both ways, allowing you to search for items you may have missed since you can't revisit these areas in normal gameplay.
  • When a crafting component can only be acquired from a Hunt, it is given a special emblem over it in the crafting menu to provide a clue how to acquire it. In turn, if the player acquires such components without being aware of their utility in crafting, the emblem is a warning that the item is unique and necessary to craft gear so they don't sell it willy-nilly.
  • The game contains various "Timely Accessories" to simplify gameplay for those who aren't so skilled at Action RPGs. These rings include the ability to slow time just before getting hit to make dodging easier, a ring to make dodging automatic (if possible), one to use healing items automatically when low on HP, one to make combos easier to perform by mashing the same button over and over, and one to make Torgal controlled by an AI instead of having to input commands for him. The game tells you about the rings after the combat tutorial but before life-or-death combat begins against the goblin horde in the playable demo.
  • When playing in Final Fantasy Mode, completing the Chronolith trials will unlock all base accessories for purchase at various merchants. As upgrading the accessories requires you to have two of the lower-tier version (and most of them are only acquired once per playthrough), this allows players to finally get their hands on accessories they missed out on if they sold their weaker counterparts.
• The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: Following Primogenesis and attacks by hordes of akashic, the people of Valisthea realize they must break class barriers and work together to survive.
• Apocalypse Cult: The Circle of Malius is a very ancient religion that worships Ultima and actively looks forward to they day when the world will be destroyed and rebuilt. They even consider being turned akashic as a good thing, since their will is removed and they're turned into obedient servants to their God. As part of a side quest, Clive can visit Mikkelburg, a small settlement where all the townspeople spend their time praying to the heavens, waiting for the moment they'll be turned.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Most of the people on the lands of Valisthea are very reliant on the usage of Crystals for their everyday life, be it mundane or for something else like in battle. The mountains of crystals that are the Mothercrystals are the source of these materials.
• Artifact of Doom: The Mothercrystals themselves; the characters discuss a theory that the Mothercrystals are producing Blight, possibly as a side-effect of generating aether. But the truth is that the Mothercrystals are siphoning aether from the surrounding land and their cores are Ultima clones that rejoin with the original once the Mothercrystals are destroyed.
• Ascended Extra:
  • In most Final Fantasy games, Ifrit is a low level summon and minor Starter Villain Boss Fight who quickly loses almost all plot importance beyond being one of the many summons. In XVI Ifrit is a central figure in the story and by far the most important Eikon, being the initial Arch-Enemy Clive seeks to kill after being involved in his Cynicism Catalyst, and later Clive's own Eikon form for boss fights against the likes of Garuda, Titan, and Bahamut.
  • Even more so is Phoenix, who tends to be a mid game extra summon with no story relevance at all. Here Phoenix plays a major part in the plot and his Dominant's death kickstarts the plot.
  • In another meta-example, the Big Bad's plan necessitates the casting of Raise, of all spells.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The Eikons in this game are enormous, nearly castle-sized beasts. Titan causes an earthquake that wipes out a platoon of foot soldiers, all while he looms large in the background. Meanwhile, "Titan Lost" is so immense, it makes the castle-sized Ifrit look like an insect in comparison.
• Automaton Horses: Clive obtains a chocobo who ostensibly stays with her flock whenever he is not calling on her services. Which means in addition to the usual aspects of this trope like the chocobo being able to gallop indefinitely, she apparently lives saddled and bridled without any issues as well.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The "Blacksmith's Blues" sidequests result in Blackthorne deciding that making equipment precisely like the special items he had Clive research would either be too much work for one smith arming a large force, or not suitable for the sort of work the Cursebreakers do. But he can make some Boring, but Practical improvements on his normal work based on what he learned from his studies.
• Badass Boast: In the "Dominance" trailer, Hugo Kupka claims "If I take the field, our duel will shake the island to its foundations." He is not kidding.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Clive's comrade, the jovial Aevis, is cut down by the Ironblood just as he's about to kill Jill, sparing Clive from having to kill any of his squad other than the much less sympathetic Tiamat.
• The Battle Didn't Count: The prologue features a large fight between Phoenix/Joshua and another Eikon of Fire (eventually revealed to be Ifrit). Even if Joshua/Phoenix wins the fight, Ifrit brutally murders Phoenix in the immediate following cutscene.
• Battle in the Rain: Clive's third and final duel against Barnabas takes place atop the Reverie spire during a rainstorm.
• Beam Spam: Bahamut's Megaflare attack, first demonstrated in his battle with Odin, is an early example of this. Bahamut also has additional variations on this.
• Behemoth Battle: Wars are waged in Valisthea in part with the warring nations' respective Eikons duking it out—in the "Awakening" trailer, we see Titan and Shiva going head-to-head, as well as Phoenix and Ifrit. The "Dominance" trailer shows Bahamut versus Odin, as well as Ifrit versus Titan, Garuda, and Bahamut.
• Beyond the Impossible: In-Universe. The "Awakening" trailer sets up the idea that there is one Summon Magic Eikon for each of the magical elements. However, after the Eikon of Fire Phoenix goes berserk during the attack on the Grand Duchy of Rosaria, a second Eikon of Fire, Ifrit, shows up to completely break that logic.
  Lord Commander Murdoch: A second Eikon of Fire... but, that's impossible.
• The Big Bad Shuffle: For the first part of the game, the Big Bad seems to be Clive's mother Anabella and the Empire of Sanbreque, Benedikta acts as an Arc Villain since she's the antagonist Clive is facing directly, and the Hooded Man serves as The Heavy by nature of Clive's quest to find and kill him being his primary motivation. By the time the first Mothercrystal is destroyed, Hugo Kupka is set up as the next Arc Villain after Benedikta, the Hooded Man has shifted to be a non-antagonist, and Anabella and the Empire seem to still be the Big Bad, but Ultima has been revealed and is implied to be a Greater-Scope Villain. Following the destruction of Drake's Tail, Barnabas steps up as the final Arc Villain before you can deal with Ultima, as it is apparent by now that he's the true Big Bad with Barnabas serving as The Dragon.
• Big Damn Kiss: Clive and Jill finally kiss after she willingly gives Clive the power of Shiva.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: One of the final scenes is Clive's (apparent) death being juxtaposed with Edda giving birth to her child.
• Bittersweet Ending: Ultima is defeated and the world is freed of his enslavement, especially the Branded. However, Clive and his companions may or may not be dead (and his hand is petrified, leaving him crippled even if he survived), and the Blight has still taken most of the land while magic has dried up, leaving humanity in a Dark Age for what may be decades or even centuries. In The Stinger, magic is gone for good and the world hasn't improved technologically, but the world has healed and humans have finally found some measure of peace.
• Black Box: Mid comes up with a design for mythril engines that would allow a sailing ship to go at tremendous speeds, but the system is missing a key component. It turns out to have been built by Cid and was hidden inside the Orchestrion. What pushes it into this territory is that, even though Clive and the player get a good look at it, it's unclear what exactly it does and the game is vague on describing its function, and even more egregiously, it's implied that Cid built this device years ago without specific intent for it to be used for such an engine design, but it is now critical to Mid's.
• Blessed with Suck: Congrats, you're a Bearer! You can use magic all on your own without having to rely on Valisthea's increasingly short supply of crystals. Problem is that it's because you're the crystal - casting magic slowly and painfully petrifies you in a way that is both incurable and inevitably lethal. Not only that, but you can and will be legally enslaved as a living household appliance because your magic only costs you and nobody else, and will be marked on your cheek with a tattoo called a 'brand' that identifies you as an official subhuman and contains a subcutaneous poison sac that makes removing it difficult, painful, and extremely dangerous to the patient even for the most specialised, highly-trained surgeons. Your own family will regard you as something inhuman to be rid of, a great shame on the family tree they cannot wait to be free of. Oh, and it's probably not a great idea to fight back - your magic isn't all that powerful, there's far more of them than there are of you (some of whom will be packing crystals that give them powers equal or greater to yours without the personal cost), and odds are that you're part-rock already thanks to being overworked from birth. There's a reason that figuring out how to make Bearers' lives suck less is one of the driving objectives for the protagonists.
• Blood from the Mouth: A common signal that a Dominant is overusing their powers is that they will cough up blood. Cid in particular has used his powers so much that using them at all these days will prompt a few hacking, bloody coughs.
• Blood-Splattered Innocents: The prologue sees the Archduke of Rosaria decapitated with a sword strike, coating Joshua, who is standing behind him, in his blood.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The first two trailers alone have quite a few examples. In addition to having Joshua drenched in his father's blood, the "Awakening" trailer shows Ifrit tearing into something, with blood splattering outwards, while it and the "Dominance" trailer have a Big Badass Battle Sequence where two armies rush each other, and the soldiers stab, hack, and smash their enemies. While the Final Fantasy series hasn't shied away from death, visible blood is a rarity in other mainline titles.
• Book Ends: At the start of the game, Clive quotes Moss the Chronicler regarding humanity's dependence and the tempting power of the Mothercrystals before stating, "And thus did our journey begin", watching a campfire flicker out. At the end of the game, after having destroyed the Mothercrystals and Ultima, thus ridding the world of an abusive "god" and the supposed source of the Blight, Clive looks into the sky as the bright satellite known as Methia flickers out, and caps off the game by saying, "And thus did our journey end." The same phrase is also the description for the game's platinum trophy.
• Boring, but Practical: Out of all the Eikons, the Phoenix will be a mainstay for many players due to being able to deal mortal blows after using the Phoenix Shift easily and also allows them to reach the enemy faster. It also gets boring very quickly to swing the sword four times, magic burst, dash, and mortal blow until all the enemies who do not have a stagger gauge on the screen are dead.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Blackthorne's sidequest about his village features this. Blackthorne's belief that his principles of pursuing blacksmithing for the artistry would have led the village to ruin was well-founded, but Zoltan's own approach of mass-producing adequate goods has led to stagnation and a lack of pride in their work among the villagers.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • It's the first non-MMO entry to be done by Creative Business Unit III and the first to go for a full real-time combat system.
  • In previous entries, crystals were worshipped as forces for good and the stability of the world. The tagline for XVI is "The legacy of the crystals has shaped our history for long enough," showing a far more cynical view of them. The "Salvation" trailer even implies that the Crystals are killing the world.
  • Every previous mainline entry since the ESRB's founding have, at best, pushed the boundaries of the Teen rating but never gone over it. XVI, on the other hand, was made with a Mature rating in mind, and it shows. It is worth noting that the only other Final Fantasy games to receive a Mature rating are Final Fantasy Type-0 and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, but while both games received a PEGI rating of 16, XVI has a rating of 18.
  • The role of the character Cid in previous Final Fantasy games has ranged from historical figure to important NPC to party member to antagonist. While Cidolfus seemingly continues this proud tradition as Clive's companion and mentor, it all changes when he passes on his name and legacy as "Cid the Outlaw" to Clive right before his death. Following the Time Skip, Clive has fully taken on the mantle of Cid, which, by proxy, makes him the first Cid to be a main character.
  • Final Fantasy games usually go with a Kid Hero protagonist, or at least a very early adult. All the main players here are in their late 20's at the youngest and that extra experience shows in the characterisation, something Square hasn't really attempted since Vagrant Story.
• Break Meter: The "Dominance" trailer shows that enemies have a "Will Gauge" much like in Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy VII Remake. The gauge depletes as Clive attacks an enemy and when it's completely empty, the enemy becomes staggered, allowing Clive to wail on them with impunity.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: The relationship between Clive and Jill as adults. By the time they reunite and have their first proper conversation together, Clive has already learned at this point that he is Ifrit and was responsible for tearing Joshua-Phoenix apart 13 years ago, which causes him to be beset with guilt and self-loathing. She is quick to reassure him that that is not who he is and they will need to confront the truth together. As time goes on, Jill consistently serves as Clive's emotional support whenever he has moments of doubt and uncertainty about the future, and also serves as his most private and personal confidante as she is the only person who can relate to his past suffering since she went through all the same terrible things he did, as both are fallen royalty who were kidnapped and forcibly enslaved into foreign armies to fight their pointless wars for 13 years.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Chronolith trials, unlocked near the end of the game, force Clive to face a gauntlet of enemies with the power of only one Eikon, and no items (though he retains his equipment). The trials are timed in a manner that you can't complete them with the time you start with, you have to increase the timer by executing particular actions in battle, typically themed around properly using the associated Eikon's unique abilities. Defeating multiple waves of enemies and bosses (across all the trials you'll be pitted against most every type of enemy in the game, more than once) with only two Eikon abilities equipped is difficult on its own, nevermind that each individual Eikon is likely not well-suited to killing enemies quickly while also keeping Clive alive. Prevailing requires mastery of the Eikon's powers and knowing how to take advantage of their specific strengths.
• Cast from Lifespan: Bearers and Dominants conjure magic using aether from their bodies. Casting too much in a short time taxes their bodies, until the aether drain becomes too intense and their bodies begin petrifying.
• Casting Gag: The Dragoon fought in the game's prologue is voiced by Robert Vernon, who fans will know as the voice of another Dragoon, Estinien Varlineau in Final Fantasy XIV.
• Central Theme: There are a few and some are the focus of specific arcs, such as the early game examining revenge. The most prominent throughout the whole narrative, however, is the value of life. Several characters spend the narrative seeking an excellent death, only to realize they should be seeking a worthwhile life instead. Heroic Sacrifice is deconstructed, with senseless or avoidable sacrifices coming under scrutiny. Simply, dying for a cause is not as valuable as living for it.
• Charged Attack: The abilities Windup, Upheaval, Ice Age and Brimstone can be charged up, filling up a gauge, and are most powerful if unleashed on the red part of the gauge.
• Chekhov's Gun: Twice for the same item. When Joshua seals away part of Ultima at Drake's Head, a barely coherent Clive is able to grab one of Phoenix's feathers before passing out. After the second time skip, the feather reacts to Joshua's presence when Clive and Bryon where searching for Kupka. Later on, after defeating the Ultima piece at Drake's Spine and Ultima trying to break Clive's will mentally, the feather is what helps Clive maintain his will in the form of Joshua constantly reminding him of his identity.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The nameless girl at the Republic market selling medicine ends up nursing Dion back to health much later on in the game.
  • The Dhalmekian man that Kupka puts in his place at the meeting with Waloed turns out to be an old friend of Clive's uncle.
• Collateral Damage: Duels between Eikons prove to be quite harmful for the armies supporting them, as attacks are thrown around and deflected almost without care for the little guys trapped in between.
  • This is shown during the prologue of the playable demo, where Shiva freezes numerous soldiers and Titan crushes several more, all while the two Eikons are focused on each other instead of the armies below them.
  • Clive's comrade Biast also gets crushed by a falling boulder from Titan's attacks, all without Titan even noticing they exist.
  • The duel between Joshua-Phoenix and the "strange Second Eikon of Fire" in the flashback deals significant damage and casualties to everyone in Phoenix Gate fortress, and the ancient ruins beneath the fortress are torn apart in the fury of their conflict.
  • During a skirmish between Sanbreque and Waloed, Bahamut and Odin rage across the battlefield with magical artillery and get many of their soldiers killed. Some soldiers are dumb enough to continue cheering for their champions even as the parried giant magic bolts are accidentally deflected into them.
• Combat Breakdown: One-sided example in the Final Boss fight. After you win the last Cinematic Clash, Ultima finally runs completely out of gas and is reduced to alternating between throwing out some final defiant attacks and just sitting there wide-open due to sheer exhaustion.
• Convection, Schmonvection:
  • Averted with Ifrit (at least in cutscenes). It is so hot that simply being near them when they first appear in the prologue causes Clive's teacher Murdoch to quickly burn to ashes.
  • Played straight later with the volcano under the Drake's Breath mothercrystal. Jill mentions that you would simply 'get used' to the heat of being directly above an active lava flow.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Late in the game, you fight Sleipnir Harbard as a boss fight. Immediately afterwards, you fight an army of Sleipnirs and all of them are far weaker than the boss version.
• Cosmetic Award: Defeating the final boss of each Stage Replay without taking any damage gives you a Medal of Valor in your Curiosities inventory. Save for a trophy that's granted from receiving your first medal, collecting them doesn't unlock anything and they only serve as proof for defeating them with no damage taken.
• Counter-Attack: Precision-dodging an attack allows Clive to follow up with a counterattack. Additionally, various eikonic abilities are counterattacks.
  • Phoenix: Heatwave by default sends out a flaming slash. If this slash hits an enemy's projectile, it blocks that projectile and Heatwave Counter is triggered, sending out even more slashes and reducing the ability's cooldown.
  • Garuda: Rook's Gambit has Clive jump back and then deliver an attack. If the jump makes him evade an enemy attack, then the follow-up attack is stronger and cooldown is reduced.
  • Titan: Titanic Block is a shield that blocks attacks. Precision-blocking an attack allows Clive to counterattack up to three times. There's also Raging Fists, a series of punches. If the first hit blocks an enemy attack, Raging Fists does more damage and has lower cooldown.
• Crapsack World: Valisthea is not a good place to live, unless you happen to be one of those fortunate enough to be born into wealth and power. The Blight is encroaching on civilization and renders the land uninhabitable as it will no longer have aether to support life or allow the casting of magic, and all forms of life — humans, beastmen, and wild animals — are constantly being displaced from their homes and forced to fight each other for room on fertile lands. In addition to fighting each other for land and old-fashioned political power struggles, humans also fight each other for control of the Mothercrystals, which are mine for aether-rich crystals that can be used to cast magic, and ready access to crystals (or lack of access) is a major factor in the quality of life one can expect to live. And this is all to say nothing of Bearers, who are enslaved, branded, and exploited for their ability to cast magic innately, which they are forced to do until they self-petrify from overuse of their power. Things even get worse as the game progresses and all of these problems become more dire.
• Cue the Sun: After Clive defeats and absorbs Ultima, Jill runs to the balcony of the Invincible and watches as the sun rises on a clear morning sky free of the purple gloom of Primogenesis, signaling a new world for all of humanity.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Unleashing the Eikon is this, as not only is it exceptionally destructive, it also harms the Dominant, making it difficult to even return back to human form. This is shown during the playable demo, where Joshua summoning the eikon Phoenix ends up causing as many problems as it solves. For one, Convection, Schmonvection is averted, as several soldiers — ally or enemy — gets burned alive from being too close to the Phoenix. On top of that, Joshua calls out for Clive repeatedly while in this form, but can't actually change back at a time where it might help.
• Dark Reprise: The "Dominance" trailer climaxes with a minor-keyed rendition of the main theme from the original Final Fantasy, accompanied by a chorus chanting the names of the Eikons.
• Darker and Edgier: Final Fantasy has waxed and waned with regards to grimness, but by virtue of the core development team being heavily influenced by and/or have worked on games made by Yasumi Matsuno, the trailers have shown XVI as being decidedly on the darker end of the scale, with it being a revenge narrative centered on an Anti-Hero. Tellingly, this is the first mainline Final Fantasy entry to get a Mature rating from the ESRB and the first Final Fantasy entry period to get a PEGI rating of 18.
  • The "Dominance" trailer features Benedikta and Kupka in a bath after what is heavily implied to be sex. The prologue from the playable demo also features the two sharing an embrace while lustfully purring at one another and making several Double Entendres. Previous Final Fantasy titles certainly had romance in them, but lust and sexual desire was decidedly rare.
  • Previous Final Fantasy games have featured Character Death, even deaths that were clearly meant to permanently stick. Such is also the case in XVI, but it's much more graphic and brutal. During just the prologue/playable demo, Clive's ally Biast ends up as Collateral Damage from a rock crushing him thanks to Titan, complete with a massive bloodstain. In addition, Elwin gets his head cut off by another soldier right in front of Joshua, who ends up splattered with his father's blood. Finally, Joshua himself is not safe either, as he gets a (supposedly) Family-Unfriendly Death when Ifrit literally rips Joshua's Phoenix form apart with his claws. Such graphic violence being shown onscreen is outright unheard of in previous Final Fantasy titles. While blood has shown up before, it's rarely been onscreen, and never to such a brutal degree.
  • Swearing is much more common in XVI than in previous titles. This is the first mainline numbered entry in the franchise (but not overall) to contain strong language, and there's a lot of it. In the opening during Titan's battle against Shiva, one of Clive's squadmates Biast screams "Fuck me!" during the assault, followed by screaming "Fuck!" over and over as they run for their lives. In previous Final Fantasy games, the swearing was much less common and much less intense.
  • Adding to the above, prostitution and brothels are mentioned openly, without any attempt to sugar coat it or to hide it behind euphemisms. Final Fantasy VII had the Honey Bee Inn presented as some kind of entertainment venue that was clearly meant to be a brothel, but never explicitly referred to it as such.
  • While the word itself isn't used, rape and sexual assault are alluded to, including that of minors, as a thing that happens to civilians caught in wars. Jill mentions she expected the Iron Kingdom soldiers who captured her when she was 13 to "have their fun with [her]" only to be spared that by awakening as a Dominant, while her fellow captives weren't as lucky. Bandits finding an injured Benedikta also talk of having "their fun with her" before selling her to slavers.
  • The game focuses a lot on themes of discrimination and slavery, and the effects of such are presented in very explicit details. Things like a father and son pair feeding branded slaves to their pet wolves (only to die to a wolf themselves) for fun, Branded being beaten to death or simply worked to death without food or rest, or being subject to horrific human experimentation on a Kingdom-wide scale. The game tries to be very explicit about what happens when a group of people are officially deemed to be subhuman by others. This lends the game world a much darker atmosphere due to how cruelty is commonplace.
• David Versus Goliath:
  • While at first glance it seems like the best way to fight an Eikon would be to bring one of your own to bear, not many armies have the option. The prologue/playable demo shows regular foot soldiers trying to fight the eikons with ballistas and swords, which aren't effective against them. Several soldiers also end up as Collateral Damage just from the eikons attacking each other, never mind aiming at the armies directly.
  • Ironically, despite Ifrit's size, many of the Eikon battles end up as this. Other Eikons are just that big in comparison to Ifrit, absolutely dwarfing him.
• Death Glare: Late in the "Awakening" trailer, post-timeskip Clive delivers a harsh glare at the camera as he declares his intent to kill his arch-enemy.
• Degraded Boss: The Midnight Raven is an early-game boss that proves a formidable challenge to Clive. Once Clive defeats it, slightly weaker versions of it start cropping up as uncommon enemies under the name "Royal Tongvaldr".
• Developer's Foresight: The first battle with Barnabas is a Hopeless Boss Fight that ends when he finishes charging for his ultimate attack and uses it to defeat Clive. The developers ensured this would happen by making him very durable as he's charging, but if players manage to do enough damage to deplete his charge meter to stop the attack, they'll learn that it's simply coded to not deplete, and the bar will empty but the attack will still execute to finish the fight.
• Despair Event Horizon: Anabella notably leaps over this line when she sees Clive as Ifrit and Joshua still alive and that her quest in climbing to the top of the food chain was All for Nothing as it essentially destroyed her past, her future and her reputation, leaving her with no choice but to commit suicide.
• Did They or Didn't They?: Clive and Jill have a passionate kiss together while naked on the beach, then the camera pans up to the moon. The game leans towards "they did" with Kalina, an NPC in Mid's workshop, asking afterwards, "How was she? The Enterprise, I mean."
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Literally. After giving him the mandatory The Reason You Suck speach, Clive's final attack on Ultima is to punch him straight in the face. It's as awesome as it sounds.
• Differently Powered Individual:
  • In the lands of Valisthea there are people, regardless of their standing, that have the innate ability to use magic without the need of the crystals from the Mothercrystals. They are called "Bearers", people who are often seen as lesser than the majority that are non-Bearers and for their ability, they experience abuse and hatred, to put it lightly. To differentiate them from non-Bearers, they are forced to be branded with special markings on their face, so that they could be identified immediately.
  • There also another kind of people that are similar to Bearers but are more special than them. That would be the "Dominants" and they have mastery over the element that their respective Eikon dominate. Dominants are feared or respected and with a good reason: They can transform into a gigantic elemental being capable of changing landcapes and it is guaranteed death when facing an Eikon/Dominant unless one is a Eikon/Dominant as well.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Parrying an enemy attack allows Clive to deal more damage as though the enemy is half-staggered. However, timing said attack does require a lot of reading when to swing Clive's sword when the enemy is swinging their attacks at him. Pull it off correctly and only ranged attackers pose any sort of threat and even that's easily dodgeable. Pull it off incorrectly and Clive's going to eat an enemy attack. Indeed, part of Odin's mechanic requires that players abuse the parry system to build up the Zantetsuken gauge faster than just hitting the enemy or dodge countering.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The lead up to Drake's Spine feels like Clive is heading towards the final showdown with Ultima. He's acquired all the other Dominants powers and Drake's Spine is the last Mothercrystal to destroy. Of course, in true RPG fashion, it is not the final dungeon.
• Disney Death: Played straight with Joshua. Turns out that being a Phoenix has its benefits. It can bring the dead back to life.
• Distant Finale: The last part of the ending has a mother telling her son to start a fire with a flint and rock, where he wishes they could just use magic to do that. The mother then lectures her son to stop reading so many fairy tales, and later the boy plays with other children talking about how they want to do "War of the Eikons," indicating that this occurs in the far future of Valisthea where Clive's destruction of the mothercrystals and Origin has purged all magic from the world and the events of XVI have long been forgotten.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Dion's point about Barnabas summoning Odin on the battlefield requiring him to summon Bahamut in return reads like he's talking about nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction - considering that Dominants are People of Mass Destruction and that both Odin and Bahamut are among two of the strongest Eikons.
  • The scene in which Clive absorbs Shiva from Jill is about as close to a sex scene as the game can show. Both characters are naked, alone, intimately close, and the act is Jill inviting Clive to reach inside her and take something important to her. Joshua later decks Clive for doing it, with his reasoning that Clive took advantage of Jill being in love with him to do it.
• The Dog Bites Back: Near the end of Anabella's character arc, Dion decides to kill Olivier right in front of her. This causes what little remains of her sanity to shatter like glass.
• Double Meaning:
  • Clive interacts with a Bearer and his master who berates the Bearer while saying how lucky he is to be born in Rosaria where Bearers are treated well. Clive pointedly tells the master he expects the Bearer's good fortune to continue before telling the man himself to take care not to work too hard, the unspoken rebuke to the master being obvious to all listening.
  • A lot of Dion's conversations following his ravaging Twinside in a mad rampage after losing control of Bahamut have shades of him intending to perform a Redemption Equals Death. For example, when he sends his lover Terence to care for the girl that nursed him back to health, Terence can tell Dion is breaking off their relationship and sending him away.
• Downer Beginning: The prologue chapter with a 15-year-old Clive shows just what transpires that turns him into a vengeance-driven adult. The grim parts of the prologue begin with his fellow soldiers in a fortress being slain, continuing with betrayal from some of his fellow soldiers, and helplessly seeing his brother Joshua being gutted by another Eikon. It gets even worse: the downfall of the fortress was caused by his mother's betrayal of Rosaria, who saw nothing wrong with what she has done and even lends Clive, her eldest son, as a forced conscript to Sanbreque.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Dominants have immense power, but channeling it takes a toll on their body that steadily worsens the more the Eikon's power is used. Naturally, the heroic Dominants are either inexperienced with their powers (Clive), older (Cid), thoroughly overworked (Jill), or sickly (Joshua) to keep them from being able to call on the Eikon's power as readily and easily as the antagonists can.
• Dystopia Is Hard:
  • Even after she takes control of Rosaria as vicereine, Anabella's regime is far from stable. By the time Clive arrives back at Rosaria, most of the land has been terrorized by the Black Shields who are persecuting and murdering Bearers, the populace is not being properly cared for or even given enough crystals to sustain themselves (even without accounting for how purging the Bearers drives the demand for crystals up to do the work they were doing), and the citizens are openly discussing revolt and banding together for protection, complaining how much better things were when Elwin was still alive. In her final moments Anabella herself has become so obsessed with blood purity that she snaps at Clive, asking him why the Phoenix did not chose him.
  • Sanbreque itself doesn't fare much better. After abandoning Oriflamme, the Emperor's single minded focus on the Crystal Dominion has left the rest of the empire in disarray, and the Emperor's decisions, including stepping down and crowning his youngest son have been so alienating to his own subjects that by the time Clive and Jill arrive at Twinside the whole city is in the middle of a civil war, since the dragoons led by the crown prince have staged a coup.
• Empty Levels: Leveling up in the game only causes Clive's HP to increase by 50 points, and gives him a bump of 2-3 points in all his stats, which very quickly becomes a negligible increase.
• Endgame+: After beating the final boss and rolling the credits, reloading your cleared save data places you back in the Hideaway right before the final battle, with said final battle unlocked in Arcade Mode and a few new codex entries to go over with Harpocrates.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Ultima does not understand why Clive continues to refuse his "destiny" to be his vessel. Or that forcing Clive to absorb the power of the other Dominants to be his "perfect" vessel is what gives him enough power to defeat Ultima.
• Evolving Title Screen: It is a subtle change that can be easily missed, but upon beating the game the title screen music changes from the "Land of Eikons" to the "Land of Eikons (Reprise)", which has the One-Woman Wail singing the melody to "Find the Flame".
• Fantastic Racism: A couple of examples:
  • The Bearers are people born with the power to use magic without relying on the precious yet scarce crystal shards (but at the terrible cost of having their supernatural abilities Cast from Lifespan instead), and are treated as subhuman tools due to the rather grim reality that their talents are cheap, useful, and yet not powerful or easy enough to let them reliably fight back against ordinary humans (who can use equally powerful but more expensive crystal magic). People identified as Bearers are marked with tattoos called 'brands' once their powers become apparent, which can be as soon as early infancy, and are placed in chattel slavery by most nations on Valisthea. The Royal Meadows sequence shows that slaveowners dehumanize Bearers to the point where they're not allowed to talk, are used in baiting, and are often renamed to replace deceased slaves like goldfish. However, at the same time, there is an element of fear against Bearers, since they don't need crystals to cast magic and are thus always a potential threat to non-Bearers, though there are no cases in the game of this fear being actually justified, with all of those who do fight only ever being either as part of the established militaries or in self-defense. In Clive's case, he's a Branded that isn't treated any different than a normal Bearer on the assumption of him being able to use Phoenix's fire at first glance.
  • 'Beastmen' is the blanket term for the less humanoid sapient races like goblins, and yes, it's a racist slur. It suits the human kingdoms very well to believe that their neighbours who they have territorial disputes with are sub-sapient animals, after all.
• Fantastic Slurs: Bearers are often disparagingly referred to as "branded" on account of the tattoos used to identify them.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Each of the factions parallels historical real world regions; the Duchy of Rosaria to medieval England, the Empire of Sanbreque to the French Empire, the Iron Kingdom to Celtic societies, the Dhalmekian Republic to the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Waloed to the Nordic regions.
• Fisher King: When Elwin is in charge, his wise leadership makes the land around Rosalith a beautiful place of peace and plenty. When Anabella is the empress, the same land turns into a dark and dying graveyard, due to her poor leadership and Hugo eating and taking almost everything there is, reflecting her own dark personality. In the distant finale, everything goes pretty again.
• Foreshadowing:
  • One of the biggest sources of drama for Clive is that he was apparently passed over by the Phoenix in favour of Joshua, and therefore is not a Dominant. However, this hints at the fact that he is already the Dominant for Ifrit. It's just that nobody knows about it yet.
  • Joshua is killed by Ifrit in the prologue. However, the fact that Phoenix has not reappeared during the 13 year timeskip, despite the fact Eikons are passed to a new Dominant when the original one dies, suggests that Joshua isn't actually dead.
  • The Dominant of Fire at Caer Norvant sets the castle ablaze to escape, but makes a point of ensuring the Bearers get out safely and Cid notes he was being careful with his flames. Given the swathe of destruction Ifrit unleashed when it was first seen, that's a sign it's not the same person.
  • The lore entries make it clear everyone other than Clive and Torgal present at Phoenix Gate was killed. Sir Wade's entry specifically says he met the same fate as Joshua. Joshua turns out to have survived, and so did Sir Wade.
  • When Cid sees Ultima, he says "I know who you are", and refuses to let them have Clive. Given Cid's past that's been revealed by this point, it serves as the player's first major hint that the Kingdom of Waloed is working closely with Ultima.
  • Ultima is sealed inside of Joshua, yet constantly appears out in the world. It isn't until the end of the game that it's revealed how this is possible; Ultima is a race of beings.
  • Torgal's commands include an option to heal Clive, though there's no apparent way he can do this since he's a wolf that ought to have no magical abilities. He's also unaffected by aetherfloods, when all other living beings save for Bearers and Dominants will eventually turn Akashic if they're exposed to the aether for too long. It's eventually revealed Torgal is a descendant of Fenrir and a pseudo-Eikon.
• Fridge Logic: Invoked in-universe by Clive. When he and Jill recount the legends of how Dominants and Bearers are curses inflicted on mankind by the gods, Clive says that he never understood why Bearers are hated and persecuted while Dominants are (in most parts of the world) respected and admired, and that "whenever I got to that part of the story, I always assumed there was something I'd misunderstood." A late-game sidequest reveals the answer: Bearers and Dominants used to be the ones in charge long ago, until normal humans rose up and overthrew them. The system of enslaving and branding Bearers was put in place afterward to keep normal humans in charge, and Dominants were only spared this fate because they were too powerful and it was feared that putting them in chains as well would cause them to stage their own rebellion, so instead people decided to grant them positions of respect and power to placate them. This information is lost to history due to a conspiracy of scholars that actively tries to bury it, and the enslavement of Bearers is so institutionalized by this point that most just accept it as the way of things.
• Fusion Dance: To battle the likes of Bahamut, Clive and Joshua combine their Eikon forms, becoming Ifrit Risen to match the dragon Eikon even after it drinks on the aether of a Mothercrystal.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Dominants can "semi-prime", causing them to take on aspects of their Eikon's appearance and granting them a power boost. Clive's Limit Break has him do the exact same thing, Ifrit partially manifests around his arms and head and is attacks become much faster and create fiery explosions.
  • This gets Played for Laughs in one case. The results screen for major enemies display victorious captions such as "Opponent Defeated" or "Opponent Bested", etc, and in particularly important fights the franchise staple victory fanfare plays as well. At one point Clive is pitted against a Hopeless Boss Fight that ends with him losing, and appropriately the results screen displays "Clive Bested" while the triumphant victory fanfare still plays.
  • Early in the game, it's mentioned that the aptly named deadlands are deprived of any sort of aether, meaning casting magic is impossible. In the Echoes of the Fallen DLC, Clive, Joshua, and Jill have to battle some goblins in the deadlands north of Eastpool. During this segment, you can't use any of your Eikonic abilities or even ranged attacks.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • It's repeatedly emphasized that overuse of their powers takes a toll on the body for Bearers and Dominants, and often their users need to rest and recover for a while when it gets to be too much. While this includes some of Clive's party members, taking them into the field afterward shows they have no problem using their abilities freely. This also goes for Clive, who suffers no ill effects no matter how much he uses his abilities. Turns out to be justified, and then subverted — he's able to use his powers more because he's Mythos and has a much higher tolerance for how much aether his body can exert, but as the ending finally shows, he does have his limits.
  • Each of the Eikons is associated with a particular element and their abilities and magic clearly weaponize that element. But elemental affinities are not part of the gameplay system, so even when you're facing a monster made of living flame, Phoenix's fire-themed attacks are no less effective than Shiva's ice-themed attacks.
  • Unless it's part of the story, no one ever comments on Clive using his abilities in full view of NPCs, even when he's clearly manifesting the powers of multiple Eikons in quick succession.
  • The Obelisks that act as fast travel points are given a Hand Wave that, because they have a distinct appearance and glow brightly, they make convenient waypoints for Clive to find his way around quickly. However, a late-game quest begins when Clive fast travels to an Obelisk that, at the time, can't be accessed on foot from any other area. This also ignores that obvious Fridge Logic that if Clive were actually just walking between the Obelisks, he'd have to contend with enemies along the way.
  • On a couple occasions where the player can't return to the hideaway, Goetz will be present to offer smithing services. Despite Blackthorne having trained for decades as a blacksmith and taking great pride in his work, Goetz can forge and upgrade the same gear as him, and in the field without any apparent smithing gear too. Goetz himself will express astonishment that he was able to forge such equipment despite having no experience.
  • The game's Time Skips have no influence on game mechanics. Despite 13 years passing between the fall of Phoenix Gate and the opening of the game, during which time Clive was branded as a Bearer and pressed into the Imperial military, his level and abilities remain the same. This also applies to the five year skip that occurs later, and comes with a particularly egregious instance: in one of the cutscenes before the jump ahead, Clive received the powers of another Eikon, but the tutorial for them doesn't pop up until the next gameplay segment which happens after the jump, which implies that five years went past during which time Clive not only did not increase in level or skill, but didn't try to manifest his new set of Eikon abilities either.
  • Even in circumstances where Clive expressed regret and hesitation about fighting the enemies he's pitted again, he still fights with the same ferocity and delivers the same kind of punishment attacks and finishing blows, which can include kicking the target repeatedly, blasting them point-blank with fire magic, or stabbing them through the chest, which he will do with the same snarls and combat banter, "you're done!", "stay down!", etc. Similarly, there are several fights where he expressly leaves his enemies alive, yet still can have been hitting them with massive blasts of fire, impaling them while they are down, etc.
  • When playing New Game Plus, Clive retains full access to all his Eikon abilities, but the story will still depict him absorbing these powers from the Dominants. He also retains all of his equipment, some of which were given to him in accordance with story progression during the first playthrough.
  • When playing Final Fantasy Mode, new and more types of enemies will appear in new locations to provide more of a challenge. Despite the story calling attention to specific kinds of enemies being exclusive to one faction (for instance, only the Empire tames aevises), such enemies may be encountered in areas where they ought not to be, including the potential to encounter variants of boss-type enemies before actually fighting that enemy type for the first time in the story.
  • When first entering Rosaria, Clive has Jill pretend to be his master to avoid the issues of being a lone Bearer in Imperial lands. The sidequests act as though Jill is not present and the quest givers tell Clive to speak to his unseen master about their requests and rewards.
• Gonna Need More X: When a blow from Cid's weapon fails to destroy the heart of Drake's Head Cid quips that he'll need a bigger sword. When Clive volunteers his own Cid has to clarify that he was speaking figuratively before priming into Ramuh.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • When Elwin Rosfield is beheaded, the death blow occurs just off-camera, with the focus instead being on Joshua being splattered with the victim's blood.
  • Most of Ifrit's savage beat down and murder of Joshua as Phoenix takes place with the latter out of frame, which really only serves to make even more horrific.
  • We're spared the direct sight of the exact moment Anabella Lesage slits her own throat.
• Gratuitous Japanese: The spells Raiton, Futon, and Katon used be dual wielding Ninja stand ins are fairly inexplicable instances of Japanese in a setting that lacks much precedent for it.
• Harder Than Hard: The Ultimaniac difficulty for Arcade Mode is harder than even Final Fantasy difficulty, the game's Hard Mode that's unlocked after being the main story. Basic enemies are capable of killing Clive within a few hits and the best player scores are recorded online.
• Harmless Freezing: The Cold Snap ability is a dodge that can also freeze enemies, but this does no damage.
• Hate Sink: Anabella Rosfield is a despicable Abusive Parent and Social Climber who is cruel and petty in every scene she's in. It says a lot that an empress with no magical powers, henchmen who share her opinions completely, betraying her own family, or ambitions beyond social-climbing manages to be one of the vilest characters in the entire Final Fantasy franchise based on her personality alone.
• Happy Flashback: During the game's emotional finale, Clive gets to hold his brother's lifeless body one last time after defeating Ultima, and players get a flashback to a happier time in the brothers' lives when Clive was knighted as his Joshua's First Shield, then to the day Joshua was born and Clive met his baby brother for the first time.
• High-Altitude Battle: The fight between Phoenix and Bahamut travels as high as the clouds, with Joshua desperately repelling Bahamut's attacks while trying to reach the brainwashed Dion. After Bahamut drinks on the aether of a Mothercrystal, Ifrit and Phoenix combine into Ifrit Risen and take the fight into orbit, where Clive and Joshua have to stop Bahamut from razing the entire world with Zettaflare.
• Hotter and Sexier: The first mainline numbered Final Fantasy entry to contain several instances of characters having sex, whereas in previous installments it was highly implied at best, here the events are portrayed by characters in mid-coitus and post-coitus, shown to be completely naked, but since it is a Japanese game with their severe restrictions on showing any form of full nudity there are several camera angle tricks to prevent the naughty bits from being shown. Clive and Jill's moment pushes the camera angles to its absolute limits though, they are as naked as they can possibly show.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: A late-game sidequest reveals this to be the case for the Bearers. A highly heretical tome called From a Distance details how, in the past, Bearers were highly revered and lauded for their ability to wield magic without the need of crystals and could assume positions of political power. Ultimately, however, it was the Bearers' decision to create an organization "by Bearers, for Bearers" that proved their undoing as this caused most, if not all of Valisthea to turn on them, leading to a series of events that escalated into a full-blown civil war the Bearers ultimately lost. The tome also implies a great deal of the prejudice against Bearers is rooted in the brutal conflict as the anti-Bearer forces came to demonize them to the point they were no longer considered human.
• How We Got Here: Two instances in rapid succession. The first instance explains the very first scene of the game - Ifrit and Phoenix battling each other, while the second explains how Clive ended up in the Empire's army to begin with.
• I'll Kill You!:
  • After the opening battle at the Phoenix Gate, Clive watches his little brother Joshua get literally ripped apart by Ifrit while he's powerless to stop it. Once this happens, Clive vows vengeance on Ifrit right then and there.
    Clive: Murderer... I'll kill you! I'll fucking kill you!
  • During Clive's first fight against Hugo Kupka.
    Hugo: It is time you learned... what becomes of those who dare to cross me!
    Clive: Cross you?! I'll kill you!
• Inelegant Blubbering: Both Clive and Jill drop their mostly stoic and proper attitudes and completely fall apart near the ending of the game. Clive when Joshua dies and Jill when Metia goes dim and she realizes Clive has just died.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Present in full force; Clive is able to leap almost his full height in the field, can get extra air with certain abilities, and can even teleport briefly using Phoenix Shift. But he's unable to bypass ankle-high environment obstacles like crates and railings, and in villages and settlements his jumping height is reduced to less than half of normal and he can't jump over anything at all. The most egregious instance of this comes when players arrive at Martha's Rest for the first time, and story progress is halted due to a literal Broken Bridge, yet the gap is so small that Clive ought to be able to easily jump across.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Downplayed but still applicable; by the time you get the third set of Eikon abilities, you may notice the ability window spaces the Eikons in a manner to have room for seven sets of skills. Since the game mentions there are supposed to be eight Eikons, one for each element, this is a big clue that you're going to be missing one of them, and sure enough an eighth Eikon named Leviathan the Lost is briefly mentioned. When Clive acquires Leviathan's powers in The Rising Tide DLC, the other sets move aside to make room for it in the loop. Subverted for Ifrit's abilities, which appear in the center of the screen between Clive's base abilities, and Ultima's abilities, which appear outside the ring of Eikon skills at the top of the screen.
  • Active Time Lore entries can do this. When a seeming bit character has a dedicated lore entry, it's a pretty safe bet they are going to be a good deal more plot relevant than they seem. There's also the lore entry for Ultima's Thralls which is titled precisely that despite the fact that the character in question has yet to be mentioned in the game at the time the entry is unlocked.
  • From version 1.10 onwards, Clive unlocks the ability to change the outfits of several of his companions upon reaching Eastpool for the first time. Jill is among those who gets a new outfit. Cid is not. Sure enough, Cid dies at the end of the mission after next.
• Infinity +1 Sword: In Final Fantasy Mode, you can acquire the Ultima Weapon, which gives 700 to Attack and Stagger and only available in the end-game, due to the materials required to make it. And as of the Rising Tides DLC, completing the Kairos Gate on Final Fantasy mode will net you an item needed to craft the Original Sin, which grants 750 to Attack and Stagger.
• Internal Deconstruction: Certain Final Fantasy staples are examined throughout the game:
  • Eikons are the game's take on the Final Fantasy Summoning mechanic, usually used as a Limit Break or a long-lasting buff against tough enemies in prior games, but not otherwise immensely destructive to the surrounding or allies in the team party. This game shows how dangerous the consequences of summoning beings with near godlike powers would actually be, especially in situations where they're matched against the Eikons of opposing kingdoms who can match their own might. Unopposed, the Eikons can devastate the landscape by the incidental use of their powers, and even the weakest of them can single-handedly destroy entire armies without effort. When locked in combat with each other, the collateral damage from their attacks is equally as devastating to their own side as to the enemies, with Titan and Shiva's clash in the prologue nearly killing Clive and massacring the warring armies around them by accident as the fighting draws nearer them. Accordingly, Eikons are treated like WMDs and the threat of one priming is considered a grave danger to everyone.
  • Hugo Kupka is the Dominant of Titan, powerful enough to be a nigh-implacable fighter on a battlefield even without shield or armaments like the other Dominants use, thanks to his Eikon's ability to clad himself in Elemental Armour along with his hulking physique and incredible strength. However, without these fantastical abilities, Hugo going into deadly battle without adequate protection is a very poor choice. When he and Clive exhaust themselves by the end of their first fight and are too weary to draw upon their Eikon's magics, attempting to continue their death-match as ordinary mortals initially results in Hugo having the advantage until Clive uses his non-magical sword against him, severing both his hands. Weapons were built to negate the advantages of an opponent's natural size or strength, and Hugo's inability to fight properly without magic puts him at a huge disadvantage. If not for Sleipnir spiriting him away, Clive likely would've killed Hugo then and there.
  • Mages and the concept of magic are deconstructed. Being one of the rare few able to use magic doesn't make you admired or respected, it makes you a resource to be exploited. Bearers are essentially a slave race that are forced to use their powers to benefit their masters, and the practice is so institutionalized worldwide that to defy or flee your master is a death sentence. Dominants fare better, since they're too powerful to be bossed around as they are, but they're still used by others while being treated better. Additionally, many previous games have said that excessive use of magic can take a toll on the body and/or the land, but this was usually never examined very closely. This game shows exactly what the consequences are: using too much of their power causes Bearers to suffer a slow, debilitating death as their body is overtaxed to the point they self-petrify and die in agonizing pain, and exploitation of the Mothercrystals for their powers is draining the aether of the land, rendering it an inhospitable wasteland where nothing can live anymore. Even the Ultima Collective cannot bypass these limitations, and fled their home due to the overuse of their planet's life force. In essence, magic is a fantastically useful resource, but it is still just another resource, and the energy used for it has to come from somewhere, be it the planet itself or people's bodies.
  • Most Final Fantasy games treat the Crystals with reverence and awe, and almost always as a force for good, especially in games where they are emphasized to bestow power and blessings upon mortal races. This game explores what such a system would realistically turn into given time — nations go to war over the Mothercrystals and see them as a resource to be exploited.^note Word of God has said outright that the Mothercrystals are an analog for the overuse of fossil fuels Proximity to a Mothercrystal and access to the crystals mined from it serves as a major factor in the quality of life individual towns and villages enjoy, and if a Mothercrystal is lost, the nation that it was supporting would quickly crumble without it. Because so many people are reliant on crystals to live their lives, black market trading and smuggling for them exists, and when people lose access to crystals entirely, they're nearly helpless because they've become too reliant on them for their daily lives and don't know how to live without the convenience of crystals and magic.
  • The ultimate scheme of the villain ends up deconstructing the core concept of a Final Fantasy game, in that Ultima essentially designed the state of the world to be an environment for Mythos to awaken in, and then become tempered through travels and battle to be strong enough to serve as Ultima's vessel. Even the Chronoliths, which pit Clive against waves of enemies with the powers of a single Eikon and serve as a test of the player's battle prowess, are speculated in-universe to have been created by Ultima as a means to test Mythos' power and hone them further.
• Ironic Name: As Clive bitterly notes, it's ironic that those who can channel the Eikons are called "Dominants" when they're made less than human by those in power.
• Irrational Hatred: The Fantastic Racism against Bearers, especially the unbranded, notably has no basis in any fact, just fear of what might happen. This is most emphasized in the case of L'ubor, who goes from a highly respected figure to nearly being stoned to death because he might want his town dead… for wanting to kill him for being unbranded, even as he is actively trying to save those very people.
• It Only Works Once: Invoked in the side quest "Blacksmith's Blues II". The latest bit of craftsmanship on Blackthorn's mind is a single-edged sword with a cutting edge far beyond anything he's ever seen. According to a weapon collector, the blade is used by a specific school of swordsmanship from the Outer Isles far from the Twins. Their philosophy is that a fight should only be decided in a single stroke, and so hone their swords twenty thousand times over with whetstones to sharpen the blade to the point of Absurd Cutting Power but incredible frailty. The sword breaks after one swing, so that one swing has to count.
• "Just Frame" Bonus: Dodges just before an enemy hits will become Precision Dodges, which slow down enemy movement and allow you to launch a Counter, while timing a melee attack to end at the same time you would take damage triggers a Parry, which does the same as a Precision Dodge with the added benefit of slowing down time.
• Katanas Are Just Better: While never explicitly referred to as a katana, the sword from Blackthorne's second quest can be inferred to be one. Crafted from a foreign island away from the Twins, this sword is made from metal of questionable quality but honed to an edge that could split a man in half with ease. The users of the sword are said to be iaijutsu practitioners who settle all fights in a single stroke. This is subverted though upon the reveal that though the sword is indeed very sharp, it's durability is so poor it is only useful for one swing before needing repairs. A very useful sword in a culture settled by duels but a very useless sword for out and out war. Ultimately, it's the special whetstone that helps make the katana that Blackthorne gets more value from.
• Lady and Knight:
  • In the prologue, the Rosfield brothers are a sibling version of this trope, with Joshua as the Lady and Clive as the knight.
  • In the present, Joshua and Jote fill in this trope nicely as a gender-reversed version of the trope, with her being the lady knight to her lord.
  • Clive and Jill briefly play at this in Rosaria, pretending she is a noble lady and he her combat trained Bearer brought along for protection, to avoid unfriendly eyes assuming he is a rogue Bearer and Imperial deserter.
• Lag Cancel: The Rift Slip ability ends animations, including recovery animations, and also slows time briefly.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The sidequest "All Bark" has Clive encounter a noble and his spiteful little brat of a son, who deliberately lure Bearers to be killed by their rabid wolf "pet" as a game. Once Clive kills the wolf, then threatens them both on finding out the truth, they immediately go and get another for an attempt at revenge. A short while later, Clive hears them both being brutally slaughtered by the wolf they attempted to tame.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: A critique of the later parts of the game after Ultima casts Primogenesis is that the skies are permanently overcast with a faint purple hue to everything, and it both wears on the eyes and makes the game's Scenery Porn less pleasant. In The Rising Tide, Mysidia has a glamour around it that hides it from outsiders, and within the glamour the skies are still blue. Shula explains this is because the glamour works both ways, and is thankful for it because she imagines she'd quickly get sick of looking up at the outside skies every day.
• Lethal Lava Land: Played very straight with the inside of the volcano under the Drake's Breath mothercrystal, with Convection, Schmonvection in full effect. Humorously, Jill even mentions that the heat was something people just would get used to, implying it was cool enough to be tolerable after an adjusting period, despite the active lava flows everywhere.
• Lonely at the Top: Whether as demigods or pariahs, the Dominants agree on one thing: society fears those who can transform into the avatars of elemental destruction, leaving them outcasts no matter what they do with their power. This is lampshaded in the "Ambition" trailer.
  Cidolfus: Our ability to summon beasts of great might should command respect, but instead has left us outcasts.
• Lost Common Knowledge: Valisthea has been dependent on crystals and Bearers for so long that they have no idea how to live without magic even for the most basic aspects of life. For example, Blackthorne thought initially thought Cid was a madman when he explained that he could make a forge that could be lit by hand.
• Lost Technology: The Fallen left their advanced aether technologies behind, but nobody knows how to use most of them. One example is a giant airship that has been permanently grounded and used as a village center.
• Love Ruins the Realm: Most of Sanbreque's problems can be traced back to Emperor Sylvestre marrying a woman who is petty, selfish, conniving, treacherous, cruel, and nowhere near as competent at actual governance as she thinks she is.
• Loyalty Mission: Allied NPCs' Side Quest chains culminate in late-game missions where you resolve a big problem for them and receive a memento for the Wall of Memories. Most notably, Joshua and Jill's quests will permanently add them to Clive's party until endgame.
• The Magic Goes Away: At the end of the game, Clive uses the power of Ultima and all of the Eikons to destroy the last of the Mothercrystals and consign them and magic itself to the flames. The last scene of the game reveals that stories of the Eikons and powerful magicks have faded into fairy tales, with the record of the War of the Eikons becoming a children's story penned by Joshua.
• Magic Is Evil: Downplayed. While it can be used for good purposes, at its core crystal magic is the result of Ultima using the Mothercrystals to drain aether from the world, and using it has severe health effects on Bearers and Dominants as it drains too much of their life. Clive realizes that even with Ultima gone, the world is so used to using magic carelessly that they will kill the planet on their own if they see Origin as nothing more than another Mothercrystal to fight over, so he destroys it to banish crystal magic from the world and remove the dependency on it that drives constant resource wars. Not only that, but magic itself is the cause of the Blight. The Blight destroyed Ultima's homeworld, so he and his people fled to Valisthea to escape it. But the magic they brought with them simply began the Blight anew.
• Magic Missile Storm: The "Dominance" trailer shows Bahamut firing a volley of magical projectiles from its wings while fighting Odin. Said volley is this game's version of the recurring Megaflare attack.
• Mercy Kill: What Clive, Jill, and Cid consider for anyone unfortunate enough to become Akashic. While they have no love for the imperial soldiers, even they can't help but pity what they've become and decide to give them a swift death to ease their suffering.
• Mexican Standoff: The main reason why the nations of Valisthea don't deploy their Dominants in battle more often and hold them as a last resort is because there is an unspoken rule that if one side summons their Eikon, the other side will respond in kind. Not only does this cause massive collateral damage, but you risk losing your own Dominant, which will leave you vulnerable to other nations' Dominants.
• Mirror Match: After finding the mural depicting some sort of god in the Apodytery below Phoenix Gate, Clive is suddenly drawn into a fiery hellscape where he's confronted by the Awful Truth of what really happened thirteen years ago. After choosing to accept that he really did kill Joshua as Ifrit in a panicked rage, Clive battles what is essentially an Ifrit made of his regrets and anger toward the Dominant. Midway through the fight, the imitative Eikon turns into a dark Palette Swap clone of Clive. The climax sees Clive himself prime into Ifrit to battle the copy, who also transforms into Ifrit.
• Morphic Resonance: Played for Drama. Barnabas discusses how the power of the Dominants literally wears away at their very being, replacing them bit by bit with the Eikon they are an avatar for. Each Dominant's character design reflects elements of their summon as well. Hugo is massive and copper-skinned as a reflection of Titan. Benedikta is spindly and has a feathered collar as a reflection of Garuda. Clive especially gains a larger build, more rugged looks and starts wearing red and black clothing after the timeskip, to reflect his eventual awakening as the avatar of Ifrit.
• Morton's Fork: Cid's plan to destroy the Mothercrystals hits this. Destroying them throws the realm into chaos and induces no small amount of economic hardship, Cid noting that the Bearers' lots in life are going to get a lot worse before they get better. But leave the Mothercrystals alone, and the land will be swallowed by the Blight. And that's not getting into how destroying the Mothercrystals frees Ultima's various copies and furthers his plans as well.
• Mundane Object Amazement: Valisthea is so dependent on the crystals and magic that something as simple as a set of bellows to heat up a smithy's forge is seen as a revolutionary idea.
• The Musical: Not even a month after the game was released, it was announced that the all-female Japanese theatre troupe Takarazuka Revue would be performing an official musical adaptation in summer 2024.
• Musical Spoiler: In major boss battles, the "boss defeated" message is accompanied by this game's version of the classic victory fanfare. So if you overcome a boss, but the message for it isn't accompanied by the victory fanfare, you'll know that there's more to come.
• Mythology Gag: Now moved to its own section.
• New Game Plus: Unlocked after completing the main game. Like in other video games, NG+ lets you start a new save file with all your items, equipment, and abilities (minus anything unlocked via story progression). You also unlock Final Fantasy Mode, essentially this game's hard mode which raises the Level Cap to 100, changes specific enemy placements, and unlocks new crafting schematics and upgrade options, including the ability to upgrade any accessories you have.
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: Valisthea is defined by wars over the magic-granting Mothercrystals, which have become even more desperate and ferocious as the aether-draining Blight consumes more and more land (and makes life everywhere else increasingly difficult, dangerous and crowded). To make matters worse, it turns out the Mothercrystals are causing the Blight by siphoning up the continent's aether themselves.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Clive's quest to destroy the Mothercrystals actually helps Ultima recombine his various copies and further his plans. Unfortunately this was a lose-lose situation, as destroying the Mothercrystals was necessary to stop the Blight either way.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Ultima wants Clive to absorb the power of the other Dominants in order to be the "perfect" vessel for him. This also gives Clive enough power to fight and eventually defeat Ultima, something Ultima had not considered.
• No Body Left Behind: Akashic-possessed beings, no matter if they're as weak as goblins or are as strong as dragons, disintegrate when they die.
• "No Peeking!" Request: After Clive and Jill have their first real conversation as adults in the Hideway, Tarja shows up and shoos Clive away from the room so Jill so she can get out of her Ironblood rags and put on some proper clothes. She even teases him about him "getting overexcited" at the prospect of watching Jill get dressed, causing him to get flustered.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Efforts to help the Bearers run into this. Cid told Martha her efforts to buy worn out Bearers so she can help them pass in relative peace and comfort was still having them die as slaves while he pursues plans to help Bearers die as free men and women. Clive in-turn tells Cid that they shouldn't be fixated on dying and the goal should be for Bearers to be able to live free instead.
• Obligatory Swearing: The first mainline numbered entry in the franchise (but not overall) to contain strong language. In the opening during Titan's attack, one of Clive's squadmates Biast screams "Fuck me!" during the assault, followed by a stream of "Fuck!" over and over as they run for their lives, and that just the first instance of many other swear words use throughout the game.
• Older Is Better: Played with. Blackthorne's clan has passed down a schematic for a sword that no one has had the skill to craft in generations. It takes the combined effort of Blackthorne and Zoltan to craft it and it is NG's Infinity -1 Sword. While Blackthorne and Zoltan initially talk about how nothing so great has been made in generations, Blackthorne quickly comes up with improvements for the sword that allows him to craft NG's Infinity +1 Sword.
• Older Than They Look: Even though the cast is generally the oldest of any mainline Final Fantasy by far (by the end, Clive is 33, Jill is 30, Joshua is 28 and Cid is late 40's or early 50's), they all still look amazing, especially Joshua, who looks younger than Final Fantasy VII's 21 year old Cloud Strife, even though he's pushing 30.
• Once More, with Clarity: The prologue begins with two fire elemental Eikons fighting. After a flashback leading up to that point, we learn that Joshua's Phoenix has awakened and faces Ifrit. Joshua and the Phoenix both die in the end while Clive is forced to watch.
• One Last Smoke: Played straight with Cid's final moments.
• Our Goblins Are Different: They hew closely to the Final Fantasy formula for goblins, being lean, vicious little bastards that try to shank Clive with their knives. Unlike typical Final Fantasy goblins, they have an extra pair of ears, and digitigrade legs that end in Handy Feet. The Gigas is basically an oversized goblin twice the height of a grown man.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Akashic are people and beasts that have been turned into what are basically magic zombies due to overexposure to Aether. Completely braindead, they're fueled by pure emotion and hate and will attack anything in their vicinity with ferocity. Magic users like Bearers and Dominants are more resistant to this and are less likely to become one when exposed to high quantities of Aether, but still can succumb if they stay nearby for too long.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Anabella outliveds her favorite child Joshua, who is killed in the prologue. Subverted when it turns out he's been alive all along, and she ends up predeceasing him in the end.
• Parental Abandonment: Discussed in the Boklad Markets. There are Street Urchins all about, but only some of them are war orphans. One of the market sellers notes that many of the refugees traveling to the Crystalline Dominion have gone as far as to abandon their children to make life easier for themselves, to Clive's disgust.
• Parrying Bullets: The "Dominance" trailer has Odin diverting then entire Magic Missile Storm from Bahamut's Megaflare off-course with a single slash from his sword Zantetsuken.
• Path of Inspiration: The "Salvation" trailer reveals that some have a theory that the Mothercrystals, practically worshipped as gods for sustaining civilization, are generating the Blight as a side-effect, and beg Clive to destroy the Mothercrystals to stop the extinction of humankind.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Dominants are this by their nature. Even when only semi-primed, they can destroy towns and level reinforced stone fortresses without much effort, and trying to take them in a head-on battle is tantamount to suicide. The player gets a taste of this power in the prologue — Joshua can create lashes of flame, shoot fireballs, and cure his wounds, and this is in spite of the fact he's sick, he can't fully control his powers, and he's only 10 years old. When a Dominant fully primes and transforms into their Eikons, they're destructive on an apocalyptic scale — the battle between Shiva and Titan in the game's prologue reshapes the landscape and leaves massive spires of ice and stone in its wake, and the two armies fighting between them are slaughtered just from the flying debris. Deploying a Dominant in warfare is considered a Godzilla Threshold in-universe, especially if the enemy has their own Dominant that they'll send out in response, because they're just that dangerous to everyone around, including their own.
• Point of No Return: Departing for Drake's Head concludes the second act of the game, closes off all incomplete sidequests up to that point, and sends the story forward five years.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Anabella is a hardcore elitist who resorted to regicide and betray her country to Sanbreque just because her own sons weren't a hundred percent perfect. With Joshua presumed dead, she sires another child.
• Power at a Price: The power of the Eikons takes an exacting toll on the Dominants over time, wearing away at their very being. "Ambition" reveals that each transformation causes their default forms to mutate with Eikon aspects, overwhelming their life energy's ability to maintain their mutant biology until their bodies petrify.
• Practical Taunt: Clive has a taunt button (which encourages a targeted enemy to launch an attack at you as soon as they can) and a diverse and powerful arsenal of Counter-Attack abilities. Getting your enemies to murder themselves on demand is a very useful gameplay skill.
• Precursors: Only known nowadays as "The Fallen", an ancient human civilization that existed some 1500 years ago and were able to achieve inconceivable feats of technology such as flying airships large enough to contain entire cities within them. They had a knack for building massive towers and spires across the land, but in their hubris they tried to control a force they were not ready for, trying to breach the Mothercrystal of Dzemekys, which enraged Ultima, causing a catastrophic event that destroyed their entire civilization; leaving their ruins scattered all across the land and their technology now lost and considered alien by the civilizations that came after them.
• Precision F-Strike: There are several F-bombs widely scattered throughout the game's dialogue. Towards the end of the demo, Clive shouts "Murderer... I'll kill you! I'll fucking kill you!" in his grief and anguish.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: The Final Boss of the game screams that the world Clive seeks is naught but a fantasy. Clive drops a one-liner just as he flings his sword through the Big Bad's chest.
  Clive: The only fantasy here is yours. And we shall be its final witness!
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: In The Rising Tide DLC, the people of Mysidia once tried to sacrifice a single child in order to create a new Mothercrystal to replace Drake's Eye. To them, it was a small price to pay for their people's prosperity. Unfortunately, that child was Leviathan's Dominant, Waljas, who nearly destroyed Mysidia in a vengeful rage. Shula, Mysidia's current leader, is ashamed of her ancestors' actions and seeks Clive's help to atone for them.
• Prepare to Die: When Hugo comes head-to-head with Clive in Rosalith, where the former lured the latter to get his revenge for Benedikta’s death, the two simultaneously deliver a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner:
  Hugo: We...we shared a dream! I would be the king of the world! She would be my queen, and together, we would rule like the gods we are! But you crushed that dream—ground it into dust! [he semi-primes] Hear me, Rosfield! You will pay for what you’ve done! I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands!
  Clive: And what of you? How many people have you killed? How many dreams have you crushed? You’re not the only one who has seen their world fall apart around them. [draws his sword] You’ll get no pity from me, Kupka. No pity...and no mercy!
  Clive & Hugo: Now DIE!
• Press X to Not Die: Boss fights have Cinematic Strikes, Evasions, and Clashes, where you have to press the right button to either deal damage to the boss, avoid getting skewered, or both during brief cutscenes.
• Protectorate: As First Shield of Roaria, Clive is dedicated to protecting the Phoenix and its host, and Joshua in turn proves that he’s more than willing to return to favor.
• Pummel Duel:
  • The final phase between Clive and Hugo as Ifrit and Titan has Ifrit, thanks to his copy ability, form giant fists of stone to counter Titan's punches in this manner.
  • In the final phase of the fight with Ultima, Clive and Ultima both use Titan's Eikon ability to pummel each other with Titan's fists in this manner.
• Rags to Riches: According to the character page on the official website, Hugo Kupka started off as a random Dhalmekian soldier before awakening as the Dominant of Titan and becoming a high-ranking advisor in the Dhalmekian Republic with wealth and prestige to match.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Titan's Raging Fists ability lets Clive pummel an enemy with dozens of rapid punches.
• Red Herring:
  • During the flashback to the destruction of Phoenix Gate, Clive sees a hooded man shortly before the second Eikon of Fire (Ifrit) appears and kills the Phoenix. Clive believes this hooded man to be his brother's murderer and the Dominant of this unknown Eikon, which seems confirmed years later when he hears about the hooded man again and he does indeed seem to be a Dominant of Fire since the Kingdom of Waloed is trying to track him down. In truth, the hooded man Clive saw at Phoenix Gate is not the same as the hooded man that is a Dominant of Fire; the hooded man at Phoenix Gate was a guise of Ultima, while the hooded man in the present that is a Dominant of Fire is actually Joshua, who is still alive. For the first part of the game the player sees both the illusion of Ultima and the disguised Joshua at different times to trick them into believing, like Clive, that they're the same person, and his motivations and personality are kept vague to preserve the twist.
  • In the later parts of the game, it becomes heavily hinted that Anabella has fallen under the influence of Ultima; characters talk about a darkness taking control of the Empire and the Emperor not being himself, and Byron directly says Anabella is acting more monstrous lately and that "the women we knew is gone, and a monster sits in her place". While Anabella is indeed a corrupting influence on the Empire and the Emperor, she has nothing to do with Ultima and her manipulations and monstrous actions are her own. Ultima is actually within the Empire in the guise of Olivier and Anabella had no idea, and it's vague how much influence Ultima had over Olivier and to what extent, if any, he may have aided in subverting the Empire.
• Revenge: This is a central theme of the narrative, as many of the main characters have a core desire for this in some form or another:
  • For the first part of the game, Clive is driven primarily by a desire to track down the man he believes killed his brother and kill him to avenge Joshua. He (as well as the rest of the Hideaway, which includes people like Gav and Otto) also wants some vengeance for Kupka's rampage against them, which killed many innocent people.
  • Kupka himself is generally stoic until he is led to believe that Cid killed Benadikta and also taunted him with her death. His first act in this pursuit is going after Cid's Hideaway, killing countless innocents.
  • Jill was Made a Slave by the Iron Kingdom and their high priest Imreann - getting bloody vengeance on him is a high priority for her.
  • Dion is disgusted by the corrupting influence of Anabella over his father, and bides his time until he can (at minimum) oust her from power. This later turns into vengeance against Ultima for being the one manipulating everything, including Dion's own Brainwashed and Crazy rampage on his people.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: After giving up the location of his village to Benedikta, a man demands some reward since the Kingdom of Waloed is known for rewarding loyalty. Benedikta finds this quite amusing and points out that he is correct, but he did just betray his own country at the first suggestion of a reward. She immediately cuts him down where he stands.
• Riches to Rags: Clive goes from being the son of an archduke (though apparently not treated as well as his younger brother) to being a Branded slave soldier in service to Sanbreque following Duchess Annabella's betrayal and the harrowing tragedy that was the Night of Flames. Jill, who was originally a princess of the Northern Territories, was initially a political hostage with the Rosfields, but she became a slave to the Iron Kingdom after the Night of Flames.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • A minor, humorous example. When Clive first visits the Hideaway, Cid offers him a fruit which he turns down because he doesn't trust Cid yet. Cid is completely on the up and up, but later we learn that those fruits are nastily bitter and only Cid can stomach them.
  • After Cid dies and Clive takes on his name Hugo continues chasing him believing that Cid killed Benedikta. Ironically he is correct in that he is chasing Clive, the person who did kill Benedikta.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Several of the key characters are either of royalty (Dion and Barnabas), or second to royalty (the Rosfields being of a duchy) that actively participate on the front lines of combat. All three present Rosfields also look out for their citizenry and close associates in person when not fighting.
• Royalty Superpower: Implied in-universe and gameplay-wise through Thousand Tomes that those that can become Dominants of certain Eikons only emerge to people descending from certain tribes originating from Valisthea's ancient past. Certain royalties in Valisthea are descendants of these ancient tribes.
  • The ancient tribe where the Phoenix awakened first was called the Motes of Fire, which down the line are the ancestors of any belonging to the Rosfield bloodline.
  • Bahamut is not limited to the Lesage bloodline as those of Sanbrequois nobility can potentially become Bahamut's Dominant so long their ancestors is the same as Lesage's, the Motes of Light.
• Scenery Censor: There are quite a few scenes with full nudity, but camera angles and the positioning of objects/other naked people obscure anything naughtier than butts and the tops of breasts.
• Schizo Tech: The game is set After the End, but some Lost Technology is still intact and is used by the rich and powerful to augment their Medieval Age technology. For instance, Cidolfus attached jet engines to his galleon.
• Sequel Hook: After the post-credits scene the text "But where one journey ends..." appears, inviting the player to complete the phrase with "...another begins."
• Shoo Out the Clowns: The story gets a lot more grim and serious after Cid, the most funny and jovial character in the main cast, dies.
• Short Teens, Tall Adults: Clive at 15 and many other teenage characters are a head or two shorter than the adult characters around them. As an adult, Clive catches up drastically in height.
• Shout-Out: XVI was noted by the devs to take elements from multiple works by other creators.
  • In an interview with Gamesradar, the producer Yoshida noted for the Eikons portrayal "the inspiration came from things like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Evangelion, Attack on Titan, that type of Japanese Tokusatsu, the anime, the manga that we all grew up with is definitely an influence."
  • In an Eurogamer interview, Yoshida also noted for the general ambience of the game "We had our core team of about 30 members very early on buy the Blu-ray boxset of Game of Thrones and required everyone to watch it, because we wanted this type of feel." It likely isn't a coincidence then that a lot of aspects of the setting are very similar: Valisthea consists of two continents just like Westeros and Essos; Rosaria combines the Northlands and the Riverlands, The Good Kingdom whose ruler gets his head lopped off at the start of the game; Sanbreque is King's Landing, the seat of the Empire where the rich and powerful live; the Iron Kingdom is the Iron Islands, a nation situated on islands off the western coast who raid the mainland; the Dhalmekian Republic is Dorne with a dash of the Westerlands, an arid region known for its wealth derived from their mining enterprises; and Waloed is Essos, a mysterious and isolated part of the world home to ancient magic and forbidden knowledge.
  • The Dominants are similar to the Jinchuriki of the Naruto series, being hosts of supernatural beings that function as their nations' aces in times of war. Also, one of Ifrit's cinematic attacks functions like a Rasengan.
  • Hugo receiving Benedikta's head in a box is a reference to Se7en, in particular to the scene where Det. Mills receives his wife's severed head in a box sent to him by John Doe. The name of the track playing during the cutscene, "The Se7enth Sin", serves as the further reference.
  • In the sidequest "Hot Water," a miniboss Bomb is called Old Faithful, named after the geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
  • References to The Lord of the Rings:
    • As part of L'ubor's scheme, Clive assumes the false surname of "Underhill", the same pseudonym assumed by Frodo.
    • Phoenix and Ifrit's fight down a chasm in the prologue is similar to the fight between Gandalf and the Balrog from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
  • Ifrit's Finishing Move, Hellfire, has often born a certain similarity to the Spirit Bomb from Dragon Ball, being a massive Sphere of Destruction that he prepares by holding it above his head and then throwing it forward. This instalment really leans into the parallels, though, with the finale of Ifrit's battle against Typhon borrowing liberally from Goku's battles against Vegeta, Frieza, and Kid Buu as he struggles to charge his attack while weathering his foe's relentless aggression. Adding further reference to Dragon Ball, in the final battle, Clive and Ultima share a beam clash straight out of Goku vs Vegeta but the camera work, poses and color of the beams are reminiscent of Cell and his beam clash with Gohan.
  • The Eikon battle between Phoenix and Bahamut plays very much like a Panzer Dragoon boss battle as an on-rails aerial shooter, complete with multi-lock on missiles and lasers.
  • Clive and Joshua losing control of Ifrit and Phoenix respectively in the prologue, leading to the destruction of Phoenix Gate heavily mirrors the opening of Xenogears where Fei Fong Wong loses control over Weltall and ends up destroyed Lahan.
  • The final battle of the game takes place in a technologically advanced artificial dome called "Origin" while the final boss also happens to be voiced by Harry Lloyd and has five health bars, all traits that are identical to the finale of Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
  • The Final attack of the game, Clive punching the arrogant God of Gods Ultima in the face via a Square Spam Quick Time Event is identical to the finishing move of Asura's Wrath, where Asura does the same against an arrogant god of his own, Chakravartin.
  • The PlayStation trophies are chock-full of these:
    • The achievement for dealing 50,000 damage to a Staggered enemy is named "It's Over 50,000".
    • The achievement for defeating 5 airborne enemies is named "Fatal Attraction".
    • The achievement for defeating 10 notorious marks is named "Think, Mark!"
    • The achievement for obtaining all curiosities is named "For the Hoard".
    • The achievement for obtaining all patron items is named "Careful Whisper", a play on "Careless Whisper".
    • The achievement for collecting six signposts through sidequests is called "And They Opened Up My Mind".
  • Cidolfus notes that one of his sobriquets is "Cid the Vicious".
  • The final duel between Clive and Barnabas is one to Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening; a fight between The Hero and The Rival on top of a tower in the middle of a storm at night.
  • A cleverly-hidden shoutout can be found in The Saint and the Sectary: the dark sorcerer Madu and young knight Sir Crandall have a duel that ends with Madu cutting off Sir Crandall's sword arm, tries to tempt him with the power of The Dark Side, and reveals to Sir Crandall that he is Crandall's thought-to-be-dead father. Who would've guessed that Clive Rosfield was a Star Wars fan, or that he enjoyed re-enacting The Empire Strikes Back?
  • In the "Rising Tide" expansion, the Timekeeper will freeze time and thrown numerous bladed projectiles at you in a manner strongly reminiscent of DIO in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders.
• Shrouded in Myth: The Outer Continent, a land far from Valisthea that few travel to or from so little is known of its inhabitants. Both Tomes and Barnabas hail from this land but neither speak of it in detail. It's implied that the native population, at least in part, are descended from Valistheans who fled during the fall of mankind centuries ago, as that how's Barnabas's family ended up there. It's also stated that this land treats Bearers far better than Valisthea does.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: The official website describes Clive as a brave man who gladly throws himself into danger while his younger brother Joshua is frail and bookish.
• Skyward Scream: After Clive slays Barnabas and is forcefully given the power of Odin, making him one step closer to becoming Ultima's "perfect vessel", he screams towards the sky in anger to becoming a slave to fate.
• Slave Brand: Bearers are made into "Branded" with a tattoo across their left cheek, marking them as property. The tattoo is made of poisoned ink; damaging the brand will release the poison into the bearer's bloodstream, killing them. Even with a master surgeon, removing the brand safely is a gamble, and even survivors have to endure days of agonizing pain afterward.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: The boss fights tend to use the Natural Integration vibe, where the gameplay and the story draw from separate convention pools but there is enough overlap for small inconsistencies to be ignored. For instance, boss fights generally treat cinematic moments as attacks that apply damage points, instead of just cinematic transitions for one place to the next. As an example, Hugo falling through a floor during the first fight with him sees the landing impact deal damage to the boss, which takes off a small bit of his health bar.
• Something Only They Would Say: Clive meets with his uncle, Byron, years after Clive was presumed dead. Byron assumes that Clive is lying about who he is, until Clive recites a series of lines from a game that he and Byron used to play when Clive was a boy.
• Spinning Piledriver: Midnight Raven's "Assassinate" attack launches Clive into the air before hitting him with an Izuna drop.
• Stance System: Each Eikon fills this role to Clive; he can equip up to three Eikons at a time, with each one having an Eikonic Feat innate to it, plus two additional abilities he can equip. Mastering an ability fully allows it to be equipped with any Eikon, otherwise each set of commands can only use abilities associated with its matching Eikon. Further, each Eikon has defined combat roles reflected in their Eikonic Feat and innate abilities:
  • Phoenix/Ifrit is a Jack of All Stats Master of None — its abilities aren't as powerful as the Eikons Clive acquires later, but they encompass a variety of tactical options that cover most any combat situation, including a magic counterattack, a forward thrust, a barrier of fireballs to reduce damage, a powerful single-hit attack, and an area-of-effect attack. It's also the only Eikon with an ability that heals Clive. Its Eikonic Feat Phoenix Shift lets Clive quickly teleport towards distant enemies to keep up the pressure.
  • Garuda is a fast but weak aerial specialist — its abilities either launch Clive or enemies into the air, all of them can be used in the air or on the ground, and while they aren't that strong on their own they do great damage to the opponent's stagger. Its Eikonic Feat Deadly Embrace pulls opponents towards Clive, but against larger foes it instead launches Clive into the air as a high-jump, and when their stagger gauge is partially depleted Deadly Embrace can be used to temporarily stun them.
  • Ramuh is a magical attacker that combines skills — its Lightning Rod ability and Eikonic Feat Blind Justice set opponents up for multiple hits by chaining together attacks, but they require a bit of prep work to maximize their potential and aren't very effective in the thick of battle. Ramuh is otherwise a Jack of All Stats with a mix of single-hit and area-of-effect attacks, but its skillset isn't as diverse as Phoenix's.
  • Titan is a slow but powerful Close-Range Combatant — its abilities have poor range but have great power and can be charged for higher damage, and Raging Fists can block attacks on start-up and gets stronger if it does. Titan's Eikonic Feat is Titanic Block, making it the only way for Clive to block enemy attacks instead of just evading them, and it allows counterattacks on a successful block.
  • Bahamut is a Long-Range Fighter — its abilities bind enemies in place to keep them away from Clive while he assails them with magic assisted by Satellites or a continuous plume of fire, and its ultimate ability Gigaflare can hit across a huge range in a limited radius in front of Clive. Its Eikonic Feat Megaflare summons a rain of light magic across the battlefield that lasts a while, but it takes time to charge it up and Clive needs to keep away from enemies and evade their attacks to charge energy.
  • Shiva focuses on mobility and zoning — its abilities variably knock enemies back or drag them closer to Clive, and its Eikonic Feat is essentially an enhanced dodge that lets him quickly move about the battlefield to avoid attacks while also freezing enemies in place. Its abilities otherwise take cues from other Eikons in their mechanics, reflecting that Shiva can combine their skills for different fighting styles.
  • Odin is a Glass Cannon — its abilities all focus on its Eikonic Feat, Arm of Darkness, which lets Clive wield Odin's sword. As Clive lands hits with it he charges up power levels for Zantetsuken, which deals massive damage to enemies and grows stronger as its level increases. However, Odin's Eikon abilities aren't very powerful compared to other Eikons, and their primary function is to charge Zantetsuken faster rather than deal damage on their own.
  • Leviathan is a Long-Range Fighter - its Eikonic Feat causes Clive's normal attack to become a blast of water and his magic attack becomes a Spread Shot. Its abilities also blast enemies with water from range or group them together to set them up for other attacks. The major difference between Bahamut and Leviathan is that Bahamut focuses more on powering up Megaflare while chipping away at enemies with magic and dealing burst damage with Gigaflare, while Leviathan is more suitable for sustained combat from range but lacks raw damage in its abilities.
  • Ultima, the final skillset Clive unlocks with the Rising Tide DLC, is a Master of All - its Eikonic Feat powers up Clive's basic attack to hit over a large area and his magic to fire multiple shots, and all of its abilities deal great damage. However, it focuses purely on overwhelming offense to kill enemies as quickly as possible and its abilities all have a fair cooldown and/or take several seconds to charge up before executing. This means it is best used against mobs of smaller enemies, as stronger foes can tank its damage output or interrupt Clive before he can complete the attack.
• Stargazing Scene: Or rather, moongazing scenes, which becomes a theme for romantic moments between Clive and Jill.
• Stating the Simple Solution: A sidequest has Clive helping a student of L'ubor's make a knife and asks people in different professions what qualities a knife should have, from durability to sharpness to lightness. Many of these are mutually exclusive for the student's skills, so he looks for a better metal than can do all that is required. When the knife is presented to L'ubor, he says that instead the student should have simply asked who the knife is for and made it according to their standards, rather than trying to please everyone.
• Summon Magic: A classic staple of the franchise. Per the game's website, XVI's Eikons (AKA summons) are granted to and reside within a select few individuals known as Dominants. The Dominants are capable of calling upon their Eikon's powers to partially or even fully transform into massive, Kaiju-sized beings that nations use to wage war on each other.
• Super Mode: 'Semi-priming', Dominants' favourite tool for any combat situation that doesn't warrant turning into a kaiju and obliterating everything within a few square miles. As the name suggests, it involves drawing on their Eikon's power without manifesting them fully ('priming'), letting them stay human - give or take some minor physical changes like hair colour - while having access to downscaled versions of their techniques and capabilities (like Garuda's wings, Titan's rocky skin, and so on). It's more than enough to make them the greatest warriors in Valisthea even without embracing their full Person of Mass Destruction potential.
• Supernatural Sensitivity: Dominants can sense each others' aether, which is sometimes accompanied by a sound effect similar to the Newtype flash from Gundam. However, depending on the plot demands, the distance of the sensitivity varies greatly or they do not sense each other at all. Benedikta does not sense Clive and Cid sneaking into Lostwing, but does when they sneak into Caer Norvent. Then when Jill is captured by Barnabas after the fall of Kanver, Joshua and Clive still feel her aether despite them being on land and her out at sea aboard a galleon. It has not been explained if it depends on the dominant's alertness or possibly their bond with one another.
• Superpowerful Genetics: Being a Dominant does not simply happen by coincidence. They all happen to be descendants of ancient tribes where their Eikon first emerged. Like for example the Phoenix that the Rosfields have the monopoly appeared first in a tribe called the "Motes of Fire". This tribe are the ancestors of those who possess Rosfield blood like Anabella, Byron, Elwin and his sons.
• Sword Beam: In the "Dominance" trailer Odin swings his sword to send a flying horizontal slash of energy at Bahamut.
• Take Your Time:
  • Occasionally averted. After certain cutscenes present pressing circumstances, Clive will be locked into the map menu with no available destination beyond the story relevant area to take care of them.
  • A justified example in story for why Clive can spend so much time assisting others during side quests and putting off the main quest. Clive is Ultima's vessel for casting Raise, which would destroy mankind and Valisthea. Having been enacting his plan for well over a millennia, Ultima doesn't care how long Clive takes to absorb the other Dominants, destroy the Mothercrystals, etc. as for all he's concerned, Clive getting stronger just makes him a better vessel to enact his plan.
  • It does get pretty egregious near the end of the game though, especially since every side character decides to give Clive a Loyalty Mission right before the final fight of the game. The sky has turned dark? Humans and wild animals are being turned into mindless zombies bent on destroying all remaining settlements? Alien-like creatures appear out of thin air and attack making all forms of travel and commerce impossible? A God-like creature has created an ominous floating fortress? But oh wait, Gav needs Clive to go find the feather of a presumably extinct animal to make a good luck charm? Yes, that definitely should take priority. Harpocrates needs Clive to go into enemy territory to find a wild flower so Harpocrates can ask his former disciple for forgiveness? Yes, that does seem to be the most pressing matter at the moment.
• Taken for Granite: This is the fate of any magic user that uses their powers too much, be they Bearer or Dominant. It is an extremely painful and slow death, as seen in-game via its sufferers, and you witness many people either dead by it or in the process of dying from it. Notably, Cid is suffering from this and trying to hide it to the best of his ability.
• A Taste of Power: The demo for the game allows players to play through a point further along in the game and gives Clive a wider array of abilities at his disposal. This is explicitly stated to be a way to allow players to experience the full scope of XVI's gameplay mechanics without limiting them to the main body of the demo, which consists of the game's prologue sequence and tutorials. It's worth noting that Clive has several abilities in the demo version of this chapter (Garuda, Titan, and the Limit Break) that he doesn't actually get in the full version of the game until later on.
• Theme Music Power-Up: In the Final Boss battle, the last two phases of the fight against Ultimalius are set to a remix of Clive's theme "Find the Flame".
• There Is Another: Valisthea is rocked when a second Eikon of fire, Ifrit, makes its appearance, as there has never been a different Eikon of the same element before.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: At the finale of the Final Boss battle, Clive throws away his sword and punches the Big Bad so hard he deals 999,999 damage.
• Throne Room Throwdown: Clive and Hugo have their first battle in the throne room in Rosalith.
• Time Skip: The game allows you to control Clive through three different time periods: at 15, 28, and 33.
• Title Drop: The first game in the main series to do this, both directly and indirectly.
  • Indirectly: Paraphrased way in the final boss battle right before landing the finishing blow:
    Clive: The only fantasy here is yours. And we shall be its final witness!
  • Directly: In the end, the title of the book Joshua penned about the War of the Eikons is revealed to be Final Fantasy, appropriate given that the war concluded with Clive destroying the source of all magic in the world.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • The trailers for the game did a very bad job of hiding the twist that Ifrit's Dominant is Clive; all gameplay footage of the Eikon battles made it clear that Ifrit is the only playable Eikon (save for one occasion where it's the enemy and is fought with Phoenix), the 2022 State of Play Trailer had the voice over "awaken, Ifrit" played over footage of Clive, and a later trailer had him screaming "come to me, Ifrit!" All in all, it wasn't hard to figure out who Ifrit's Dominant was. In the narrative proper the identity of Ifrit's Dominant is a Driving Question for the first several hours of the game and is treated as a major emotional revelation.
  • The trailer for the version 1.10 update acknowledges that it has minor story spoilers for the game, namely a clear shot of Joshua Rosfield as a very not dead adult.
• Toplessness from the Back: The "Dominance" trailer has a brief shot of Barnabas and Benedikta sitting naked in a bed together. They are both facing away from the camera and shown only from the waist up, achieving this effect.
• Trapped in Villainy:
  • Imperial Bearer battle slaves are gruesomely punished not just if they desert, but if any of their fellows desert on their watch. This means anyone trying to escape has to first get past their fellow conscripts and be willing to condemn them to death in the process. Tiamat also indicates that failing their mission will see the entire squad executed, so they have no choice but to carry out their Suicide Mission.
  • Jill was enslaved by the Ironblood and forced to fight or they would torture and kill her fellow Rosarian captives. By the time of the game, she's implied to want to die at the hands of the Imperial assassins just to let her suffering finally end.
• Undressing the Unconscious: After the boss fight against Garuda where Clive becomes berserk after transforming into Ifrit and needs to get put down by Cid. When Clive next wakes up, he's at the Hideway's cells, chained up and naked, having had all his armor and weapons taken. But soon after Cid shows up, frees Clive, and gives him back his stuff.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Eikon duels behave as such, with each encounter being different depending on who exactly is fighting.
  • During Phoenix's first duel against Ifrit, controlling Joshua plays like a rail shooter.
  • During Ifrit's duel against Garuda, Clive is getting used to using Ifrit and uses slow but fierce strikes. The duel plays like a heavyweight mech fighting against an airborne mech, but with magical wrestling. Word of God states that they wanted the fight to resemble a WWA match but with kaiju.invoked
• Unreliable Narrator: The entire prologue featuring Young Clive is actually a flashback the adult Clive is having as they remember it, despite how some events being shown to the player are things that they would have no knowledge of. Thus when it is revealed that Clive is Ifrit's Dominant the game is able to be ambiguous on if they were actually Joshua's killer as up until that point the player has no reason to doubt the events as presented. It's only once they return to the location of the events and accept the truth that it's stated that their memories of events were a self-serving lie. After all, Clive couldn't be watching Ifrit kill Joshua if he was Ifrit.
• [Verb] This!: During the Benedikta boss fight, once she semi-primes, she grabs Clive, slams him against the ground, and prepares to unleash a powerful wind attack at point-blank range while quipping "Dodge this." Fortunately, Torgal chooses that moment to intervene.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: After all the Mothercrystals are destroyed and Clive realizes doing so helped Ultima's plans he then makes his way to Origin to finally take Ultima out for good.
• Violation of Common Sense: Arcade Mode allows you to replay past dungeons and be scored for your performance based on the battle techniques you exhibit. Contrary to what one might expect, killing enemies quickly is actually an inefficient way to boost your score, and pulling off fancy combos of attacks that show off your mastery of Clive's swordplay won't do you much good, either. The best way to score points is to let fights drag on so you can land more techniques and get more points. Paradoxically, this means weaker abilities like Rime, Mesmerize, and Gouge, are the most effective skills for racking up a high score.
• We Have Reserves: Sylvestre Lesage, the Emperor of Sanbreque, claims that, for every citizen that falls, another can be bred, and that for every home that burns, another can be rebuilt.
• Wham Episode:
  • Toward the end of "Streets of Madness", Ultima whisks Clive and Joshua away to the Interdimensional Rift and explains the "transgressions" of humanity. Ultima and his race fled to Valisthea when their home succumbed to the Blight and created the Mothercrystals to house their spiritual forms while discarding their physical bodies. Not only does Ultima reveal the Blight predated the Mothercrystals, but even implies the Blight itself was caused by magic. Ultima's status as "god" is not hyperbole or megalomania; he created humanity in the hopes of making "Mythos"; a vessel that he could inhabit and create a new world where the Blight could not reach them.
  • The Echoes of the Fallen DLC, while largely self-contained, expands on the story and mystery of the Fallen. Clive and the rest of the Hideaway learn that the Fallen were so advanced that they were creating lifeforms that are commonplace throughout Valisthea and used them to create dusk crystals, inferior versions of the regular crystals harvested from the Mothercrystals. The Fallen even managed to create not only their own synthetic Mothercrystal, but even an artificial Eikon in the form of Omega.
• Wham Shot: In "The Hunter and the Hunted", Margrace and his aide are shown to be traveling to Rosaria. The former removes his hood and uncovers his face, revealing him to be, a now much older, Joshua Rosfield.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: A few things are left unresolved by the game's ending:
  • It is never exactly learned where the Blight actually comes from. Throughout most of the game, Cid and Clive believe the Mothercrystals to be draining Valisthea's aether and that is why they seek to destroy them. But Ultima reveals that the Blight is a byproduct of the magic that the Fallen created, forcing his kin to travel to Valisthea after their homeworld was ravaged. He also reveals the Mothercrystals' true purpose is to harvest the land's aether and create aetherfloods for his plan to create a new world for his kind.
  • Dion sends Sir Terrence to Twinside in order to find the Medicine Girl, Kihel. But shortly afterward, Ultima levels the city in order to bring up Origin, and we never hear from Terrence or Kihel again. Presumably they are killed despite avoiding Twinside's earlier destruction at the hands of Bahamut, or alternatively Terrence rescued her offscreen and that is the reason why we are shown that he is heading there in the first place. It's also possible that they weren't directly impacted by the raising of Origin anyway, and that the slum was just far enough outside Twinside that they avoided it.
  • The Executors are introduced in one late-game sidequest as a secret society dedicated to keeping forbidden knowledge hidden, going as far as to kill anyone who stumbles upon it. Clive helps Vivian find a book they normally keep hidden, which details the historical treatment of Bearers, and once they confront Clive they are driven off and are never encountered again.
• Wind Is Green: Wind-elemental spell effects, and Garuda's menu icons, are green.
• Wolfpack Boss: Literally; a low-ranked Hunt consists of a wolf pack that individually are only mildly stronger than normal enemies. Another hunt, the Grimalkin, has also formed its own pack, which it sics you in waves before it takes the field.
• Worf Had the Flu: In the Prologue, Clive and the Bastards are given an effective suicide mission to assassinate Shiva's Dominant in the chaos of a battle between the invading Iron Kingdom and The Dhalmekian Republic. As demonstrated when the Dominant goes full Primal and incarnates fully into Shiva, they're a Person of Mass Destruction capable of single-handedly freezing the Republic's army in an open fight, and Clive and the rest are just four men, one of whom is killed as collateral damage from the war before ever getting close to the Dominant. However, because said Dominant was forced to fight to a stalemate against the incarnated Titan, the strain of it exhausts them afterwards, leaving them unable to even go Semi-Primal and forced to use steel and weakened ice abilities against Clive and the rest ambushing them. The only reason the Dominant survives is because she's actually Jill, Clive's Childhood Friend.
• Zombie Apocalypse: After the defeat of Bahamut, Ultima starts Primogenesis, covering the sky in clouds and shrouding several areas in Aetherflood, creating hordes of Akashic from man and beast alike. It only gets worse from then on.

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"The legacy of the crystals has shaped our history for long enough."

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