A little rant about the "RPG"-side of 16

I am a few hours away from beating the game and to preface, really enjoyed the story and combat. Although I altered the latter a little bit - modded the game so both the enemies and I did a little bit more damage which actually massively improves combat in the first playthrough - allows you to get rid of pointless enemies more quickly and makes bosses actually pose a threat.

Also to preface I am not a big fan of 16 not being a classic Final Fantasy. Matter of taste, obviously, but waiting the majority of the lifetime of my daughter for a new FF - my favorite game series - and then realize there wont be a party system, there wont be FF-endgame and side-content, no minigames etc...yeah let me just say I wasnt happy.

But what I actually want to rant about and what I think needs to be studied regarding future games is the RPG system in FF16. I had to walk in circles in my living room for a bit and sort my thoughts as to whats wrong with it and came to the conclusion that whats bothering me with it is...that its fake. Its not real. The entire RPG system of the game is make-pretend and essentially the perfect system to point at and say "dont do this".

So, first of all, gear. Well gear is fake. Aside from amulets, its just numbers. You dont get different weapon classes or new movesets, thats all bound to eikons. So you just get a new sword every now and then. But the new sword doesnt do anything. It just gets a higher number. Which is obviously a huge issue in itself, but on top of that the way you obtain the new statstick is entirely pointless as well. Essentially you just get the better statstick for free every now and then from the blacksmith by just playing the game. You dont work towards it in any way, it unlocks as soon as you can afford to buy it and there is no point in not doing it.

So now you got a sword that does 5% more damage and enter a new area where the enemies have 5% more health. Its all fake. They couldve literally just given you more atk when entering a new area or whatever and the game wouldnt have changed. The blacksmith is entirely redundant. Having elemental swords, swords that make clive play a little different (like a sword that improves specifically your standard attacks increases ability cooldowns)...anything that gives you a choice wouldve been great. But its just numbers that dont do anything.

Speaking of the blacksmith and crafting. Why does this system exist? Its fake. I skip half the sidequests (the useless ones with the "!" mark) because they dont give rewards. Like yeah on the screen it says you got 20 crafting mats for doing it, but crafting mats dont do anything so the reward screen might as well be empty.

You can skip half the enemies in the game and half the quests and youll still have WAY more mats than youll ever need. And what do you do with those mats? Right, you craft the fake items that dont do anything that I just mentioned before. Its a completely redundant system.

And the above issue bleeds into everything else. You beat an enemy? Well the stuff it drops doesnt do anything so technically enemies dont drop anything ever.

Bleeds into chests too. Unless a chest has an amulet in it, its fake. Its empty. The crafting mats in it dont do anything. You dont use them. Gil? Gil is so funny too. Whats the point of gil in this game. You cant buy anything. The only expensive stuff are the new orchestron scrolls which wouldve made for way better sidequest rewards mind you. But since hour 1 my gil count has just been going up and I am about to finish the game and I still dont know what the purpose of it is. I cant spend it on anything. There is no merchant that has an awesome axe of destruction that costs 5m gil that I can work towards. They sell things that cost 10 of the crafting mats that I have 300 of to craft so its like two redundant systems high-fiving each other.

And again this is with me going past a lot of enemies and skipping the little mmo-fetch-quests. I assume it would be even more absurd if you did all of those.

Also since you have no party like in other Final Fantasies there isnt even a second weapon type or whatever that the player can work towards to for example make your homies stronger.

Btw leveling up is kinda fake too. Since there are no level-reqs on anything and leveling up doesnt unlock anything, not even quests or monsters afaik, its really just a tiny stat boost.

The eikon system is the only system thats remotely functional...however even that has a similar issue. Since you only have 2 slots per eikon even just playing the story of the game means you always have the two abilities that you want per eikon and have them upgraded because you get more than enough skillpoints. In other words: its fake again. If you always have enough abilitypoints to get all abilities for all 3 eikons that you got equipped, that means youre kinda just introducing an extra step to unlock them. Unlocking stuff that thats just locked for the sake of it essentially. That being said, the system is at least semi-functional because you can unlock abilities and put them on other eikons which is very expensive and actually requires you to target farm which in theory makes this a choice and choices is what make a proper RPG system.

In general its a bit of a beginner mistake to have linear and meaningless progression like this. If Im 20 hours into the game and so are you, our clives are going to be identical with the exception of what eikon abilities we chose to use. We will have the same weapon, same armor, same damage output, same stats and our companions will be 100% identical too. And if I want to use your exact eikon layout, I can do this with a couple of button presses. (the latter is not a bad thing, it just plays into the lack of choices)

Anyway. Sorry for the long rant. As someone who works on indie games and likes to look under the hood its hard for me to play a game and not constantly go like "holy moley thats brilliant i wouldnt have thought of this" but also "oh no what are they doing".

Overall its still an 8/10 game for me (not an 8/10 Final Fantasy mind you but thats a different topic). There are parts of it that very few games do as well as it does. But oh man. I genuinely cant think of a weaker RPG-system and Ive played RPGs for like 30+ years.

Ill start playing Rebirth as soon as I am done with 16 and I really really hope that they didnt do the same mistake. But remake was already better in that department so I am optimistic.

Oh and as youre inevitably going to downvote this, at least leave a comment and tell me how I am wrong and how this RPG-system isnt just fake.