Final Fantasy 16: Titan Fight
So there’s…a lot story elements in Final Fantasy 16.
Narrative complexity is one of the hallmarks of the series and trying to simply summarize the plot of any of these games can be an exercise in self-torture. I’ll do my best to give a brief introduction. Clive Renfield is the son of an aristocrat and unbeknownst to him is the Eikon, or champion, of a fire deity known as Ifirit who has, up to this point, been a creature players could summon during battles to help in fights. Clive is abandoned by his step-mother after his father is killed and winds up becoming recruited by a man named Cyd who is also an Eikon and trying to help bearers, people who can use magic without the help or assistance of magical crystals. Clive will eventually cross paths with a powerful warrior by the name of Hugo Kupka who kills bearers because he believes Cyd is responsible for killing the only woman he loved. In a rage he attacks Cyd’s fortress and has his men regularly harass and murder bearers as revenge. Clive becomes determined to stop Kupka and fights him cutting off his hands and stealing his power. Kupka manages to escape the fight, but Clive decides to finally kill the man one-on-one thus setting up the epic fight.
That…is the shortest summary of well over 30 hours of gameplay that I can offer.
And believe me I could offer more.
Final Fantasy 16 was released earlier this year, June 22 to be precise, and I went into it expecting a fantasy epic which would include boss fights, general fantasy monsters, and an RPG hero who was typical to the franchise. I got all of these, but Final Fantasy 16 has surpassed these expectations by delivering an incredible game. I’ve written once already about it briefly discussing a side quest about getting scorpion tails for a chef, but this time it felt more important to talk about the fight against Hugo Kupka and how it became a wonderful example of how Boss-NPC fights can and should work for narrative goals in video games.
The fight against Hugo Kupka in his underground Crystal mansion and yes I wrote those words correctly, is set up as a kind of final confrontation. By this fight the player has fought, and defeated Hugo at least once, and given the narrative cues from the various friendly npcs preceding this battle it’s clear that we are about to settle a score. But where before Clive fought simply as a man with a blade, and his trusted dog companion Torgul, this battle becomes truly epic.
Kupka is driven mad, and sensing Clive’s presence transforms into the massive Rock-deity known as Titan. Clive, in a moment of self actualization is able himself to transform into the bipedal demon-fire-wolf-dog deity known as Ifrit, and from there begins a battle between gods who hurl giant rocks, fireballs, and fists at one another until eventually Titan is defeated.
This in itself would be, to quote the kids, pretty rad.
But then, somehow, it gets better.
I wanna make sure my reader understands, I was not expecting anything that followed this. What was supposed to be a dramatic fight sequence between giant monsters escalated into Godzilla level wackiness. Titan, realizing that he is defeated, desperately reaches for a glowing crystal nearby and swallows it whole. There’s a brief moment as Titan’s eyes shift to blue. The scene cuts to the large mountain known as Drake’s Fang and there’s a small moment of silence until Ifrit is shown being blasted literally miles away from the mountain where the fight took place. And then, after a brief moment of calm, Titan emerges, bursting from the earth. His body now dwarfed the mountains he had sprung from and his face was now nothing but thin blue slits while literal giant rock tentacles emerged through the dust tempest which swirled around this titan.
At some point, as I watched Ifrit ride one of these giant rock-tentacles up to the atmosphere while what I can only describe as an anime-opening song played in the background, I realized that I was laughing.
I was laughing really hard. I was hopping left and right on the balls of my feet. And I laughed to the point I was getting lightheaded. It was the kind of laughter I have experienced only a few times whenever I play video-games that leave me absolutely invigorated, spell-bound, and happy to be alive. The fight against Hugo Kupka as the rock-Eikon Titan in Final Fantasy 16 has been, arguably, the most incredible moment in a game that already is simply amazing.
It was also absolute bonkers bullshit craziness and I loved every fucking second of it.
As such, I knew I wanted to write an essay about the experience.
The fight against Hugo Kupka, and by extension the god Titan, is a boss-fight and therefore the player who goes into the battle can expect the experience to be largely driven by narrative. This is a way of saying that gameplay mechanics will play some role in this fight, but the scene is largely supposed to be concluding some narrative point as opposed to challenging the player to demonstrate mastery over the controls. Up to this point Kupka has been, not the main antagonist, but a regularly recurring opponent driven mostly by sadism and revenge. Clive, and by extension bearers, have endured endless heartache because of this man. Clive Renfield is fighting Hugo Kupka, and then Ifrit is fighting Titan, and the player is watching, experiencing, and achieving a catharsis.
This lecture is brought to you by…no one because nobody follows me on Patreon.
Hint, Hint.
Boss-npcs(Non-Playable Characters) have, throughout videogames typically been opportunities for game developers to give the player a sense of closure. I wrote about this briefly in a previous essay about Vitreous, the boss of Misery Mire in Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In that temple the player experiences the various challenges, riddles, obstacles, and secrets before eventually arriving at Vitreous and defeating him. When the player arrives outside the door to Vitreous’s lair the game has provided a visual tone that this fight is supposed to be the conclusion of the temple and that, once this fight is finished, Link and the player will leave this space never to return to it. Once Vitreous falls to Link’s blade (or arrows if you want to down him fast) Link rescues the trapped maiden, exposition is given, and the player does that satisfying sword swish that I could recite from memory and even recreate via onomatopoeia if you buy me a tall enough cup of coffee. What was important about this fight, more than just the sick visuals of fighting a giant bouncing eyeball, was the emotional and intellectual reaction. I had beaten Vitreous the Boss-npc, and by extension I had defeated Misery Mire. This challenge was complete and I could keep moving.
The Boss-npc is a gift to the player as much as it is a challenge because it creates the closure necessary to make the player understand that they have pushed past their previous limitations and have emerged stronger for the experience. It’s as much a gameplay mechanic as it is a rhetorical structure.
And when we’re talking about Final Fantasy games, we’re always talking about a story.
Clive Rensfield’s story is one of pain, loss, failure, and growth. From the very beginning of the game Clive is plagued with feelings of inadequacy and rejection from his mother, guilt for his belief that he killed his bother Joshua, and endless frustration as he fights to make the world a better place for bearers like himself who are constantly finding themselves the victims of societal sadism and persecution. The constant threat of failure looms over Clive, and this is demonstrated again and again in his inability to summon and control Ifit. Unlike every other Eikon who can “prime,” a word employed in the game to mean transform and become the deity which has chosen them, Clive is never able to become the god himself.
That is, until he fights Kupka a second time.
The most important moment of this whole fight sequence is when Clive attempts to transform and fails. He eventually declares aloud, in a sequence highly used in the promotional material, “Come to me Ifrit!” but before this he says something that reveals the importance of this fight in the first place. Clive watches Kupka beginning to “prime,” and he thinks to himself, “If he can do it, then I can do it.”
This sentence is conviction.
It’s the purest demonstration of conviction.
“If He can do it, then I can do it.”
Clive will repeat this sentence several times during the fight with Titan as the sheer size and, arguably ridiculous bombasity that is an absolute blast continues. Final Fantasy Boss fights have, since their inception, often been designed to be long grinds heavily built upon plot points in the story. There’s always been giant monsters the player will face randomly as they explore the open worlds, but the fights against Bosses were designed to bring that familiar sense of closure to the player allowing them the knowledge that they were steadily working towards the ultimate end of the game.
A role playing game is about growth, and watching the choices you and your character make build towards a larger strength. I haven’t discussed the gameplay mechanics of this fight because, honestly, it’s my first playthrough of this game and right now the narrative is what’s keeping me going. Watching Clive grow from his pains and failures, and watching him become Ifrit and leave Hugo Kupka as a literal pile of dust has been a catharsis.
There’s so much pain in Clive, and in the world of Valisthea. Bearers suffer needlessly, emperors and kings wage pitiful wars as the land becomes plagued with blight, and almost every character the player will encounter has endured some manner of abuse or torment.
Fighting and defeating Hugo Kupka becomes a step towards making Clive Stronger, and making the world a safer place.
Narrative content of games has been subject to debate with critics, designers, and players, with John Carmack’s now legendary dismissal of plot being as important to plots in porn films a damning but revealing attitude towards the medium. So many writers struggle to justify narratives while balancing the necessary concern for how the design reveals technological and scientific significance. This in turn can create endless arguments in blog posts and forums over whether one side is more important than the other. Are games purely about the developments of software, or are they a medium of art to create aesthetic responses in players?
I’ll be honest.
I’m not particularly interested in planting my flag on either front.
I think instead I’ll use my own bisexuality as a philosophical argument: why not both?
Like the medium of comics which employs visual art and prose for the purpose of telling stories or delivering information, videogames as a medium employs software, writing, and visual art to likewise tell stories and/or deliver information. There will always be readers of comics more concerned with the form of the comic itself. Likewise there will always be readers who flock to the medium for the stories they tell, oblivious or apathetic to the formal qualities of whatever comic they are reading. It comes down, ultimately, to how the artist(s) prioritize and balance these elements.
The Titan fight is a visual spectacle that left me thrilled and exhausted. The technology employed in the software of the game itself, as well as the hardware development of the Playstation 5 reveals how incredible videogames have become in their technical wizardry. Likewise the narrative elements and tone of the fight left me laughing and deeply moved as I watched, and participated, in an incredible story of personal growth. The story succeeds because the technology succeeds and this is exactly what a perfect moment in a video game can and should be.
Clive’s battle would not be possible without the technological developments games have steadily built towards over time, and as designers are given opportunities to employ these tools for their stories and games we will only see more growth. It’s only a matter of time before the next generation of players, boggling at watching Ifrit scramble across the length of a giant rock tentacle will think about the people who made this game and realize, “If they can do it, I can do it.”
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.3.2023
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