Final Fantasy 16, the PlayStation 5 exclusive RPG from Square Enix that released this past Thursday, has earned mostly positive reviews from players and professional critics alike, leaving it with apretty healthy Metascore of 88, currently. That’s still a long way down from the current king of the 2023 charts,Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which is riding high with a score of 96, a full two points ahead of second place Metroid Prime Remastered.
While an 88 is nothing to sneeze at, it sets Final Fantasy 16 all the way down in 22nd place among games released this year, and there’s still just over half a year left in 2023. But despite that seemingly bleak number, one analyst is encouraging Final Fantasy fans not to count out FF16 for Game of the Year contention, and he’s drawing from recent history to make his point.
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As pointed out by YouTuberNIXNE on his Twitter account, EA and Hazelight Studios' action adventure title It Takes Two was in a similar boat back in 2021 when it took home the top prize at The Game Awards, also bearing a Metascore of 88. “This is for the people who keep saying Final Fantasy XVI wont win GOTY because it scored an 88 on Metacritic. In 2021 It Takes Two won GOTY and was NOT the highest rated game that year. Highest metascore does not equal GOTY,” his post reads.
And he’s right. Taking a look back at Metacritic’s top-rated games of 2021, it requires a bit of scrolling to findIt Takes Two. It, too, finished with a Metascore of 88 and falls at number 31 in the year’s review rankings. Currently, Final Fantasy 16 is sitting in the 22nd overall spot for 2023, although since Metacritic treats each instance of the same game released on different platforms as its own release, it’s really only in 15th place when removing second and third listings of the same games. Adding to that point, a lot of the games ranking above Final Fantasy 16 are remakes, remasters, expansions, and special collections of older games, and removing those entries brings it up to a solid sixth place (behind Tears of the Kingdom, Street Fighter 6, Diablo 4, Moss, and Hi-Fi Rush).
And if you’re more inclined to believe user reviews than professional ones, FF16’s scores may also be a bit misleading as there’s beenevidence of review bombing, which seems to be coming from longtime series fans who aren’t comfortable with the different direction in which the series is heading. On MetaCritic alone, there are currently 1,222 positive user reviews, 78 mixed reviews, and 540 negative ones, including 80 that gave it either a zero or a one.
We’re still about six months out from The Game Awards, so it’ll be some time until we even get a list of nominees, and there are plenty of games yet to be released that could still make the cut over FF6 or even Tears of the Kingdom. We’ll just have to wait until December to see which games have a chance at Game of the Year.
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