Final Fantasy XVI Fails Its Players and Its World with Its Misguided Treatment of Slavery

Final Fantasy XVI has a lot to offer. It gives us massive kaiju-esque monster fights, magic spells, vigilante chocobos, a very good dog, a Moogle bounty hunter, and many, many swords. It looks great and feels urgent and exciting to play. What it lacks, unfortunately, is an ability to engage with the themes it presents in any truly meaningful way. Most damning are the ways it refuses, or is simply unable to interrogate the world built upon slavery in which it takes place. Through some cocktail of overambition and cowardice, the developers manage to create a story that says slavery is bad, but doesn’t seem to understand precisely how or why. It takes a theme that is ugly and complicated and decides that it is easier to kill a god than address the structural complexity of the world its characters inhabit.

In Final Fantasy XVI, certain people–known as Bearers–are born with the ability to do magic. Because of this ability, they are enslaved, and are either owned by their nation of birth and forced into military service, or owned privately by wealthy citizens as labor to be extracted, compelled to perform tasks and favors until they’ve outlived their usefulness. When Bearers use too much magic over extended periods of time, their bodies become overrun by a stone sickness that eventually covers them completely, killing them. They are worked to death and discarded. Our protagonist, Clive, is born to a noble family but also has magical powers granted to him by the Phoenix Eikon. After a coup led by Clive’s mother, Clive is sold into slavery as a Bearer. He remains enslaved for 13 years.

The stage is set for Clive to effect real change: he has connections to a noble line; he has the perspective of someone who has seen the injustice acted upon the Bearers first hand, and he is, afterall, the main character. Despite this, he has almost no thoughts on the balance of power in the world until he meets Cid, the revolutionary rabble rouser and host to the lightning Eikon, Ramuh. After Cid dies Clive takes up his crusade to free the Bearers, but in his best moments simply parrots Cid’s beliefs. He has almost no thoughts of his own, and at times it seems he is pursuing the freedom of the Bearers to honor Cid’s posthumous dream rather than because they are people inherently deserving of freedom. Throughout the game, the Bearers feel like an afterthought to Clive and to the narrative as a whole, secondary to a greater quest. Clive’s goal is to fight and kill the behind-the-scenes alien god, Ultima. If the slaves are freed as a side effect, terrific, but it’s not his priority.

More egregious than setting up your story to be about slavery and then mostly ignoring that the story is about slavery is that the game’s solution to the injustice of the enslaved Bearers is assimilation. Before his death, Cid comes up with a plan to destroy the Mother Crystals, massive floating stones that provide each nation with magic. His reasoning is that, with the Mother Crystals gone, the Bearers will no longer have magic, and therefore be freed. Not only is this deeply naive, it also lacks any real understanding of the political systems that make slavery in this world useful and necessary to a powerful few. It assumes that if the slaves were to lose the ability that gives them value and become physically like those who enslave them, they’d simply be freed. At the time it’s suggested, Cid has Clive and Jill (host of Shiva) working with him. Together they are three of the most powerful beings on the planet. Not once do they discuss, in a game allegedly about medieval politics, overthrowing a system that employs and thrives on slavery. They never plan to dethrone the kings and queens using and profiting off slave labor. Instead they stumble through the logical fallacy of “bearers are enslaved because they have magic; if we destroy magic then they won’t be slaves anymore.” It’s an assimilationist argument that removes any moral burden from those who have enslaved these people, and places it instead on the enslaved. It says, “if you weren’t different this wouldn’t happen to you, so lets make you like everyone else.”

The only character who seems to actually want to free the Bearers and abolish slavery as a concept is Clive’s father, Elwin Rosfield. Elwin dies in the first chapter of the game (or the demo) and never actually speaks of his plans to free the slaves. In fact, you only find out his intentions if you elect to do an optional late game side-quest that is more about bonding with your brother Joshua than it is about honoring your dead father’s wishes. The main story routinely sacrifices the emotional potential of small, earnest exchanges for the sake of explosive but ultimately empty moments. Most of the content engaging with cruelty towards the Bearers is relegated to optional side-quests, allowing the player to opt-out as much as Clive seems to when it comes to actually facing the very human horrors of this world. 

These stories, and the way we engage with these themes, matter. Final Fantasy XVI builds a world constructed around something as horrific as human slavery and then for the most part disregards it, implying that if people weren’t different they wouldn’t be made to suffer or be exploited. But the problem is not the difference. It is not the Bearers’ magic that makes them slaves. It’s the cruelty and inhumanity of the people given power over them. The solution is not to take their magic away, it’s to remove the political system allowing anyone to be enslaved. Cid and Clive’s plan may be a good one to move along the plot of Final Fantasy XVI, a game much more interested in killing a space god than freeing slaves, but it is not a good plan for saving the people of this world. The burden should not be put on those who are different to assimilate into their oppressors, and if you’re going to make a game about slavery you owe it to the player to make a game about slavery, not a lumbering hand-wavy adventure ultimately about how being different is dangerous. If Final Fantasy XVI can’t treat the subject with the gravity and care it deserves, it shouldn’t bring it up at all, much less make it the bedrock of its entire story.

Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.