Final Fantasy XVI Complete Edition PC review — An excellent story, now with mods!

By Cassie Peterson and Ron Burke

Posted on September 30, 2024

It has been a little over a year since Final Fantasy XVI released on the PlayStation 5. The game was received very well by players and critics alike, with our very own David Flynn scoring the game at a solid 100 in his review. The game went on to earn many award nominations in the following months, particularly for art direction and the incredible score. Recently the game made its way to the PC as Final Fantasy XVI Complete Edition as part of SquareEnix’s pledge to bring more of their games to more platforms, and we’ve been digging into it to see how it fares on new ground.

Of course, the first concern that comes to mind when hearing such a gorgeous game is coming to PC is how it will perform, especially when you take into consideration all of the variables in PC hardware that are still in use today. Despite the gorgeous visuals, this is really no concern at all, especially once you take a look at the minimum and recommended PC specs. At a minimum, you need a Ryzen 5 or Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a Radeon RX 5700 or GeForce RTX 1070 graphics card. The recommendation isn’t much of a reach, jumping up only a single generation for the processor and graphics card.

We tested the game on PCs running very different hardware, one with a Ryzen 7 and a GeForce RTX 2080Ti (the recommended specs) and the other with an Intel Core i9 13900K and GeForce RTX 4090, and in both instances, the game performs beautifully, with only minor concessions on the older tech. The game does, however, take up a whopping 170GB of storage (SSD required), which is in part because the Complete Edition includes the two expansions, The Rising Tide and Echoes of the Fallen. That minor concession, by the way, was that the framerate had to be capped at 165 instead of 240.

DLSS and Frame Generation do some solid heavy lifting here, but it’s thankfully not a crutch. At 4K on the 4090 we were able to achieve over 165fps, but even turning it off we only saw that drop to around 100 at that same resolution. A 4060 will get you from around 60fps to around 100 with Frame Generation. Square Enix hasn’t always done a wonderful job at optimizing their software for PC, but that’s not the case here – they’ve done the work, and we’re the beneficiaries. In all, there are just shy of two dozen sliders to tweak the overall experience and performance, and each are explained in a brief synopsis on the screen. Each one has a minor impact on overall performance, so you’ll have to mix and match to find precisely what you need for your hardware. That said, if you are anywhere near the requirements you can rejoice and crank up those graphics settings. You will be just fine.

Despite showing as unsupported on Steam Deck, the game runs well on it. With FSR 3 Frame Generation turned on, it’ll bounce around like a yo-yo between around 45 and 30, staying above 30 reliably. It looks solid, without any odd artifacting beyond the occasional jagged edge from running at the Steam Deck’s default resolution. Undoubtedly, somebody will eventually figure out the precise settings to make this thing sing, but it works well and lets you take this gorgeous game on the go.

Final Fantasy XVI is a game with a lot of buttons that need pressing, for which the right configuration is needed to make the game more fun to play on whichever platform you play it on. Full button mapping is available for people choosing to play on mouse and keyboard. However, it is still highly recommended to just use a controller. You have a handful of mapping profiles to choose from, but you can also do a custom configuration if you’d like. The game comes with full support for your PlayStation 5 DualSense controller, but also supports use of the Xbox controller, which is a pleasant addition. While the buttons you press don’t change (unlike with Nintendo’s configuration), it’s nice to have the option since some players prefer the design of one controller over the other. That said, I can’t say Ienjoyed the mouse and keyboard experience much. It feels overly clunky by comparison – this title was clearly built and optimized for a controller.

Of course, this begs the question, will Final Fantasy XVI be coming to Xbox Series X|S? Unfortunately, we still don’t know, however the outlook is promising. Game Director Hiroshi Takai said he’d like to see it happen, and we would too. Maybe we’ll have that to look forward to in 2025?

There’s not much that can be said about improvements to accessibility, other than that the game is now accessible on more platforms than before. In terms of accommodating those with disabilities, players can take advantage of the flexibility and utility PCs provide that consoles cannot, however, as had been mentioned in David’s review, the menu text still can’t be altered, so text can be hard to read for some. That said, modders have already taken their tools to the game. There are already mods for fixing the 30fps lock on cutscenes, adding ultrawide support, equipment and difficulty balance tuning, expanding the wonderful orchestral soundtrack, full color reshades, and much more. It’s a matter of time till just about any new functionality you can conjure will be achievable – the power of PC.

Final Fantasy XVI Complete Edition PC review — An excellent story, now with mods!

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