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

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.