Let's just get it immediately out of the way, if you are hoping for something like the "old" Final Fantasy games, like from the SNES era, or 7-8-9-10, you are not going to find it here.
The game starts with an extremely long cutscene. I'm not even sure how it ends, because I got bored after 40 minutes (no joke), and skipped it. Then you get to run around with a party on a battlefield for about 20 minutes, which then ends in another cutscene that I skipped.
Then you get to control the (who I assume) the main character, and puts you into an unskippable combat tutorial. Combat is press X to hit, press Y to hit harder, press Z to parry, and press W to not die. It's the same combat you would find in any other other action RPG in the last 10 years, why this needs a game interrupting tutorial is beyond me. All the controls are there on the screen anyway, this is something everybody is able to figure out after 2 minutes, just let people play the game.
Then there are more cutscenes. At this point I have skipped 12. By the time you actually start playing the game, you have spent more than 1 hour, watching/skipping cutscenes, and doing a tutorial for a battle system that you are already familiar with from all the other games. The combat gameplay is super similar to Devil May Cry (the combat director of that game worked on this one as well), but the whole thing feels like a DMC reskin under the Final Fantasy name. This in itself is not bad, the DMC series is pretty good, but it gets to the point immediately, and it lets you play immediately. FF16 is just a slog fest with DMC's combat. I wonder why Square keeps pushing the Final Fantasy name (marketing I guess), the series is so far away from its roots that it has nothing do with it. I'm 100% convinced that everybody who worked on the old games has left Square, and I'm very curious to know where they are now.
Also, doing cutscenes at 30 fps for a $50 game in 2024 takes some real effort, and it deserves the 💩 award. There are so many good games, play something else that respects your time.