When it comes to replaying modern Final Fantasy games, two titles come up constantly in discussions: Final Fantasy XV Royal Edition and Final Fantasy XVI. Whether you’re looking at New Game+ options, forgotten gameplay mechanics, or just wanting to experience these worlds again, both games offer different reasons to return. The question is: which one actually gives you more reasons to play through again?
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Final Fantasy XVI’s New Game+ Mode
Final Fantasy XVI has a “Final Fantasy” mode that becomes available after beating the game. Despite being marketed as a harder experience, many experienced players find this mode isn’t actually challenging.
What Final Fantasy Mode Actually Gives You
Remixed Combat Encounters: Enemy variety, placement, and attack patterns are changed throughout the game. You’ll encounter different combinations of enemies, but this doesn’t actually make the game much harder for experienced players.
Stat Increases That Don’t Matter Much: The mode increases the level cap to 100 and upgrades enemy stats, but since you keep all your abilities and gear, skilled players can still steamroll most content.
New Customization Options: You can upgrade weapons and accessories to higher tiers and forge the Ultima Weapon. This gives you new gear to work toward.
Arcade Mode: You can revisit specific combat stages and try for high scores with global leaderboards.
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Skippable Story: You can skip cutscenes if you just want to get through the combat.
The Problem: It’s Not Actually That Challenging
Here’s where things get complicated. Many experienced players have found that Final Fantasy mode isn’t as difficult as advertised, especially early in the game. The difficulty perception depends heavily on your experience with action RPGs and how well you mastered FFXVI’s combat system on your first playthrough.
You Keep Your Power: In Final Fantasy mode, you carry over all of your mastered Eikon abilities, accessories, and levels. You’re essentially starting the game as a maxed-out character. While enemies get stat buffs and the level cap increases to 100, skilled players with a complete arsenal of Eikons can still make short work of most encounters.
Enemies Just Get Spongier: A common criticism is that the increased difficulty simply makes enemies into damage sponges with bigger health pools, rather than making them more strategically challenging. While enemy compositions are remixed, the core gameplay loop doesn’t evolve enough to provide a truly different experience.
Overpowered Mechanics Still Work: Certain Eikon abilities and strategies, like using Odin to quickly charge your Zantetsuken, can still trivialize encounters even on the highest setting. The generous combat mechanics, including the high degree of precision dodging, make it difficult to actually get a Game Over.
Where the Real Challenge Lives
The actual difficult content in Final Fantasy XVI exists outside the main story campaign:
Ultimaniac Arcade Mode: This is found at the Arete Stone in the Hideaway and is specifically for players who have completed Final Fantasy mode. It’s a step up in difficulty with unforgiving combat stages, aggressive enemy AI, and no continues. You’re given limited resources including just a single potion and high potion for entire stage runs, with no item drops. The focus shifts from winning to achieving high scores through perfect dodges, parries, and combos.
Kairos Gate (The Rising Tide DLC): This is a 20-stage gauntlet where you fight waves of increasingly difficult enemies and must complete all 20 circles in a single attempt. Your level and equipment are locked, but accessories are disabled and you rely on temporary “Boons” and permanent “Enhancements” you purchase between stages. If you achieve S-rank on all 20 circles while playing on Final Fantasy mode, you unlock a secret boss fight.
S-Rank Hunts: The Notorious Marks vary in difficulty, but S-rank hunts like Svarog and the Behemoth King have intricate, fast, and punishing attack patterns. However, even these can be manageable for highly skilled players who have mastered the combat system.
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Final Fantasy XV Royal Edition’s New Game+
Final Fantasy XV takes a completely different approach to New Game+. Rather than trying to create a new challenge, it’s designed as what many players call a “victory lap” – a more relaxed way to experience the story and world again.
What FFXV’s New Game+ Offers
You Stay Overpowered: Most of your abilities, gear, and levels carry over from your first playthrough. Since enemies don’t scale in the same dramatic way as in FFXVI, you can steamroll most combat encounters from the very beginning. This creates a power fantasy where challenges that once gave you trouble become trivial.
Identical Story Experience: The story and quests remain exactly the same, so there’s no new narrative content to discover. However, some players enjoy revisiting the story with their existing power, experiencing familiar moments from a position of strength rather than struggle.
Enhanced Open World Exploration: The replayability comes from enjoying the open-world exploration with fewer barriers. You can tackle any side quests or optional content you missed on your first playthrough with ease. The Regalia Type-F flying car, unlocked after completing the game, makes traversal much faster and more enjoyable.
Complete Story Package: With the Royal Edition and its DLCs, a second playthrough allows you to experience the game with all the previously fragmented story content properly integrated, providing a more complete narrative experience than might have been available on your first run.
Optional Self-Imposed Challenges: Some dedicated players create their own difficulty by using items like the Nixperience Band to prevent gaining experience, or by restricting their gear usage, but these aren’t built into the game itself.
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When You’ve Forgotten the Game Mechanics
Sometimes replayability isn’t about New Game+ features or challenge modes – it’s simply about time passing and forgetting how the game actually works. This creates a completely different type of replay experience depending on how each game’s mechanics hold up to rediscovery.
Final Fantasy XVI: Mechanics That Stick
FFXVI’s action-based combat system tends to be more memorable due to its straightforward design. The basic dodge-attack-Eikonic ability loop is intuitive enough that even after months away, most players can jump back in without too much confusion. The Eikon switching and ability management might take some getting used to again, but the core combat flow comes back quickly.
The main challenge when returning to FFXVI after a break is remembering which Eikon abilities work best in different situations and relearning the timing for perfect dodges and counters. But since the combat is skill-based rather than system-heavy, muscle memory tends to return fairly fast.
Final Fantasy XV: A Complex Web of Forgotten Systems
FFXV presents a much bigger problem when you’ve been away for a while. The game has multiple interlocking systems that aren’t immediately obvious or intuitive:
Combat Complexity: The combat involves holding buttons for attacks, directional inputs for different weapon types, warp-striking, link attacks with party members, and a parry system that’s easy to forget how to use properly. Link-strikes and blindside links are co-op attacks that can be performed with party members, and each weapon type has its own moveset.
Character Progression: The Ascension grid system with its various skill trees requires over 18,000 AP to fully complete. There are multiple trees covering Combat, Teamwork, Magic, Recovery, Exploration, Wait Mode, Stats, and Techniques, each with dozens of abilities to unlock and manage.
Cooking and Camp Mechanics: Ignis’s cooking system provides stat boosts that last until sundown, with Ascension abilities to extend duration. Each character has favorite foods that provide specific bonuses like increased tech bar fill rates. The difference between staying at hotels vs camping, and how cooking affects your stats, all become fuzzy memories.
Magic and Elemancy: The magic crafting system where you extract elemental energy from deposits around the world and combine fire, ice, and lightning elements to create spells. Adding items as catalysts creates additional effects like healing, multicast, or status ailments, and magic flasks are required to store the crafted spells.
Open World Systems: Camp site mechanics, how the car works and when you can drive vs when it’s on rails, side quest structures, and the hunt system all become fuzzy. The photography system for experience bonuses and fishing mini-games add even more layers to remember.
When you return to FFXV after forgetting these systems, you’re essentially learning a new game again. This can be either frustrating if you want to jump right back into the action, or refreshing if you enjoyed discovering these systems the first time around.
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The Replayability Factor
This creates an interesting dynamic where FFXV actually becomes more replayable for players who have forgotten its mechanics, while FFXVI loses some replay value in the same situation.
If you’ve forgotten FFXV’s systems, jumping back in feels like playing a new, complex RPG with deep mechanics to rediscover. If you’ve forgotten FFXVI’s simpler systems, you’ll be back up to speed in an hour and then facing the same “is this actually challenging enough?” question that many players have.
The fundamental difference between these games’ approaches to replayability comes down to philosophy and target audience.
Final Fantasy XVI’s Approach
FFXVI was explicitly designed with the idea that players want a fresh, challenging gameplay experience on subsequent playthroughs. The developers created Final Fantasy mode specifically to address the common complaint that New Game+ modes just make you overpowered without providing new challenges.
However, the execution has mixed results. While the mode does remix encounters and increase stats, many players find that it doesn’t fundamentally change the experience enough. The real challenging content – Ultimaniac, Kairos Gate, and high-level hunts – exists as separate modes that many players never engage with.
Final Fantasy XV’s Approach
FFXV is more honest about what it offers: a comfortable return to a world and story you enjoyed. There’s no pretense about providing a hardcore challenge. Instead, it focuses on removing barriers that might have prevented you from fully exploring or enjoying content on your first playthrough.
The game recognizes that sometimes replayability isn’t about challenge – it’s about comfort, nostalgia, and the simple pleasure of existing in a game world you love. The road trip atmosphere with Noctis and his friends, the beautiful open world, and the relaxed pacing can be just as valuable as mechanical challenge.
Which Game Is More Replayable?
The answer depends entirely on what you want from a replay experience.
Choose Final Fantasy XVI if:
- You want to engage with challenging optional content like Ultimaniac Arcade Mode and Kairos Gate
- You enjoy score-based gameplay and competing on leaderboards
- You’re looking for mechanical depth and want to master complex combat systems
- You don’t mind that the main story replay isn’t dramatically different from your first playthrough
Choose Final Fantasy XV Royal Edition if:
- You want a relaxing replay experience where you feel powerful
- You enjoy revisiting stories and characters you love
- You prefer open-world exploration without gameplay barriers
- You value atmosphere and world-building over mechanical challenge
- You want to experience the complete story with all DLC integrated
The Broader Context
It’s important to note that difficulty perception varies dramatically between players. What some find trivially easy, others consider genuinely challenging. FFXVI’s design philosophy of broad accessibility means it caters to a wide range of skill levels, which explains why player experiences can differ so dramatically.
For hardcore action RPG veterans, FFXVI’s main campaign replay might feel underwhelming, but the optional endgame content can provide hundreds of hours of challenging gameplay. For players who primarily engage with story-driven experiences, FFXV’s gentle power fantasy approach might be exactly what they’re looking for in a replay.
Final Thoughts
Both games succeed at what they set out to accomplish, but they’re targeting different types of replay experiences. FFXVI offers more traditional “replayability” in the sense of providing new gameplay challenges and content, though much of this is locked behind optional modes. FFXV offers something equally valuable but different: the comfort of returning to a beloved world without the stress of difficult gameplay.
The question isn’t really which game is “more replayable” in an objective sense, but rather which type of replay experience appeals to you. Sometimes you want to prove your skills against brutal challenge modes. Other times you just want to take another road trip across Eos with your friends, steamrolling enemies and enjoying the scenery.
Both approaches have their place in gaming, and both games execute their respective visions competently, even if FFXVI’s marketing might oversell the difficulty of its main campaign replay.
