Final Fantasy XVI: all the latest on the darkest FF yet

I am a person who often struggles with vast, world-spanning fantasy stories. I just can’t keep track of all of the people and places and other proper nouns that make up the world. The result is that I spend a lot of time reading wikis to help me get through things like The Lord of the Rings or The Witcher — but that’s not very helpful in the moment when I’m watching a pivotal scene unfold. But Final Fantasy XVI, which just launched on the PS5, has a helpful tool to make it a whole lot easier to follow its complex tale.

The feature is called Active Time Lore — a nice play on the Active Time Battle combat system of past games — and it’s sort of like the X-Ray tool offered by Amazon Prime Video, only for a video game. It works like this: at any time during a cutscene, you can pause and hit the touchpad, bringing up a web of all the important characters, locations, and events related to the current scene. So if you have no idea who, say, Ramuh is or the importance of The Kingdom of Waloed, you can get a brief refresher.