Final Fantasy XVI: Battle Basics

Clive must defend himself on his road towards revenge, so be sure to use our Final Fantasy XVI Battle Basics Guide to help you guide our struggling hero. Combat can be decisive. Your competence will determine if you or your foes meet an untimely end.

For the sake of creating a guide that doesn’t have a bunch of extra button prompts tacked on, I will be referring to the default (type A) control scheme. If you changed these, the controller guide in the game will show you what each button does.

Basic Attacks

Locking on is integral to any action game where you have to manage multiple foes at once. Tap L1 and you’ll see the dot on your closest enemy turn into a circle. This indicates that Clive’s actions will target this enemy and that your camera will track their movement. Click the right stick (R3) to cycle between enemies. Press L1 once more to disengage the lockon.

Alright, next let’s introduce some basic attacks. Tap the ‘Square’ button to use a standard sword swing attack. Tapping 4 times in succession will creat a combo. Tap ‘Triangle’ to fire a ranged magic blast. If the right abilities are purchased, you can charge your magic and physical attacks to create a huge burst attack. You can even mix your physical and magical attacks together by alternating Square and Triangle.

Next, let’s talk Clive’s basic air game. Press ‘X’ to jump. Remember that.Aerial attacks actually hit harder than your ground attacks, however they can only create a combo of three hits. If you have the stomp ability you can tap X again in the air when on top of an enemy to launch Clive up higher in the air. Of course, you can use magic and other abilities in the air.

There are a couple of standard attacks that involve tapping X + ‘Square’ at the same time. On the ground Clive will stab his sword in a distant lunge attack and in the air he will slam his sword down to the ground. These are great ways to disrupt opponents among other things.

-eikon swap

Using Eikonic Abilities and Specials

Now, all that is well and good. There’s even a couple basic attacks that are ALMOST flashy. Where’s the REAL effects heavy and awesome looking attacks though? Well, these are tied to your Eikons. All you have to do is hold R2 and your Square and Triangle attacks become Special Attacks. Your circle button is also always reserved for an Eikon specific attack called an ‘Eikonic Feat’. Using your specials and feat in conjunction with other Eikons and your normal attacks will lead you to victory.

Be sure to read what your abilities do and experiment to see what works for you.

The last tip I’ll give is that you can tap L2 to cycle between your Eikons. With some proper planning you can start a combo with your first Eikon in the list, continue it by swapping to Eikon 2, and finish your combo with Eikon 3.

A basic strategy can go as follows: start with Phoenix and use Phoenix Shift to close the distance between you and your opponent, use Rising Flames to launch your foe, do some normal attacks in the air, press L2 to swap to Garuda, use a stomp, use Garuda’s Deadly embrace to pull your opponent to you, gain more air with your opponent with Garuda’s Wicked Wheel, attack some more, use your aerial X + ‘Square’ to slam them to the ground, ready Titan, and finally finish them with a powerful Windup.

That’s one simple combo you can work out. I probably left out some cool stuff… Look I got some time to optimize it! Okay?!

Items and Torgal

There are some very important functions tied to the d-pad. Clive can administer items and command his wolf, Torgal. Use our item guide to learn more about item usage! Torgal has two attacks and a heal, so use these to support Clive!

Limit Break

This powered up form for Clive is obtained over the course of the story. Click both sticks to enter a super-state and restore some hp. Your attacks will deal significantly more damage and come out more quickly.