The base game has 76 side quests, 32 optional monster hunts, and 7 chronolith trials. Seems like plenty to me.
Ok let's actually break this down. The side content in FFXVI is split into 3 categories. Side Quests, Monster Hunts, Chronolith trials. Let's get into why the design around these features had issues:
Preliminary Notes
In order to unlock these three pieces of side content, you must progress the main story. The main story gameplay loops plays out like this:
- 1-2 hour dungeon, big boss battles, and high budget cutscenes.
- 4-5 hours of talking to NPC after NPC after NPC. Go somewhere on the map to kill something. Go back to talking to NPC after NPC after NPC. Speaking with NPCs has a low budget approach to camerawork. Every conversation uses the same camera angles and static animations from Clive and the NPC.
- 1-2 hour dungeon, big boss battles, and high budget cutscenes.
- 4-5 hours of talking to NPC after NPC after NPC. Go somewhere on the map to kill something. Go back to talking to NPC after NPC after NPC. Speaking with NPCs has a low budget approach to camerawork. Every conversation uses the same camera angles and static animations from Clive and the NPC.
- Rinse and repeat.
Keep all of this in mind for the next three points.
Side Quests
Given the repetitive nature of the gameplay loop with the story, especially with the sections in between the big action set pieces, the player will naturally want to mix things up by taking a break from the main story to do side content. One of these is Side Quests. The Side Quest design in this game is hot garbage. The story sections of the Side Quests play out the same way as the in between moments in the main story listed above. Clive statically stands in front of an NPC and they talk and talk and talk. Then you go kill something, come back, and get your reward. There is no variety or anything of substance to separate how Side Quests play out compared to those slower Main Story moments. So if the slow moments in the Main Story are boring you, and you have to mix things up, the Side Quests won't be cleansing the palette. On top of that, the rewards are terrible for 90% of the game, and not worth the player's time.
Monster Hunts
Eventually you start unlocking optional challenges called Monster Hunts. These involve going to the board, taking on a bounty, and then finding the monster on the map to kill it. These are fun. The big issue with these is the game drip feeds these hunts to you very slowly. If you need a break from the slow paced talking moments from the Main Story and Side Quests, Hunts can be a way to mix things up and give you some combat. But you're only give 2-3 at a time, which typically take 15-20 minutes total to complete. And then what? If you want to do more, you have to go back to progressing the thing that was boring you or burning you out, in order to unlock more hunts. So in short, the Hunts are good but they're not enough on their own to provide the player hours of enjoyment as they break from the story.
Chronolith Trials
I would actually call this a quantity issue. Like the Hunts, these are drip fed to you throughout the game, and the only way to unlock more is to progress the Main Story. Once you complete one, there's no real reason to redo it.
So if you want to break away from the Main Story, you have very little to do. Saying the game has "76 Side Quests and 32 Monster Hunts!" is a bad argument, because of the way these are slowly fed to you. If you want to do nothing but side content between the Time Skip and Titan, you only have a small handful of things to do, half of which are poor quality (Side Quests) and the other half are not enough quantity (Hunts and Trials). So what about just bopping around on the World Map then? The problem is there's very little to do there either, except for mindlessly killing monsters. There's no optional dungeons/caves to stumble upon, and the game doesn't have a deep and robust gear system, so it's not like you're going to be hunting for chests to find different gear and weapon sets. There's no mini games, and nothing to do in towns except shop.
The Side Content in FFXVI is fundamentally terrible in terms of quantity and quality.