In some of the Final Fantasy franchises darkest and most violent moments, the violence on show has been quite tame in comparison to most other video game IP. Final Fantasy XVI, from everything depicted in trailers so far, has displayed a game that bucks the trend of the franchise so far, and has consequently been given a Mature rating in the United States. So what does this mature rating mean for the direction of the upcoming 16th core entry in one of the industry’s most acclaimed franchises? IGN managed to sit down with Hiroshi Takai, the Director of Final Fantasy XVI to get some answers, shedding some insight into the more realistic and natural fantasy narrative.
In response to questioning about the game’s dark tone and violence, Takai responded saying,
In the early stages of development, we decided that we wouldn’t tell a juvenile story. Some of the major considerations were the age range of the players we expect to form our core audience, and also that we have an increased capability to portray things, in several meanings of the word. You say it’s a more “violent” direction – but the key point here is that we didn’t want to just make things more extreme, we wanted to show things more realistically and naturally.
The world of Final Fantasy XVI is wracked by endless wars between nations, so we inevitably had to include scenes of battle. And if a character doesn’t have any blood splatter on them after slashing someone with a sword, that ends up looking unnatural with modern graphical capabilities – which creates an even stronger sense of dissonance. I’m sure the series will continue to butt up against this question of depicting things realistically and naturally in the future as well.
The trailers we’ve been shown by Square-Enix so far certainly depict graphic moments of bloodshed, as well as other obvious triggers for ratings boards worldwide. While the franchise has typically dialed back the levels of violence over the years, Takai’s point about displaying the acts of violence more “realistically and naturally” is an important point of note. Numerous other pieces of fiction in recent years, from HBO’s Game Of Thrones to Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us, have put extremely graphic, but often still quite grounded acts of violence at the forefront of the experience to great effect. Square-Enix is choosing to follow that lead, and from all, we’ve seen so far, they seem to be doing so effectively.
