Final Fantasy 16 Is Built Around The PS5, Square “Blown Away” By SSD Speed

Hiroshi Takai of Square Enix Creative Unit 3 was interviewed about Final Fantasy 16  on the PlayStation Blog, and how it leverages the power of the PlayStation 5.

Let’s get it out of the way; this is what Takai said about the PlayStation 5’s capabilities:

“The two main things that struck me were the size of the memory and the speed of the SSD. I’ve worked with a lot of different hardware over the years, and many have failed to strike the right balance between the capabilities of the hardware and the size of the memory.

However, the PS5 is different—it comes with enough memory installed to take full advantage of the hardware. As for the SSD, as we were building the game, I was simply blown away by how fast it was.”

For those who aren’t aware, every PlayStation 5 comes with a default 16 GB GDDR6 RAM, and a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSD, with 825 GB capacity. The SSD can be updated, though of course the end user will need to do the due diligence to ensure that they get compatible SSDs.

Takai goes further that Creative Unit 3 pushed what they could do technologically to get fine details on their characters and environments, as well as lighting and shadow models. Add to this the impressive animations and visual effects you see in Final Fantasy 16’s battle scenes. These are memory heavy tasks, that are dependent on the RAM.

On the other hand, the SSD enables Square to program fast loading between those battles to graphics intensive cutscenes and back again.

Square Enix also leveraged the PlayStation 5’s unique capabilities, so of course Final Fantasy 16 makes use of the DualSense’s haptic sensors and adaptive triggers.

You use the adaptive triggers to feel the resistance when lifting portcullises, opening heavy doors, even riding Chocobos. Sounds were also adapted to provided some haptics, similar to the 3D effects you feel from IMAX or Dolby 3D. The DualSense’s haptics are capable of providing subtle vibrations, so they were particularly used in the more tense cutscenes.

These all sound very impressive, of course, but good gamers know that we are on the cusp of a generational shift for PCs as well. Many prebuilt gaming PCs could hypothetically run Final Fantasy 16 as well as the PlayStation 5 or even better. It will definitely be easy to build a DIY gaming PC for the task.

Of course, such PCs could conceivably be many times more expensive than a PlayStation 5, so when that expected PC port comes, most gamers may still choose to stick to their console. But it’s best to see Square Enix’s impressions of the PlayStation 5 to be indicative of the very real hardware shifts that have come with this current generation of consoles.

Final Fantasy 16 will be released on the PlayStation 5 on June 22, 2023. A PC port is also expected to be announced in the future.