What does Final Fantasy XVI do that is something borrowed, and what did they do that is something new? In a new interview on the PlayStation Blog, producer Naoki Yoshida and director Hiroshi Takai explained where they are coming from.
And once again, they have to address the shift from turn based to real time action combat. The logic here is that after years of using the Active Time Battle system, it was the next step the franchise had to take after going halfway with Final Fantasy XV’s Active X Battle system. For Final Fantasy XV, the menu commands were moved to the face buttons, streamlining the way combat worked completely.
Naoki and Hiroshi also acknowledge that various other games have played around with combinations of menu and action gameplay. But cutting straight to the chase, they applied one old maxim when it came to making Final Fantasy XVI, that they applied to everything.
And that would be Hironobu Sakaguchi’s maxim; “Final Fantasy is what the director at the time thinks is best.”
Even if Square Enix had applied an internal ruleset that determined that Final Fantasy games would fit a particular aesthetic and game design, the truth is there are no tangible limits to what their developers can do with the game.
It does make one wonder if Naoki took a different tact here, and hesitated to bring the game in this direction. We may have seen a continuation of these hybrids of action and menu driven gameplay, but that would be ignoring the bigger picture of the industry outside Square Enix’s comfort zone.
The big talk of the industry is the pending release of Starfield, potentially another era defining game from Bethesda Game Studios. Bethesda themselves pushed RPGs forward for Western studios, so that they would create an even bigger market than even what Final Fantasy’s fiercely loyal fanbase can amass. We’re talking the likes of The Witcher, Dragon Age, Fallout, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, and so on.
Nobody is going to say that Square Enix is a small company, or that Final Fantasy is a small franchise. But clearly Square Enix is looking at how they can expand the fanbase for Final Fantasy beyond the loyal, older fanbase they already have. Naoki says as much in this interview.
In what is actually the tradition of the series, Naoki and the rest of Creative Unit 3 has chosen to change the combat design of Final Fantasy XVI. And now, we are about to find out if this will be the future of the Final Fantasy franchise, or something else.
Final Fantasy XVI will be released today, June 22, 2023, exclusively on the PlayStation 5.
