Final Fantasy 16’s director has a wish that we are sure the game’s fans now also share.
While it may seem nowadays that anything Final Fantasy-related was made by Naoki Yoshida, he served as producer for Final Fantasy 16. It was actually Hiroshi Takai who served as director on the adventures of Clive Rosfield and his friends.
Takai had previously directed The Last Remnant, but spent the past decade working with Yoshida as assistant director and development supervisor on the many updates that fixed and redeemed Final Fantasy XIV Online.
That’s put Takai in a unique position. He was very much ready to direct games for Square Enix fifteen years ago, and only very recently had the opportunity to prove his mettle in that position once again.
As we well know, Final Fantasy 16 launched as one of Square Enix’s PlayStation 5 exclusives, and alongside Final Fantasy 7 Rebrith and Foamstars, were cited to have performed well below expectations. Yesterday, Square Enix finally announced that Final Fantasy 16 was coming to Steam and Epic Game Store. The standard version is coming at a considerably reduced price of $ 50, while it is bundled with both DLCs for $ 70.
As bittersweet as it all is, it’s still a great occasion for Square Enix fans on PC, and a great deal for them. But now, the question arises if Square Enix will bring the game to even more platforms after this.
While we will have to wait and see if it’s even feasible to bring Final Fantasy 16 to Nintendo’s next console, the natural question here and now is if it can come to Xbox.
Jez Corden had the opportunity to interview Takai for Windows Central, and capped things off with this very question. Here’s what Takai said:
“We’re taking one thing at a time right now, so I can’t reveal anything about our future plans. All I can say is, it’s something I would personally like to see happen!”
So, we don’t get a commitment on Xbox Series X or Series S, at least for now. While Square Enix talked a lot about optimizing the PlayStation 5’s SSD for this game, it seems that they can scale the game back for other platforms. As Takai explained, this is exactly what they had to do for this PC version.
It may simply be the case that it took a gargantuan effort Takai’s team took to make what was previously a platform exclusive now playable on different configurations. They may not have yet worked on this possible Xbox port, or for that matter, a Switch 2 port. Hopefully, they will find that all this work for PC compatibility makes their job to port for other consoles much easier and cheaper, so that they’ll just go ahead and do it.
