Why is Final Fantasy 16 an activity game? Its designers discuss

Image: Square Enix

Final Fantasy 16, the following entrance in Square Enix’s 35-year-old role-playing game franchise business, brings action-based gameplay to the forefront. The game’s real-time activity will likely be, at best, a change for some longtime Final Fantasy followers, also if the collection has actually been proceeding to this factor over several mainline games.

But Final Fantasy 16 manufacturer Naoki Yoshida has his factors for going all-in on activity, and also bringing previous Capcom developer Ryota Suzuki (Devil May Cry 5, Dragon’s Dogma) to Square Enix to understand the game’s vision. Clive Rosfield is basically FF16’s Dante, equipped with sword, spells, and also the sensational powers of traditional Final Fantasy summons, called Eikons.

Speaking to Yoshida, Suzuki, and also Final Fantasy 16 game supervisor Hiroshi Takai at a Final Fantasy 16 sneak peek in New York just recently, I asked the game’s designers why they made the option to accept activity.

“That was me, and I want to talk about why I made that decision,” Yoshida stated via a translator. “In my years working on Final Fantasy 14, before I started working on Final Fantasy 16, I have had the opportunity to travel around the world and talk with fans, players, and media from all around the world and get their views on not just FF14, but Final Fantasy as a series. From the feedback I got, it was turning out that people’s opinion of Final Fantasy, as a series, had started to solidify.”

Yoshida stated that strengthened photo was that “all Final Fantasies are going to be a JRPG, they’re going to have anime-type characters, it’s always going to be about teens saving the world, [and] it’s always going to be turn-based.”

“Not that these are bad things,” Yoshida proceeded. “We grew up with games like this. And we enjoy games like this. And we understand that there are a lot of players out there that enjoy games like this. But there are a lot of players out there that use those as reasons not to get into the series.”

Image: Square Enix

Yoshida stated that there’s a more youthful generation, elevated on first-person shooter games and also the Grand Theft Auto games, that take pleasure in the pleasure principle of activity games, and also think that a Final Fantasy game isn’t for them. That it’s “niche.”

“With Final Fantasy 16, we wanted to get as many players as we could,” Yoshida stated. “We wanted to bring back not just the fans of the series, but also players that had drifted away from the series.[…] And the one thing that we thought would be a great way to get a lot of those gamers to come back was to go down the road of action.”

Yoshida and also Takai stated that they created their very early action-focused take on Final Fantasy throughout 2 years, constructing a model where gamers would certainly battle 2 boss-type personalities. The model additionally consisted of a magnificent very early variation of an Eikon clash — a flashy, summon-versus-summon fight that appears like a 3D battling game.

“We submitted that to the board of directors and they approved our project,” Takai stated. “But then there was the problem: Now that we have this one, we have to create a bunch more of these Eikon-versus-Eikon battles, and also we have to create the Clive-versus-enemy battles. It can’t just be hard-coded, we need to have a system that’s going to work for all of the game.” Looking at the existing team accessible at the time, Takai stated, they recognized they didn’t have anybody with fantastic activity-game proficiency.

Image: Square Enix

Enter Ryota Suzuki, Final Fantasy 16 fight supervisor.

“At this time, I’d just finished working on Devil May Cry 5,” Suzuki remembered. “I’d been at Capcom for almost 20 years at this point, so I started thinking about my career moving forward. For those 20 years, I’d only worked on action games [and] fighting games. My skill set was very, very limited. I started to think, Well, I have this skill set that I spent my whole life building up. Does anyone need it? Is this going to translate to another company? Do people need me?”

Takai and also Suzuki recall conference via a shared buddy, and also the last asked if Square Enix was trying to find somebody with his specific abilities. Takai was silently delighted concerning the chance, however couldn’t inform Suzuki at that conference that they were intending on constructing an action-focused, Devil May Cry-instilled variation of Final Fantasy.

“We ended up hiring him,” Yoshida stated. “It was just perfect timing in so many ways that it can be nothing other than fate that he came at the time he did, fate that he has this 20 years of experience, which is exactly what we needed. We can tell you right now that without his help on [Final Fantasy 16], had he not joined the project, we wouldn’t be in here talking because we’d still be developing at least two more years.”

 

Source: Polygon