Creating The Look Of Final Fantasy 16
Final Fantasy art is some of my favorite in all of games. The series' visuals fall somewhere between realism and fantasy, and it’s always fun to see how Square Enix studios leverage more powerful hardware to bring worlds to life. These settings, characters, and monsters are memorable, and a large reason for that is the art. It’s striking and unique – you know it’s Final Fantasy when you see it.
With each new Final Fantasy, Square Enix has a chance to solidify characters and worlds into the zeitgeist of gaming, like the company has done in the past with Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud Strife, Final Fantasy X’s Zanarkand, and more. During my cover story trip to Square Enix’s Tokyo, Japan, offices, I spoke to Final Fantasy XVI art director Hiroshi Minagawa about how developer Creative Business Unit III went about creating the game’s visual style.
“Like other members on the Final Fantasy XVI team, I was also working on [Final Fantasy XIV] when I was asked to come over to Final Fantasy XVI,” Minagawa tells me. “I got that call very, very early in the development process. Very early in that process, I was able to speak a lot with [FFXVI director Hiroshi Takai] about what type of world it was going to be, what type of flavor the world is going to be, and be a part of that creative process there.”
He says he approached art direction quite differently from his work on FFXIV because, with FFXIV being an MMO, the team focuses graphical quality on displaying lots of different things on screen. With FFXVI being an offline single-player experience, “the graphics have to be at a higher level, and they have to be deeper and richer in that sense.”
Minagawa worked with the CBUIII team to emphasize the difference in focus on visuals between
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