Even Final Fantasy 16’s developers couldn’t follow its story, so they made a tool to help

polygon.com:

One of the neatest features of Final Fantasy 16 is something called Active Time Lore. You can pause the game at any moment — even and especially during cutscenes — to bring this screen up with a click of the touchpad, and it gives you helpful little capsule bios of all the characters in a scene, plus notes on the location, the factions involved, any concepts the characters are discussing, and any jargon they’re using. It’s like the X-Ray feature on Amazon Prime Video that can tell you the name of a character actor that looks familiar, but for arcane video game lore.

It’s useful. It’s also quite necessary, because Final Fantasy 16 has a byzantine setting that confused even its own developers to begin with.

Final Fantasy 16’s world features multiple nation states with names like Waloed, Sanbreque, and Dhalmekia warring and jockeying for power. Each of these cultures takes a different approach to things like magic use, the giant Mothercrystals that tower over the land, and Dominants — humans who can summon and control the godlike Eikons that protect each kingdom.

It’s a lot, and Final Fantasy 16 chooses to throw players in at the deep end with all this stuff, rather than spell it out for them in exposition scenes. It’s a good choice for the momentum of the story, but it can be confusing.

This is intentional, producer Naoki Yoshida tells Polygon; at the time his team at Square Enix was making a start on the game, HBO’s Game of Thrones was at the peak of its popularity, and they wanted to create something similarly large-scale, detailed, and plot-heavy.

“It was always our objective to tell this kind of story, this sweeping, grand, epic story, with this massive ensemble cast — something that was very complex and intertwined,”