Final Fantasy 16 devs on its combat: "We wanted it to be a gateway for players who aren't good at action games"

gamesradar.com:

With Final Fantasy 16, the development team at Square Enix is striving to deliver approachable action, grand cinematic battles that leverage the power of the PS5, and a story and setting that takes the series back to its high fantasy roots. With the shift away from the traditional turn-based systems to real-time action – which is partly born from the advances of new technology – Final Fantasy 16 uses what producer Naoki Yoshida describes as a "twin-tiered battle system", with two types of battles. 

The first sees you control Clive Rosfield and use the arsenal of abilities he channels from different summons known as Eikons. The second are large-scale battles in which Clive transforms into a huge Eikon himself, and faces off against another Eikon. From my hands-on time with the game, I got to see first-hand just how grand and cinematic the latter fights are, with multiple stages that seamlessly move into action-packed QTE sequences. As Yoshida-san explains, the idea of scaling up the battles in real-time was an ambition of his from the start. 

"My first order to the team, when deciding on how we're going to create the battles, I told them that we wanted these different levels of the battles," Yoshida-san says. "That you'd start off with Clive versus something that is the same size as him, and that would scale up to Clive versus a large boss. And then that would scale up to Clive versus an Eikon, and that would scale up as Eikon versus an Eikon. And you'd have this battle scaling, but all in real-time. And all seamlessly. And all in this really speedy sense that it's all in real time and you don't get any breaks in between."

"All of that kind of focuses around the concept of the Eikon, which is one of our central themes in