Final Fantasy 16 is a slick, modern epic with the soul of a PS2 game

polygon.com:

That Square Enix wants to shake up mainline Final Fantasy games with Final Fantasy 16isn’t up for debate. Every Final Fantasy is a reinvention, of course, but few more so than this. It’s produced by Naoki Yoshida — the fixer who saved Final Fantasy 14 and turned it into one of the world’s hottest massively multiplayer games — with a remit to broaden the series’ appeal and turn these venerable role-playing games into a slick, modern action-adventure. In interviews, Yoshida and the other developers love to name-drop two titans of recent, hard-bitten, mass-market fantasy: Game of Thrones and God of War.

The risk is that, in the drive to keep Final Fantasy in the top echelon of global blockbusters, the series loses its identity. Some fans might be distressed to learn it has transitioned from a party-based RPG into, essentially, a single-character action game (albeit a very refined one). Others might have qualms about Final Fantasy characters getting spattered in gore or screaming “I’ll fucking kill you!” at the top of their lungs.

These two things happen within a single scene, early in the game. They certainly raised my eyebrows when I played through Final Fantasy 16’s opening hours at a recent London press event. But as much of a departure as Final Fantasy 16 might seem to be — and despite its self-conscious edginess — it’s undeniably a Final Fantasy game at heart. It has the summons, the Chocobos and the Moogles, the crystals and the Aether, but more than those things, it has the spirit: earnest, grandiose, a little bit emo, but with a generous sprinkling of charming goofiness. Yoshida insists that the game comes from the heart, not from a corporate mandate for change: “For us, it was about: Let’s just make what we love