Final Fantasy 16 Is Rated Mature Because It’s More Realistic And Regulations Are Stricter
Final Fantasy XVI will be the first mainline-numbered Final Fantasy game with a Mature rating. The presumption might be that developer Creative Business Unit III wanted this game to have more violence to accompany its new action-heavy combat, but that’s not the case. The team put little thought into the rating – it just came naturally, according to various members of CBUIII I spoke to for our FFXVI cover story.
“We actually get this question kind of a lot – people ask us if the rating went up because [we] wanted to make a more violent game, and the answer to that is no,” producer Naoki Yoshida says. “On the outside, it doesn’t appear [the rating system] has changed. You still have your E, you still have your Teen, and you still have your Mature. The problem is that over the years, as more games have come out and as we move forward, the regulations within those have actually changed a lot.”
Yoshida says the team understands these ratings are ultimately meant to protect children from sensitive content, but it’s still more restrictive to what a studio can do in a game. He says before, studios could do “much, much more,” but now, “we’re finding ourselves not able to do as much to get the same rating we did before.” One example he gives is that it’s okay to kill a zombie violently today, but if that character is a human, you’ll push the rating more. Suppose someone’s getting pierced with an arrow, Yoshida says that will no longer be allowed with a Teen rating – it will immediately take you to the M rating “because it’s too realistic now” in instances where games are pushing for higher-fidelity visuals.
He also brings up the differences in rating systems between different world regions. Ultimately, though, CBUIII made the
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