Final Fantasy 16's Characters Have British English Voices So American Players Don't Get Confused

thegamer.com:

Final Fantasy 16's characters speak in British English so that American players don't get confused.

When it was first revealed, there was a lot about Final Fantasy 16 that surprised longtime fans of the series, including its character action focus and seeming lack of party members. Another big change was that every character shown in the trailer spoke British English, something that has appeared in the series before, but not with every single character.

Related: Why Are Games Refusing To Learn From Final Fantasy 7 Remake?

In a recent interview with Dengeki Online that was translated by aitaikimochi, Yoshida spoke about why Final Fantasy 16 has decided to go with British English characters over a range of accents or instead of American accents. As it turns out, it's to make sure American players aren't confused if they're expecting British English characters from a medieval setting.

Yoshida said, "Even though the script is written in English, we made sure to not include any American accents," Yoshida said. "We decided to do this to prevent Americans from playing the game and getting mad and saying something like, 'I was looking forward to playing a game set in a fantasy Medieval Europe, but why are they speaking American English!?' To prevent this, we made sure that all the dialogue was recorded using British English."

Yoshida also gave a little more detail on the process behind casting and acting, "This time around, all characters motion capture and voices were done by European talent. However, since the script was written in Japanese first and made by Japanese staff, we had to translate it into English and then proceed with the English facial capture."

This isn't the first time that Yoshida has made reference to the