Final Fantasy 16’s Mature Rating “Allows Us to Tell the Story the Way We Want to Tell it”- Developer

gamingbolt.com:

Final Fantasy 16 has been rated M for Mature by the ESRB, which means it’s going to be the first mainline numbered in the instalment to launch with that rating. A darker, more grounded tone is something that the developers have put quite a bit of emphasis on in the lead-up to the action RPG’s launch, but what prompted the development team to move in what’s largely an unprecedented direction for the series?

According to producer Naoki Yoshida, it was simply a matter of not wanting to have to deal with the restrictions that a Teen rating would impose, especially from a storytelling perspective. Speaking in a recent interview with Game Informer, echoing similar statements from last year, Yoshida said that with a Mature rating, the development team was able to much more freely tell the story that it wanted to tell, and do it without any unnecessary restrictions that would cheapen its impact.

“We wanted to create something that was based in reality, that felt really real, and talk about complex and violent themes such as war,” he said. “You can’t have a war without certain imagery. Clive is in the trenches, he’s fighting for his life, he’s covered with dirt and blood. Once you start limiting that when you’re trying to create something that’s very real […], it takes the player out of the reality and makes it feel more like a game. That’s what we didn’t want to do. So rather than maintaining the Teen rating, which would have limited a lot of the things that we could do and [what we] show in cutscenes, the Mature rating allows us to tell the story that we wanted to in the way we want to tell it.

“We’re not going out of our way to create content that’s violent or sensationalist. We just wanted to create […] the story that we