Final Fantasy 16's Summons Brought The Series Back To Its High Fantasy Roots

gameinformer.com:

During a recent hands-on preview with Final Fantasy XVI (read my thoughts about it after playing two hours here), I was able to participate in a group interview of the game’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, its director, Hiroshi Takai, and its combat director, Ryota Suzuki. One question asked was about why the game returns to the series’ high fantasy roots, and why it has such a different tone compared to recent Final Fantasy games. 

According to Takai, it all started with summons. 

“So when the project started, I was one of the first people that [Yoshida] came to first and he said, ‘Okay, we have this project called Final Fantasy XVI. Will you be director?’ and his orders at the time of creating the game, he had this very big idea that he wanted to focus on the summons,” Takai says through a translator. “And not only on the summons, but have a system where the summons could fight other summons. And his other order was basically that the Final Fantasy series, its fanbase is getting older, and they’ve been with the series for a long time.

“We wanted to create a story and a narrative that resonated with the older fans, fans that have been around for a long time. And then finally, the third point was that we wanted to bring in more people into the series than just the standard series fans and the standard RPG fans. And to do that, make it into an action game, believing that would be able to get us that audience that we haven’t tried before.” 

Once those three main pillars were decided, Takai says it was then about getting together a small core group that would work on development for about a year to create these concepts. First came the story and the main scenario, which the team decided that to integrate Yoshida’s summon wishes