Why is Final Fantasy 16 an action game? Its creators explain
Final Fantasy16, the next entry in Square Enix’s 35-year-old role-playing game franchise, brings action-based gameplay to the forefront. The game’s real-time action will likely be, at best, an adjustment for some longtime Final Fantasy fans, even if the series has been progressing to this point over multiple mainline games.
But Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has his reasons for going all-in on action, and bringing former Capcom designer Ryota Suzuki (Devil May Cry5, Dragon’s Dogma) to Square Enix to realize the game’s vision. Clive Rosfield is essentially FF16’s Dante, armed with sword, spells, and the fantastical powers of classic Final Fantasy summons, called Eikons.
Speaking to Yoshida, Suzuki, and Final Fantasy 16 game director Hiroshi Takai at a Final Fantasy 16 preview in New York recently, I asked the game’s creators why they made the choice to embrace action.
“That was me, and I want to talk about why I made that decision,” Yoshida said through a translator. “In my years working on Final Fantasy 14, before I started working on Final Fantasy 16, I have had the opportunity to travel around the world and talk with fans, players, and media from all around the world and get their views on not just FF14, but Final Fantasy as a series. From the feedback I got, it was turning out that people’s opinion of Final Fantasy, as a series, had started to solidify.”
Yoshida said that solidified image was that “all Final Fantasies are going to be a JRPG, they’re going to have anime-type characters, it’s always going to be about teens saving the world, [and] it’s always going to be turn-based.”
“Not that these are bad things,” Yoshida continued. “We grew up with games like this. And we enjoy games like this. And we
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