Brotaku

Square Enix has revealed new information about the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI during a global media tour for the game. The tour featured Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), the producer, Hiroshi Takai, the director, Ryota Suzuki, the combat lead, and Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, the localisation director.

Here’s a rundown of the new details:

• The main story for the game will take around 35 hours to complete. Doing a completionist playthrough will take between 70 and 80 hours.
• The game includes 11 hours of cutscenes. Transitions from cutscenes to gameplay will be seamless.
• The production value and voice acting budget are extremely high. The development team also prioritised visuals and world detail to best take advantage of the PlayStation 5 hardware.
• The story is focused on Clive but there is a great deal of lore about secondary characters.
• The game has a 60 fps performance mode and a 30 fps fidelity mode. The performance mode has a 4K variant and a frame rate variant.
• The game is designed so that even those that aren’t fans of action games will be able to enjoy it.
• The game has a practice arena that works similarly to those in fighting games.
• Ryota Suzuki, formerly of Capcom, was brought in to improve the gameplay aspect of Final Fantasy XVI.
• You can control summons during battle. The game will also dive into the lore of the summons.
• Eikon boss battles are unique, each was designed from scratch and is never repeated.
• Party members cannot be controlled. There will be a lot of banter between Clive and the party members throughout your adventure.
• You can pet Torgal (Clive’s dog). Torgal is also always in your party, regardless of who else is travelling with Clive. Clive can also command Torgal in battle.
• Valisthea is split into five main regions, each with its own nation and politics.
• The game is not open world, instead, the team have split it into large open areas that are rich in detail.
• The game has an “Action Focus” mode and a “Story Focus” mode. The Action Focus mode does not equip any of the assists in the game whilst the Story Focus mode equips them from the start of the game. You can customise the assists on each mode. These options will allow for players to create the experience they desire. Assists come in the form of rings and grant abilities like auto heal, auto evade, slowing time and single button combos.
• The game does not have difficulty options, the difficulty is instead determined by which assists you have enabled.
• A demo for the game will be available two weeks before the game releases.
• Yoshi-P has confirmed that the game is exclusive to the PlayStation 5 for six months but also claims that a PC version won’t be out in the six months after. Yoshida-san says that the team are focusing on fine-tuning the game for PS5 and that it would take quite some time to do the same for PC, the team are not ready to say when it will release as it will require quite a bit of work.

Final Fantasy XVI is due out on the 22nd of June 2023 for the PlayStation 5, Yoshi-dan san has also confirmed that he does not expect any delay unless an “act of God” prevents the team from doing work.