Final Fantasy 16: How Square Enix Balances So Many Different Combat Experiences In One Game

After previewing Final Fantasy XVI for roughly two hours, which you can read about here, I’m left most interested in the different styles of combat happening throughout the game. Clive uses his Devil May Cry-esque fighting style, with party members being controlled by A.I. up the ante, Clive’s dog Torgal can attack enemies, Clive can fight Eikons, and there are even Eikon vs. Eikon fights. It’s a lot for one game to juggle, and after my relatively short preview, I feel that the team is confident in this balancing act. 

To find out more I asked Naoki Yashida, Hiroshi Takai director, and Ryota Suki combat director, how their team handles so many combat scenarios. 

“With regular Clive battles…this is the type of battle that players are going to be experiencing the most, and you spend most of the time controlling Clive,” Suzuki tells me. “You’re going to be playing this style of combat for the longest, and so through these battles, your character is going to be leveling up, and as you level up, the type of actions that you have will increase, and you’ll be able to upgrade those and get new ones.” 

Clive can access various Eikon abilities, including the Phoenix and Titan. This is just five hours after my preview. Clive can at any point press Circle to activate special Eikon abilities. The Phoenix’s Circle ability lets Clive dash-teleport to an enemy in a fiery blaze, whereas the Titan’s saw Clive summon a small rock shield on his forearm capable of blocking most incoming attacks for a short duration.

You can also equip each Eikonic ability wheels with two additional special abilities. After using the large AOE fire strikes of Phoenix, I could quickly shift my Titan wheel to access two other abilities. Clive’s abilities enable him to summon large rocks hammers that do devastating melee damage. Additionally, you can release the button during a swing for additional damage. It’s fast and slick, and switching between the wheels feels great. 

Suzuki says that Creative Business Unit III needed something easy to use and accessible for longer periods. And he says it’s a nice touch that each of the special abilities speaks to the larger narrative going on. I asked the team if Clive, who is not a Dominant, meaning he cannot transform into an Eikon, is collecting Eikons in a Pokémon-esque way or if he’s outright becoming them, like a Dominant. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t get much by way of an answer. 

“Clive is not a Dominant, so he shouldn’t have these powers,” Yoshida tells me. “Going through the story, we will find how Clive comes across his powers and makes them his own. But again, because that is so closely tied to the narrative, by telling you any more right now, we’d be giving away spoilers.”

On top of Clive’s combat, which is completely under your control, his dog Torgal (yes, you can pet Torgal) can attack enemies as well. You can manually assign his attacks to enemies or equip a new accessibility-related accessory, the Ring of Timely Assistance (more on that here), to have Torpal attack automatically. Party members will join Clive from time to time – Cidolfus Telamon (there’s always a Cid) joined me during my preview, utilizing Ramuh’s lightning abilities in combat – but they will always be controlled by AI, according to Yoshida. 

Clive will be fighting both standard enemies and bosses in the way I described above, but he’ll also have to fight Eikons, too. As Clive, I faced Garuda in Final Fantasy. It was cinematic and flashy, but it was one of the most tedious combat scenarios I have ever seen. I was just button-mashing, trying to get at the larger boss. The fight progressed when cinematic buttons prompts were shown on screen. Eikon vs. Eikon was significantly more exciting. 

Clive, as Ifrit Against Garuda was the name I took on, was controlled by me. My full FFXVI preview contains more details. The team was able to explain how they approached combat situations. 

“Eikon vs. Eikon battles come at pivotal moments during the story, and are tied directly to the story,” Takai says. “We had to create them around those story beats. We had the same ideas we used to create them. Clive and the Eikon would meet at this point, so we knew this would require them to use these kinds of actions in battle. And so once we knew that we had a template…to hand over to Suzuki-san, and they could create a battle around that.”

Yoshida claims that the Ifrit-vs. Garuda fight I witnessed is early in the game. 

“Clive is still kind of getting used to using an Eikon,” he says. “That’s why it has that certain feel; it feels like he’s getting used to it, and this ties directly into the story. The story moves forward and the characters feel more comfortable. [Eikons] controlling quite differently.”

Yoshida says the guiding principle with Eikon combat is that players are always going to “get something that feels like it really, really fits the narrative as well as the battle itself,” stating it should always feel “awesome.”