Final Fantasy 16 is an action game; producer Naoki Yoshida explains why

Final Fantasy 16, 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 16Producer Naoki Yoshida had his reasons to go all in on the action and bring Ryota, a former Capcom designer (Devil May Cry 5, Dragon’s Dogma) to Square Enix to realize the game’s vision. Clive Rosfield, essentially FF16’s Dante, armed with sword, spells, and the fantastical powers of classic Final Fantasy summons, called Eikons.

Yoshida, Suzuki and Final Fantasy 16Hiroshi Takai, game director 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 14Before I began working on it. Final Fantasy 16As a journalist, I’ve had the chance to visit all corners of the globe, talk with players, fans and media, get their perspectives on everything, not only the sport, but also the people who play it. FF14Final Fantasy is not a single 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. These games are what we love. It is clear that not all players enjoy this type of game. But there are a lot of players out there that use those as reasons not to get into the series.”

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Yoshida said that there’s a younger generation, raised on first-person shooter games and the Grand Theft Auto games, who enjoy the instant gratification of action games, and believe that a Final Fantasy game isn’t for them. That it’s “niche.”

“With Final Fantasy 16, we wanted to get as many players as we could,” Yoshida said. “We wanted to bring back not just the fans of the series, but also players that had drifted away from the series.[…] And the one thing that we thought would be a great way to get a lot of those gamers to come back was to go down the road of action.”

Yoshida & Takai claimed that the prototype they created for Final Fantasy’s early action-focused version took them two years to develop. The prototype allowed players to fight two boss-type characters. The prototype also included a spectacular early version of an Eikon clash — a showy, summon-versus-summon battle that looks like a 3D fighting game.

“We submitted that to the board of directors and they approved our project,” Takai said. “But then there was the problem: Now that we have this OneThis means that we need to add more Eikon-versus Eikon battles to the game, as well as create Clive-versus enemy battles. It can’t just be hard-coded, we need to have a system that’s going to work for all of the game.” Looking at the existing staff on hand at the time, Takai said, they realized they didn’t have anyone with great action-game expertise.

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Enter Ryota Suzuki, Final Fantasy 16 combat director.

“At this time, I’d just finished working on Devil May Cry 5,” Suzuki recalled. “I’d been at Capcom for almost 20 years at this point, so I started thinking about my career moving forward. For those 20 years, I’d only worked on action games [and] fighting games. I was not very skilled. Then I began to think. This skill set is something I’ve spent all my life building. Do you need it? Do you think this will translate into work for another company. Do people need me?”

Takai and Suzuki remember meeting via a mutual friend. The latter then asked Square Enix if they were looking for anyone with their particular talents. Takai was quietly thrilled about the opportunity, but couldn’t tell Suzuki at that meeting that they were planning on building an action-focused, Devil May Cry-infused version of Final Fantasy.

“We ended up hiring him,” Yoshida said. “It was just perfect timing in so many ways that it can be nothing other than fate that he came at the time he did, fate that he has this 20 years of experience, which is exactly what we needed. You can be sure that we would not have been able to do this without him. [Final Fantasy 16], had he not joined the project, we wouldn’t be in here talking because we’d still be developing at least two more years.”