An Interview With The Developers of Final Fantasy XVI

While the bulk of my recent time with Final Fantasy 16 was spent in a combat-heavy demo, as this represented the brunt of what the team said they wanted to focus on to begin with, I also got the opportunity to pick the brains of some of the game’s key developers. As part of a lengthy roundtable interview with a few other journalists, I was able speak to Naoki Yoshida (FF16’s producer), Hiroshi Takai (FF16’s main director), Ryota Suzuki (FF16’s combat director), and Michael-Christopher Koji Fox (FF16’s localization director) and unpack various other aspects of the game, like lead character Clive Rosefield, his motivations for revenge and the wider world around him, and rethinking Final Fantasy’s approach to combat, which helped me wrap my head around an FF title that feels jarringly distinct, if promising, next to the rest of it’s lineage.

Clive, for example, is a more tragic protagonist than usual, even if the trope is a familiar one in the series. He’s hellbent on revenge for his younger brother Joshua, and unlike other protagonists whose tragic backstories tend to unfold over time and in the background, we will get to experience his firsthand. “When you start Final Fantasy 16, you’ll start with Clive in his twenties and you’ll play just a little bit, and then you will have this flashback where he goes back in time to and, and remembers, when he was in his teens,” Yoshida explained. “It’s not just a flashback that you watch…It’s about a two to three hour long section of the game where you go back and see Clive in his teens…You see him with his loving brother and his gentle father and his strict mother, and you see what happens exactly.” It’s a different approach, clearly meant to bring players more fully into Clive’s decades-long journey and one that, by my measure, realizes it needs to approach its theme of an intense and personal revenge from a place of empathy. It’s such an important part to onboarding players to the game that, according to Yoshida, we’ll only hit the game’s title screen after we’ve gotten through this prologue.

However, while revenge has thus far played a big part in motivating Clive—and has informed much of the marketing of the game to this point—the team were clear that Clive only begins in this place. “While Clive is driven by revenge at that first point in the game, it’s through his journey and meeting a lot of different people that he learns to open up a little bit and he starts changing this for you. For example, we mentioned his relationship with Cid: he meets up with Cid, and Cid pretty much helps Clive open his eyes to the rest of the world,” Yoshida shared. Following Clive for decades then becomes a very intentional conceit for the team, who say that this allowed for Clive to more naturally grow from a person fixed on revenge to someone who is receptive to the larger issues around him and uses his own cause as fuel to aid others. Clive’s eyes opening up to the world around him will take him down from his position on the royal guard of the Duchy of Rosaria and place him alongside the people who have to sort through the refuse of FF16’s conflict. As Takai put it, “You will have the nobles, you have the people in power, but then you also have the regular people in the towns. You have the downtrodden and those that have been oppressed as well…These people that don’t know if they can rise up or maybe never even thought about rising up, but then helping them see the world as [Clive] is seeing the world.”

Valisthea is after all a complex series of nations, each with their own goals and methods of ascertaining them. It’s a realm being ripped asunder as a result of “losing its aether,” which causes it to collapse in on itself, turning to war over these mothercrystals, which various nations have and the team has likened to oil fields. At one point near the end of our interview, Yoshida sheepishly copped to being influenced by Game of Thrones (more the books, rather than the show), a fact pretty plainly evident in the breakdown of Valisthea and its various governments and ruling families. The premise of each of these ruling bodies having their own deities they can summon as weapons of mass destruction mirrors a similar plot line that runs through much of the early stretch of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, a parallel drawn by Yoshida, who himself has ushered the once-troubled MMO since its relaunch. Yoshida, reflecting on the moral complexities of the Cold War-ish setting FF16 starts in, told us, “I like a fantasy story that feels like it’s real…There are bad things in the world, but it’s because there are bad things that there are good things. And because there are good things that there are bad things; Those things both feed off each other. And rather than just focusing on one and ignoring the other, we want to see the whole picture because that is what makes it feel real. And so I want that in my story.”

With a bit more clarity on the events of FF16, we moved onto the other large manner in which the game has stood apart: its lean into full on action, aided by Suzuki, whose credits include Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon’s Dogma. When I asked about the game’s shift to action reminiscent of western games, I was partially rebuffed by Yoshida, who claimed that while it certainly does appeal to audiences outside of Japan, he’s noticed that younger Japanese players who grew up with action-RPGS are also clamoring for something like FF16. The team broadly spoke about this change in priorities for their core audience, who would rather play something instantly engaging rather than a title that felt slow. “I mean, rather than playing a slow turn-based game, they’d rather go play Apex Legends,” said Yoshida. In order to grow, the game simply needed to be something different. Takai and Suzuki both echoed this, while also noting that they needed to find a healthy balance between something fresh—potentially even challenging—but not alienating. To further motivate the change, Takai noted that his experience with turn-based games offered up a bit of a revelation that made it all the easier to swing in a different direction. “The other thing with turn-based [gameplay] is that I’ve noticed that players in a lot of different regions like different types of turn-based controls. And so when creating a turn-based control, you create it in one way, then you’re going to maybe not please players that want their turn base in a different manner. But when it comes to action, I think that that’s something that’s more general. If you create an action game, you don’t have to create it for one type of group, you’re creating it for the whole world. And so it’s easier to create a great action game that’s appealing to everyone than a turn-based game that’s appealing to everyone.”