Final Fantasy XVI Preview - An Interview With Naoki Yoshida On Eikons, Boss Fights, And When We'll See More - Game Informer

Square Enix debuted a new Final Fantasy XVI trailer during a recent PlayStation State of Play. It was our biggest look yet at the upcoming RPG and the trailer revealed that Final Fantasy XVI is due out sometime during the summer of next year. .

Game Informer spoke with the game’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, who is also the director of Final Fantasy XIV, about this new "Dominance" FFXVI trailer, including the franchise's return to a more medieval setting, Eikons, boss fights, and much more. ?

Game Informer: Final Fantasy has a history of experimenting with different combat systems in new mainline entries and Final Fantasy XVI seems to be doing the same, with probably the heaviest emphasis on action in the mainline series yet.

Naoki Yoshida: You asked me about the direction with the combat system and so to answer that, in order to contribute to the overall evolution of the Final Fantasy series, we decided that rather than building on past Final Fantasy battle systems, that we instead shift our focus to one of real-time action.

That said, we didn't want the screen cluttered and so after a lot of back and forth and trying a lot of different things, we came to the design…in the trailer, and that it just happens to look like a fighting game is just something that ended up happening. ?

For example, maybe one Eikon versus Eikon battle, if you have Eikon A versus Eikon B, that battle will be reminiscent of a 3D shooter.

And so again, we didn’t reuse these systems and each one of these Eikon versus Eikon battles is unique and will change with each battle.

GI: Mainline Final Fantasy games of late have skewed more toward modern timelines, with heavy emphasis on the integration of tech with magic, but FFXVI looks decidedly more medieval, or classic FF.

Yoshida: The answer to that is actually kind of simple: it just happens to be that a lot of the core members in [Creative Business Unit III] really enjoyed those classic Final Fantasies as well as that classic medieval European fantasy feel – myself included – and we wanted to create a game that had that feeling.

As you know, the Final Fantasy series is kind of famous, or infamous, for being different with each entry in the series.

That said, after doing some recent user research, we found that a lot of the users were finding that a lot of the recent Final Fantasy [games] were kind of becoming static in that vision so we wanted to use this as an opportunity to step back from that and try something different; not just for us, but thinking to the future of Final Fantasy and forthcoming projects, we wanted to try something different and maybe show that yeah, the series can go in different directions rather than focusing on one?

As you know, on Final Fantasy XIV, I’m both producer and director

Final Fantasy XVI being the newest entry in the series means that all eyes are going to be on us as everyone pretty much is out there scrambling to figure out just what kind of game it will be, and a lot of that pressure goes directly to the director

After that, read about how I’m excited for the Kaiju-style fights it appears to be giving us, and then check out Game Informer’s ranking of every mainline Final Fantasy game.