* This article is compiled from IGN Benelux related content, compiled by Tony Wang, unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.
With less than 4 months to go before Final Fantasy 16's official release, IGN Benelux had the opportunity to interview Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida, game director Hiroshi Takai, combat director Ryota Suzuki, and localization director Koji Fox. The following is the main content of this interview.
- The first question is for Yoshida P. Now that you have two of the most important Final Fantasy games in your hands, are you still the head of the development business or a board member, and what is your typical workday like?
Naoki Yoshida: I wake up at 8:30 and arrive at the office at 11. The next 8 to 9 hours are all about meetings in addition to meetings, whether it's about a project or something else. No time for lunch. These meetings are all about Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy 14, and the board, and these things add up to about 9 hours. Between meetings, I check emails and reply to them. By 10 p.m., the meeting was finally over. That's when I can really do my job, check the in-game data, look at the team's files, see what they think, and then save some time to play FF14 on my own. I finally got home at 3 a.m. I wish I could go to bed by 3:30 a.m. and repeat the process again. I'm sorry for nothing interesting, but that's my day.
- Your work on Final Fantasy 14 is an ongoing effort. And this game will be about 50~60 hours of story, is an epic experience with a beginning and an end. Do you need to learn new skills or something new to create an experience like this?
Naoki Yoshida: Like you said, Final Fantasy 14 is a game that is constantly updated. But each expansion has a story we want to tell, and we'll tell it through the expansion itself and the .x big update. Through these, we can get a complete story. But at the end of the story, we will add some plot or suspense that is connected to the next story. And in Final Fantasy 16, since we already have a beginning and an end, the suspense we build needs to be combined with the story we've already written.
That being said, we felt that we had enough stuff in Final Fantasy 16 that we could do that if we wanted to continue writing the game. Because I believe that our games will make players expect more content. So if you take that into account, there's really no difference in how these stories are written.
But I think one of the biggest differences is how compact and focused the story is. In Final Fantasy 14, you have more time and a wider world, and more things going on, so things can be spread out and less dense. The game's story experience is relatively short, and you'll get a lot of information in a shorter amount of time, which makes Clive's adventure feel even more compact.
- The last canon Final Fantasy also used an action-based combat system, but the combat part may not have received particularly good reviews. Why do you want to try again? What did you learn from Final Fantasy 15 as a company?
Hiroshi Takai: From my perspective, we didn't wait to see the results of 15 and then decide what to do 16. We didn't take that as a starting point.
The reason for the fully real-time action-based combat system is to expose as many players as possible to Final Fantasy 16. We felt that the command-based system would limit the number of players the game could attract. So we thought that by adopting a fully action-game-style combat system, we could bring in more players.
However, you may notice that in Final Fantasy 16 there is a skill called Phoenix Shift, which is a heroic trait that has a very similar effect to the displacement in Final Fantasy 15. This is a similarity that has existed since the beginning of our development. For a while we muttered, is it too similar to 15? What should we do about it? I had a discussion with the combat director. Is this a good idea? And then we thought, oh, of course that's a good idea, it's an attractive thing. It makes the battle more enjoyable, so we should keep it. But other than that, I don't think we used 16 in 15.
Ryota Suzuki: For Final Fantasy 16, I think our target audience is different from Final Fantasy 15. For us, we have three target groups, the first of which is a veteran of Final Fantasy, that is, fans of the series. The second is for action game enthusiasts. The third one is for hardcore action gamers who want to fully develop the combat system. We wanted to appeal to all three players and make a game that was acceptable to all groups. In order to achieve this goal, we felt that we could not learn from the experience of 15, because the goals of the two are not the same. We had to start from scratch.
Naoki Yoshida: We don't think Final Fantasy 15's combat system is bad. Our opinion is that this is a series that has been using command systems for a long time, and they took the first steps in a different direction. This is a good step. There are a lot of things that they have worked very hard to make and polish.
However, rather than fighting, I think the point where many players are dissatisfied with Final Fantasy 15 is the story. Basically, they enter the game thinking they're going to get a complete story, but then they find out it's not complete. Then they get a promise that they will complete the story through DLC. As a result, the DLC was canceled again, which left a very bad impression on everyone.
So if there's one lesson we've learned from 15, it's that we can't let Final Fantasy 16 repeat it. We made sure from the start that wasn't the case with the games we made. Make sure our games start and end so that players have a complete experience. So, if there's one thing we've learned from Final Fantasy 15, it's that we've learned its lessons.
Why is now the ideal time to focus on instant combat and accessibility? Why not 5-10 years ago?
Naoki Yoshida: That's a great answer: We were working on Final Fantasy 14 5 to 10 years ago.
But in general, as a producer, the answer I give may be different from the answer given by the game director. But from my perspective, before I started working on Final Fantasy 16, which was 5, 6, 7 years after I developed Final Fantasy 14, I was able to travel around the world and talk to fans around the world to find out how they felt about the Final Fantasy franchise and what they thought Final Fantasy was like. The more I talked to people, the more I realized that there was a stereotype of Final Fantasy – that it was a classic game, a JRPG, a Japanese art style, and it had hardcore fans, but it was hard for non-fans to get into its world.
Eventually, it went from a series that would entice everyone to buy as soon as it went on sale, to a series that only some people would buy and no one else would be interested in. What I want to do is reach out to those who have drifted away from Final Fantasy, and those who have grown up playing action games and FPS games, show them what the franchise is like, and lower the bar for it so that fans can see what they've missed and bring them back. Make Final Fantasy once again a game for all fans, not just a part of it.
Hiroshi Takai: As a player, when I play the games that are released now, I find that they all value direct feedback. You push the joystick and it starts moving immediately. You press a key and immediately swing your sword. The point is on the immediate satisfaction: the positive feedback you get directly after you give those instructions. When doing instruction-based games that require more waiting, today's games also allow players to get an immediate response.
However, you can't ignore players who don't want this action experience. They prefer a slower experience. So, after we decided on the route of real-time action, we thought, how can we make this game for these players to enjoy as well? We started thinking of ideas. Later, we brought in the Director of Combat and asked him to come up with ideas to turn those ideas into reality.
Ryota Suzuki: Personally, I don't hate turn-based games. I like turn-based games in my own right, and I think they embody the concept of combat in a very interesting way. I also know that there are a lot of people who really like them. But in my experience, there are also a lot of players who really like real-time action games, including myself. So in order to expand the audience of the Final Fantasy series, we knew that was the direction we had to go.
It's an option that I'm very much in favor of, so when I learned that I was going to make this kind of game, I could say, okay, I know exactly what you guys want. With my experience developing Devil May Cry and Dragon's Creed, I can understand what action game lovers think, and I know what they want. At the same time, I think I also understand players who don't like action games and know why they're afraid of those systems. With this in mind, it is possible to create a system that is acceptable to these players; Being able to create something that removes their fear by knowing what scares these players, knowing what will overwhelm them, is something I'm really trying to do in this game. I think we have also achieved that goal.
- I think the difference between turn-based and action-based combat is not just the speed of the battles, but also the emphasis on strategy and operational technique. Final Fantasy has always been known for its strategic, methodical combat. Did you take this into account in this Final Fantasy?
Ryota Suzuki: In a turn-based system, this strategic element is reflected in actual combat. I think in our system, since it's action-based combat, the tactical nature may be more in pre-battle preparation than in the battle itself. Before entering a specific level or facing a specific enemy, we have a fully customizable skill system. You'll think, we're going to fight these enemies here, we're going to get into such an environment. So there are some combinations of skills and souls that will work better in certain situations. But that doesn't mean you can't beat certain levels without using specific combinations. We don't want to be like that. But in some cases, this can make some levels a little easier. So, before entering the battle, players have the opportunity to stop, turn on skill customization, find the combination that best suits the subsequent battle, and strategize before entering the battle.
As you progress, there are a plethora of options, combinations, and combinations to use. Each one will give a very different feel, and each configuration will have a completely different feel from the other. So no matter what you use, it doesn't feel the same. When players test these complex, diverse combinations, this creates a sense of strategizing.
- Next is a question about PS5. In Final Fantasy 16, is there anything you want to do for many years, but you can't finally achieve until you have the computing power of the PS5?
Naoki Yoshida: I've been a fan of the series since I became a director or producer, but one thing I've always hated is that every time a new Final Fantasy game is announced, you put a very beautiful, pre-rendered CG trailer that makes you very excited, but after you enter the game, you can't do anything in the trailer, and that's when I feel a little cheated.
So when making this game, I didn't want to do that. I want the trailer to look exactly like the game you're actually playing.
Hiroshi Takai: For me, I've always wanted to create a truly seamless experience, from combat to cutscenes to exploration, all smoothly. Thanks to the memory size of the PS5 and the read and write speed of the SSD, this is finally something we can achieve.
This also extends to combat. Without such a large amount of memory, the complexity, fashion, and graphics of the battles would not reach this level.
Naoki Yoshida: If you only increase the size of the memory, there will still be a speed problem. So it was the combination of more memory and faster data transfer that allowed us to do this.
Ryota Suzuki: In games I've developed before, specifically Dragon's Creed, players have a four-player squad, and they fight at the same time. When designing battles, I always worry about whether there is enough memory. This time, there were Clive, Tolga, and two other team members on the screen, but I never worried about what could and could not be done in battle.
Takai Hiroshi: Despite what he said, our programmers have been complaining that Clive uses a lot of memory.
Naoki Yoshida: He's the protagonist, he has to be like this, right?
- Here's a question for Koji: I think Final Fantasy 14 was great at localizing, but one thing that is often talked about is the Shakespearean English used at the beginning of the game. And Final Fantasy 16 is set in an even older era. So what did you learn from Final Fantasy 14 when it comes to creating realism through language?
Michael-Christopher Koji Fox: At Final Fantasy 14, we basically thought that we wanted a lot like Game of Thrones. But at that time, only the novel version was released, so we used the novel as a reference. We wanted to imitate that style. George R.R. Martin uses a lot of old phrases to give it a very classical fantasy feel, and we wanted to emulate this in Final Fantasy 14.
But the problem is that they are very difficult for people who are not familiar with the language. So a lot of the feedback we received early in development was that a lot of people liked it very much, they really liked that style. But there are also many people who say, "It's too difficult to understand, what does this say?"
When I moved on to Final Fantasy 16, I heard that the goal was to get as many players as possible, so take that into account in terms of text. If we had Shakespeare's English, a lot of people would say, "Wow, that's great," and someone would say, "Can't understand what they're saying, that's stupid." I don't even want to touch it." We don't want to alienate these fans.
But by this time, the Game of Thrones TV series had aired, and they had shown that that language was now more accessible. Although compared to the novel, the degree of drama version is much less. Now it's more Hollywood, and the difficulty has been diluted a bit. So there is still a classical fantasy feel, but easier to understand. That's our goal: to still have a classical, fantastical temperament, but not to intimidate people. I think we're doing a good job in that. We also have that kind of Hollywood quips, but after entering the cutscene, we use very convincing language, which feels very real, very real, and has the temperament of a literary work.