final fantasy 16At the heart of the great battle, however, is the battle between the Eikons. Each has a different style and scope, though Yoshida says they all feel “like a pro wrestling match.” Although Clive is not your typical ruler, he transforms into Ifrit, a slightly sinister and mysterious Eikon during these battles.
The motivations of each Dominant and how their values and ambitions collide are at the heart of the game’s narrative. “We didn’t want this to be just a story about right and wrong, because we believe right and wrong is a very gray area,” Yoshida said. final fantasy 16 Darker and certainly bloodier than its predecessors. An early trailer for the game, for example, hinted at a savage ending for the innocent Joshua and his mop of sandy hair.
Oddly enough, though, the team’s venture into deeper narrative waters meant creating a dizzyingly white cast.In previous interviews, Yoshida has stated that the game is set in medieval Europe, and that due to those “geographical, technological, and geopolitical constraints,” the setting “will never be as realistically diverse as modern Earth… or even final fantasy 14”
According to Yoshida, the series has always been about “the conflict between those with power and those who are used and/or exploited by the privileged few… without triggering the audience’s preconceived Assigning unique races to antagonists or protagonists can be challenging, prompt unnecessary speculation, and, ultimately, controversy.”
However, this is undercut by Yoshia’s claim that the team wants players to focus “less on our characters’ physical appearance” and more on them being “people with complex and diverse natures, backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, and motivations.” anything. It’s a weird fantasy, and people of color can’t be portrayed in the same complex, nuanced ways as white characters in the world Square Enix has created itself. Despite the inclusion of people of color in Final Fantasy, they have yet to feature in the more complex stories the company hopes to achieve.
final fantasy 16 Not the only game in the series to receive a mature rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, but it is the first in its mainline series. Yoshida has previously said that ratings gave teams more creative freedom to explore heavy themes of their interest as regulations tightened. But it matters in a more practical sense. “It’s not like we wanted to go out of our way to create something violent,” Yoshida said. “We wanted to leave no stone unturned to create something that felt real.”
However, it’s not just about violence. One of the characters, Cid — a recurring series favorite who’s often portrayed as a tinkering engineer — is a heavy smoker who’s not for everyone or for teenage ratings. Even parties are censored. Imagine, Yoshida said: Everyone celebrating the win. They raised their glasses and filled them. “But if we want a juvenile rating, we have to tell the ESRB, ‘No, no, no, no,'” he said. “‘That’s not the wine, it’s the grape juice that everyone’s drinking after the fight.'”
The point is not to create a game that thrives on being gloomy or dirty. Square Enix leaned heavily on its grim image when showing off the game, but Yoshida says final fantasy 16 full of hope. However, from the demo, this is still hard to discern. Fighting at night in an enemy-strewn castle just to fight a brutal battle at its peak doesn’t inspire optimistic images. But to hear Yoshida say, it’s a commitment to personal growth — not too different from what he wants future developers to do with the series. “Whoever makes Final Fantasy XVIIprobably not us,” he said. The game, then, serves as a lesson for those upcoming creators.
