While you may have read a fair bit about the return of a certain Japanese fantasy action-adventure game recently, another genre-defining, equally long-running Japanese RPG (JRPG) franchise is also poised to make a long-awaited comeback.
On June 22, Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 16 (or Final Fantasy XVI if you’re feeling proper) will arrive, seven years after Final Fantasy 15. And in the context of the overall Final Fantasy series, it’s a hugely important game.
That’s partly because it’s a series which, in recent years, has been in danger of upstaging itself. Final Fantasy 15, while perfectly serviceable, was in no way acclaimed as a classic instalment, unlike the remake of Final Fantasy 7 (the second episode of which is due in summer 2024).
So Final Fantasy 16 comes with a certain sense of responsibility – not least a mission to set the venerable franchise up for a gilded future in the modern gaming age, to match its revered past. In order to assess whether it could do that, we spent over four hours playing it (on the PlayStation 5) – and the resulting early indications are very promising indeed.
Final Fantasy 16
First impressions
Final Fantasy 16 marks something of a departure from the franchise’s previous instalments, with a more serious vibe and a markedly darker undertone. It still manages to feel authentically Final Fantasy though, and is clearly designed to set the franchise up for the future – we look forward to playing more of it soon.
Grittier and more medieval
One aspect of Final Fantasy 16 immediately stands out: it has avoided an obvious trap afflicting such long-running franchises, by refusing to pander to past instalments. It’s still recognisably a Final Fantasy game – the hair-modelling, for example, is often outrageous, magical crystals are once again key and there are plenty of chocobos. But even those chocobos have lost their faint air of ridiculousness – many are heavily armoured – and the general vibe is markedly different: grittier, and showing nods towards the likes of Game of Thrones and Elden Ring.
Square Enix
It opens with an unexpected on-rails action sequence, in which you control a giant phoenix battling with another fire-breathing titan – a sequence that would be revisited at greater length in due course. That set the general fantasy-forward tone, but felt slightly odd until we realised that a fair amount of scene-setting cut-scenes would inevitably follow in the game’s early stages. Final Fantasy 16 is set in a new world for the franchise – Valisthea – so has a distinct lore that must be established.
The initial scenes also jump between two time periods, and the character you play, Clive Rosfield, features in both. When Final Fantasy 16 properly gets going, you play as a 28-year-old, battle-hardened Clive (at one point going by the name Wyvern to hide his identity), but the key story-establishing scenes take place 13 years earlier, when a 15-year-old Clive, having established a reputation as a promising swordsman, must earn his spurs.
Square Enix
Clive is – not unusually for a Final Fantasy game – something of a blue-blood: his dad is the Archduke of the Grand Duchy of Rosaria, in Valisthea’s Storm continent. Rosaria is a pretty idyllic place – you could imagine the castle Clive was brought up in being run by the National Trust – but storm clouds are gathering. Valisthea is “Blessed in the light of Mothercrystals”, which keep away a creeping blight, but Rosaria has no such crystal of its own. As a result, it is preparing for a skirmish against the neighbouring Iron Kingdom, which has a Mothercrystal in territory Rosaria views as its own.
Safeguarding his Dominant brother
Initial bucolic scenes in Rosaria introduce various characters. Clive’s younger brother Joshua, although a sickly child, is the anointed heir to the Grand Duchy. This is because he is a so-called Dominant: a wielder of elemental fire power and able to transform into a giant Phoenix Eikon. Clive’s mother strangely seems to disdain him – for reasons that will become clear later in the game – and Clive, who has been imbued with some of Joshua’s Phoenix fire-magic, swears to protect his little brother.
Square Enix
However, treachery is in play, and after Rosaria’s fighting forces are terminally ambushed, Joshua must face another, unexpected fire Eikon (there is only supposed to be one of each element). He’s unprepared, never having properly wielded his power, but you get to play as him both pre and post-transformation.
Clive, left for dead after the battle, is conscripted into an elite unit of the army of neighbouring province Sanbreque, and vows to track down the mysterious Eikon who fought Joshua.
Easing into combat
As an interlude before that frenzy of exposition, Final Fantasy 16 introduces you to its combat system by sending Clive and two fellow soldiers on a tutorial-style mission, to rid a marshy area of Rosaria of monsters (which are mainly goblin-like, although there are some fairly untaxing bosses, too).
Beforehand, though, he must defeat his combat instructor, in a sequence which teaches you the bare-bones basics, and confirms that Final Fantasy 16 has finally expunged any franchise legacy of turn-based battling. Its combat system is fully real-time, and primarily melee based, although Clive can charge up various magic-enhanced special attacks too.
He can also parry and evade, and as he levels up, he acquires an array of new, increasingly spectacular abilities such as aerial and follow-up strikes, and the ability to launch himself off opponents.
Square Enix
Final Fantasy 16’s combat system feels spot-on: it’s fast, flowing and responsive, and gives you the sort of tools that can deal the bursts of spectacular damage that you would expect from a Final Fantasy game. Somehow, even though it has abandoned its turn-based element, it still manages to feel distinctively Final Fantasy, so should please most fans, bar the complete turn-based adherents.
Equipment, as ever, is vital, and a particularly significant new part of Clive’s combat array is the concept of rings – dubbed Timely Accessories by the game – which can be equipped to at least partially automate those combat tasks which you find least appealing.
During our play-through of Final Fantasy XVI’s first two chapters in their entirety, we acquired a Ring of Timely Strikes, which automated combo-chaining, a Ring of Timely Evasion, which brought a measure of auto-evasion, and a Ring of Timely Focus, which added a context-sensitive time-slowing element which, for example, bought extra time, in combination with on-screen prompts, for evasion when major strikes came in from enemies.
The net effect of those accessories was to make you feel like the most agile force on the battlefield, and there was power and magic to add, particularly when Clive started to level up – which he did frequently. We ended chapter two at level 13.
Staggering enemies so that you could deal a flurry of damage proved to be a key mechanic, too. Clive has a magic strike – an Eikon Ability – which powers up during battles and can be unleashed using the R2 button as a modifier.
There are also two other Eikon skills, which bring about different types of attacks, and while he begins (as explained in the story) with access to the fire Eikon Phoenix’s skills, he later becomes able to tap into other Eikons’ boxes of tricks.
Solo fighting but in a group
While Clive fights with others, he doesn’t directly control them – but there’s plenty of useful support on offer. In chapter two, the game flashes forward to the older Clive, fighting with a Sanbreque army unit which is basically gatecrashing someone else’s fight, and has been tasked with capturing an ice Dominant named Shiva.
Square Enix
Shiva – apologies for the spoiler, but it happens very early in the game – turns out to be Clive’s childhood friend Jill, so Clive feels unable to carry out his order to execute her.
At this point, a Final Fantasy hardy perennial, the character Cid, rescues the pair of them, and while Jill recovers in Cid’s hideout (a hub which is the source of various side-missions and home to an Arete Stone, which lets you hone your combat skills in a jeopardy-free environment and replay previous sequences), Clive embarks on his true mission – to avenge his brother Joshua by tracking down the second fire Dominant.
A faithful canine companion
Cid’s appearance reintroduces Clive to his dog, Torgal, who cutely appears as a puppy in Clive’s early teenage sequences. Except now, he has become a fighting support machine – he can auto-heal Clive when his health gets low, and has other canine skills, such as an ability to scout out hidden pathways.
Square Enix/Pocket-lint
His presence reinforces the feeling that, although in Final Fantasy 16 you only control Clive, you still have a group around you providing valuable backup. That’s an important factor in the way the game manages to make significant gameplay changes, yet retains its franchise identity.
Open-world sequences
After finishing Final Fantasy XVI’s second chapter – which involves navigating through a monster-infested forest in Cid’s company – we were given a brief glimpse of one of the game’s open-world areas. This time, Clive and Torgal have Jill for company, who mainly provides healing support as well as long-range ice-magic attacks.
Again, its gameplay felt like that of a Final Fantasy game, as we meandered through a lakeside map with a marshy shoreline, taking on monsters and picking up side-missions – including one from a merchant whose overturned cart was being menaced by wild chocobos.
Square Enix/Pocket-lint
Sky-high production values
Final Fantasy 16 will be a PlayStation 5 console exclusive, which looks like a wise decision when you bear in mind its impeccably high production values. It looks fantastic, contains some music that is destined to become iconic and serves up incredible attention to detail in its ambient sounds.
Production-wise, there’s no doubting that it is a very classy game indeed, and what we experienced of its story arc also impressed – although even four hours of preview play can never provide a solid impression of how well a game will hang together as a whole.
Square Enix
It will be fascinating to see what Final Fantasy fans make of it, since it is a departure, clearly designed to set the franchise up for the future. Its combat is certainly different, yet somehow still feels recognisably Final Fantasy, which is some achievement. And its vibe is definitely more serious than that of many previous instalments, with a markedly darker undertone and scant evidence of some more frivolous characters who featured in previous iterations.
Final Fantasy 16’s difference from its predecessors may alienate part of the franchise’s fan-base, especially those wedded to turn-based gameplay, but it should also attract it to new players, in particular those who enjoy Soulslike games.
Its developer, Square Enix’s wonderfully named Creative Business Unit III, should be commended for grasping the nettle and making a decisive break with the franchise’s creaking legacy, while still managing to preserve its identity.