Embracing new systems and staying true to traditions, an interview with Final Fantasy XVI director & localization director

We the slimes from Nmia were honoured to be invited to the Final Fantasy XVI Global Media Tour that was recently held in Gangnam,South Korea!

We really loved the combat system, it was fluid and smooth, we believe that the battle system itself is already very convincing and gave us the urge to pre-order the game.
After testing out the game for ourselves, we took the opportunity for an interview with the game’s Director Hiroshi Takai and Localization Director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox!


Here’s a summary to the interview session:

Q: Basically, after I’ve experienced the story and combat, I think it is slightly easier than I’ve expected, so in all the quests and main storyline, are there any really challenging quests, or any mode for those intense players to go through?

A:  For those players that are looking for that extra challenge, as with the case of most final fantasy games, when you completed the game, you’ll have the option for new game plus, and the new game plus, in addition to the story focused mode and action focused mode, we have a final fantasy mode which has very high difficulty level for those action oriented players.

And in this Final Fantasy mode, it’s not just that the enemies are more difficult, or the difficulty is higher, we’ve actually changed the enemy placements, so the enemies is going to be in different places, with different enemies appearing than the first playthrough, so it’ll be a completely new experience as well as a challenging experience. In addition to that, we also have other side content that is geared towards those high level action gamer, which is even more difficult than the final fantasy mode, there’s a lot of stuff out there for those action gamers who are looking for a challenge.

Q:Who is your favourite character in FFXVI?

A: You’ve probably noticed we’ve released a lot of information about FFXVI across the past few months, but even with all these information that we’ve released, we haven’t been able to talk about my favourite character yet, so again, its easy to say,my favourite character is Clive, Clive has such a great story, the protagonist seeing his life, seeing how his changes, but you cannot help but to like Clive, but aside from Clive, my favourite character is a character that we have not introduced yet, and the character’s name is byron, i can’t tell you a lot about the character right now, but his relationship with Clive, his overall character, he’s a very happy and jolly character, and just the way that he carry himself is something that i can relate with, and i really love about that character.

Q:About the combat system, it’s different from the previous games in the series, what challenges did you face when designing it?

A:So, when we decided to go for the direction of full real time action, we wanted to make sure that the controls felt very natural and responsive, is that when you press the analog key, you’re going to move in that direction, when you press that button you’re gonna get the instant action, the attack, magic, these movements, attacks, spells, we call this the character control, and we wanted to make sure that these character controls felt very natural and human, and players can feel like they’re connected with the characters, and this was one of the most difficult things for us to do in the battle system.

And it requires adjusting everything down to every single frame, a lot of that work was done by our combat director Ryota Suzuki san who put in a lot of work. Creating this type of character control unfortunately in our games it doesn’t only mean doing that for Clive, but also our Eikon VS Eikon battles where you have different kinds of characters fighting each other, all of these is going to feel different, once we’re finished with Clive, it wasn’t about feeling finished, but more like, now we’re going to create this and that battle, and it all have to be unique, and it is a lot of extra work. 

So instead of creating one main character, we had to create these controls for multiple main characters, which is also a lot of extra work.

Q: There’s some lag and frame drops on the Quality mode, will this be fixed before launch? and based on discussion, performance mode seemed to make the game run 30 fps on exploration and 60 fps on combat, will there 60 fps in exploration as well?

A: as for that lag in the graphics mode, we’re really close on launch and there’s probably not enough time to address that by launch. That said, once the game is launched, we’re going to continue work on it and optimise it, and hopefully address it in a patch in the future.

As for the exploration 30fps and battle 60 fps, this is not something done internally by the system, During that performance mode, its basically raising the limit to 60fps, and that’s going to vary to what is happening in the game, as of why there is 60 fps in battle is because we spent more time optimising those battles. And again, one of the reasons you’re getting better fps on battle is because we’re doing special things to the battle, example the draw distance of objects, the lighting as well, things that players don’t focus on during battle, allows us to get better frame rates for those battles, which is why the frame rates is as such.

Q: Other than Clive, Jill is actually our fan favourite from our audiences, is there any design concept or inspiration from previous FF characters for Jill?

A: For the actual design of Jill, as you know, the main scenario writer, Maehiro-san worked for Heavensward for FFXIV, and one of the characters in that story, Ysayle, was a big inspiration for them, so when telling our character designer what he wanted to design Jill to be like as template,Ysayle from Final Fantasy XIV was mentioned. And from there, Kazuya Takahashi our character designer took that and created it into something that is original for Final Fantasy XVI

Q: The Final Fantasy series has a long history and a big fanbase, how does the development team approach the FFXVI with this in mind, and what method did you take to stay true to the franchise while also introducing new elements and ideas?

A: That’s a difficult question to answer, but we do believe that what we’ve created with Final Fantasy XVI feels very new, we followed the main concept or policy of the Final Fantasy series, The way that we created it is that, they are going to get that final fantasy feel that we worked hard that the game still feels like a final fantasy game, despite the fact that it is very new, and for those who have played the series for a long time to also feel like a final fantasy game. While a lot of things from Final fantasy are going to be changed and feel very new, for example like the battle system, for a lot of final fantasy fans, when they actually pick it up and play it, it may feel new, but they’ll still feel its like a final fantasy. and our biggest hope is to have something that feels new and also familiar, to bring the existing fans to the series and also something that is very modern and exciting for new fans as well, I think that we’ve been able to achieve that with FFXVI

Q:We have found a few things that are not safe for kids in the scenario, such as sexual content , why was that?

A: We didn’t go out of our way to show these types of extreme scenes, we didn’t put them in there because we wanted to put that in there, but we felt that it fit the story that we wanted to tell, and we didn’t want to avoid those things that we felt were necessary for the story. Yoshida has kinda mentioned the same thing in his interviews as well, but we have a story to tell, the kind of story that is based a lot on realism, a lot of us on the development team are old enough that the world isn’t a pretty place, and we wanted to show the reality of this world without hiding behind certain things and secreting things away. While we have the Mature Rating, but compared to younger kids 10 or 20 years ago, the kids now are way more matured than they are in the past, and know more about the world just as us older people nowadays, having that reality there is going to make both older and younger fans to really relate with. 

Q: Can you give us some details of side quests for the game, how long or short it is in the game, and what variety are they in? 

A: Regarding the side quest length, there are many types of side quests, some of them are short and easy to complete, while some are longer, some are one off quests, as well as multi part quests, where later parts will trigger in a longer span of time. Mentioning the side quest types, for the game, the side quest is more of a vehicle for story telling, and getting across more of the narrative and learning about the world. While these quests will give reward, its not really about the end reward, it’s more about learning about the world, the character, what’s driving them to give you a better overall view of the story and world. There’s going to be other ways of telling the story, whether that involves gathering, or to have combat, if that is part of the story, then it will be such. But in the end its less about what you’ve did, its more about learning the world and stories. But of course, for those who are into rewards, we also have the renown system, that increases as you clear quests, and with it you will get extra rewards, motivation beyond just learning the world to play the quests.  In addition to regular side quests, we also have unlock quests as well, for example, Clive will have his access to ride a chocobo through a certain quest, to learn more about why he got to ride the chocobo, and it is same for recipes as well, and they all tells a story, so its not about getting the rewards immediately, but to learn about the world and story as you do it. 

Q: Turn based games used to require a lot of resource management skills, so by working on a full real time action on FFXVI, which part of the resources or strategies do you reccommend players to focus on?

A: As you’ve mentioned, during turn based game there’s a lot of resources to juggle between, for our system, what we wanted to do is to get rid of those as many as possible, when making the decision to make the first full real time action final fantasy, we understand that it will be very overwhelming to many players, we didn’t want these players to be stepping into an action game for the first time to be juggling with all these things, to worry about cooldown timers and debuff timers etc, and more onto doing action. And so, you’ll have these players that are gonna be trying their best to get through these very difficult battles, its going to be difficult for them, because they’re not used to action games, and to have the long battle all the way to the end and all of a sudden to have no MP, and the player is gonna die, which will cause a lot of frustration, we didn’t want to have that frustration. We basically took all those different things to think about, and kind of focused it down, for most stages, the one thing that you’ll need to pay attention to is your HP, and using the potions and when to heal yourself. And during the battle, we’ll want players to focus on the cooldown timers, for the abilities, and to be trying to use that in a way to maximise the damage so that you will not have a lot of down time, when do you use certain abilities or limit break to make the best out of the combat.

We’ve made it so that you’ll be able to focus on one thing, to remove some of the burden for those players because of the action.

Q: May I ask if the Eikon is only available during the special battles or available in all battles?

A: Turning into the Eikon itself is limited to the Eikon battles, but being able to use the abilities of Eikons is available in any battle, but turning into it is not available in all content.

Q:While playing the beginning chapter, I’ve realised that the theme BGM was different. Does the soundtrack change according to Clive’s age or mood? And can you share some little story about Soken san’s composing?

A:When creating the music for FFXVI, it all started with Yoshida san with his idea and direction that he wanted the music to go, these large themes,  and then it is up to Soken san to create the music based on the main theme to bring the players and emotions into the cutscenes. And when Soken san and his team worked for the music, they always worked towards the end of the game, and the scenes are already created, its possible that what you’ve played back in february is different from now could be that because the team is still polishing on the music. For the Eikon vs Eikon battles, we would have an idea, the template and draft for the battle, once we have that down, we’ll go to the sound team, they will create the composition for the draft perfectly, then it goes back to the battle team adjusting it, and feedback is sent to the sound team to recreate the music many times, and every time that happened, Soken will get very angry at us and yell at us, and we’ll get into these fights, but in the end it worked out i guess.

Q: Will there be mini games in the game?

A: We don’t have the traditional minigames like fishing, but one thing that does is that we have these things in the world which is called the Chronoliths, standing stones that are scattered across the world, and by accessing these stones, it will pull Clive into this virtual world, where Clive is limited to the abilities of a single eikon to clear it, which is something like a mini game.