With Final Fantasy XVI now just three months from its final release date, it’s no wonder Square Enix is ramping up the publicity surrounding the game.
More specifically, producer Naoki Yoshida recently spoke to the Japanese magazine Famitsu about the length of the game. Twitter user @aitaikmochi took it upon herself to translate the interview for English readers.
When the game development was just starting out, I had the idea in mind that gamers these days are really busy with other things, so I wanted them to be able to at least aim to complete the story. I thought making the game something you can complete in about 20 hours would make sense, but more and more just got packed in.
For this game, we really wanted the player to be able to experience the story from start to finish. If the story length was too long, then it might get tiring to play. That’s why we want Final Fantasy XVI to feel like a roller coaster experience where just when you think you can see the road ahead of you, you’re pulled into another direction.
As a result, the game is truly packed with story, battles, etc. that if you did not skip any cutscene, it’ll take about 35 hours for you to understand the meat of the story and complete the game. Now, if you want to master and level up all abilities, gather all accessories, do all the side quests, and fight all the monster hunts, you’re probably looking at about 70~80 hours of gameplay. Not only that, but we also included an insanely difficult New Game+ mode that allows you to carry over all your stats called the “Final Fantasy Mode.” That’ll probably add even more gameplay hours.
On top of that, Yoshida also mentioned the presence of online leaderboards where players will be able to compete, presumably for high scores and/or clearing times.
As previously confirmed by Square Enix, Final Fantasy XVI won’t be an open world, unlike Final Fantasy XV. Yoshida later went on record to say that it would have taken something like fifteen years to make this game with open world design.
The game will instead be more similar to the rebooted God of War titles, featuring large explorable areas and a similar split of action and roleplaying game elements.
Final Fantasy XVI will be released for PlayStation 5 on June 22. A PC version will likely come, but much later.
