Final Fantasy XVI: all the latest on the darkest FF yet

On Friday morning, Sony released a system update for the PlayStation 5 that may help with graphical bugs and crashes reported by Final Fantasy XVI players after the last PS5 firmware update.

Sony says today’s update (version 24.06-10.01.00) simply improves “system software performance and stability” and doesn’t mention any specific fixes for the game. But a post shared on the official Final Fantasy XVI X account earlier today says it’s been released “in response to the crashes and graphical bugs” reported by players.

Final Fantasy XVI is out today on PC, and its producer is asking players to be chill about it. In an interview with PC Gamer, Naoki Yoshida has woefully underestimated the collective horniness of the internet by requesting that fans not create mods for the game that are “offensive or inappropriate.”

Good luck with that one, buddy.

Square Enix has finally shared a release date for the PC version of Final Fantasy XVI: September 17th, 2024. The single-player RPG first launched on PS5 in June 2023, with two DLC chapters following in December (Echoes of the Fallen) and April (The Rising Tide).

You can now preorder Final Fantasy XVI on Steam and the Epic Games Store, and there are complete editions that include both DLCs available for preorder, too. You can also check out a demo for the game from both stores, and your progress from the part of the demo that covers the opening section of the game will transfer to the full version.

Yesterday, Square Enix released a trailer for The Rising Tide, the next paid DLC for Final Fantasy XVI, and gave the expansion a release date: April 18th. The update to the PS5 game will be available as a single purchase add-on or in the $24.99 Final Fantasy XVI PlayStation Store Expansion Pass. And besides adding the eikon Leviathan to the game, other content introduces a game mode as well as new weapons and abilities.

For no good reason, I haven’t played a new Final Fantasy game in years, but I trust Ash Parrish’s conclusion that the Leviathan being missing has been an error in need of correction. PlayStation’s blog post says in addition to fighting it in a new boss fight, Clive will get Leviathan Eikonic abilities, including summoning “a sea-spitting serpent capable of dealing precision strikes to enemies at great distances” and the ability to flood baddies “both near and far with the terrible might of the Eikon of Water.”

Ralph Ineson is 2023’s video game “it” guy. The English actor, who’s made a sizable career out of supporting roles across television and film, managed to nab leading roles in two of this year’s biggest games, Diablo IV and Final Fantasy XVI.

The games released within two weeks of each other, and Ineson is front and center for both of them, playing the gravelly voiced Lorath in Diablo IV and the equally gravelly voiced Cid in Final Fantasy XVI. Eagle-eared listeners noticed the overlap immediately, wondering how he managed to score roles in back-to-back summer gaming blockbusters.

With Final Fantasy XVI’s new, action-focused combat scheme comes a new suite of tools that assist with making that combat easier. These tools were billed as the game’s accessibility features but weren’t tied to a menu setting; rather, they were special rings you could equip that were already in your inventory at the game’s start. When equipped, each of the five rings assisted with one facet of the game’s combat.

I loved this approach to Final Fantasy’s combat. Though the series hasn’t featured turn-based combat since Final Fantasy X, a lot of players — myself included — have been slow to adjust to the series’ action-RPG pivot. These rings, then, feel like not only an assistive tool to help players with different levels of abilities but also a way to ease in folks who want to play Final Fantasy but can’t quite manage the breakneck pace of the game’s combat.

Early in Final Fantasy XVI’s marketing cycle, producer Naoki Yoshida was asked about the apparent lack of inclusion of people of color in the game. His answer wasn’t great, essentially stating that including people of color would violate the narrative boundaries established by the fantasy world the developers created.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to follow up with Yoshida about that answer, asking him if he had the opportunity to hear the response to his words and if he had anything to say to the fans of color that he upset with them.

It’s no secret that Game of Thrones has been a major influence on Final Fantasy XVI — the developers have said as much. “When we first started creating the game, we had our core team of about 30 members very early on buy the Blu-ray boxset of Game of Thrones and required everyone to watch it, because we wanted this type of feel,” producer Naoki Yoshida told Eurogamer earlier this year.

And man, does it show.

Final Fantasy XVI, out today, is stuffed with neat little homages and references to the Final Fantasy games that came before it. One of the game’s menus features sprites of Clive, Jill, Torgal, or whoever else is in your party if you’re nostalgic for the old pixel art from the game’s early days on the NES. When you speak to Harpocrates and have acquired enough lore, the old victory fanfare plays. But there’s one homage that’s more likely to inspire fear than warm fuzzy feelings.

Red Comet is back, and he wants his revenge.

I am a person who often struggles with vast, world-spanning fantasy stories. I just can’t keep track of all of the people and places and other proper nouns that make up the world. The result is that I spend a lot of time reading wikis to help me get through things like The Lord of the Rings or The Witcher — but that’s not very helpful in the moment when I’m watching a pivotal scene unfold. But Final Fantasy XVI, which just launched on the PS5, has a helpful tool to make it a whole lot easier to follow its complex tale.

The feature is called Active Time Lore — a nice play on the Active Time Battle combat system of past games — and it’s sort of like the X-Ray tool offered by Amazon Prime Video, only for a video game. It works like this: at any time during a cutscene, you can pause and hit the touchpad, bringing up a web of all the important characters, locations, and events related to the current scene. So if you have no idea who, say, Ramuh is or the importance of The Kingdom of Waloed, you can get a brief refresher.

There’s a moment within the first quarter of Final Fantasy XVI in which Clive, the protagonist, faces an enemy that has withstood his strongest attacks. Beaten and worn out, the game prompts Clive to “accept the truth.” As he does, two limit-break bars (ones that Final Fantasy XIV players will recognize) appear. But they don’t just pop in as though the game was merely updating its UI to introduce a new feature — they burn on as though they’ve been branded onto the screen with a hot poker. It feels like the game wants you, too, to feel the flames that burn within Clive as you press in the thumbsticks to make him go Final Fantasy Super Saiyan.

I almost destroyed my TV, losing my grip on my controller as I pumped my fist into the air with an excited, “Oh f– yeah,” battle cry. That battle cry happened a lot.

Not to be outdone by Tears of the Kingdom in the summer video game blockbuster hype generation category, Final Fantasy XVI got its own State of Play, showcasing over 20 minutes of gameplay.

Final Fantasy XVI is a beautiful game, both within the cutscenes and gameplay. The combat looked slick and exciting. Clive flipped, dipped, and parried with a satisfying flourish, perfectly in line with the developers’ stated goal of making Final Fantasy XVI feel like a “high-speed rollercoaster.” The presentation went into detail on some of the smaller activities Clive can get up to when he’s not saving the world or doing whatever it is Clive does, as we’re not quite sure what his motivation is yet. Knowing the typical cadence of Final Fantasy stories, it’ll start out small, like “head to the village” and eventually end with “kill god.” There are hunts he can complete and what looks to be a wealth of sidequests. We haven’t seen any mini-games yet, but here’s hoping a version of Final Fantasy’s greatest card game, Triple Triad, will appear in some shape or form.

When Naoki Yoshida, producer of Final Fantasy XVI, was doing the first round of press tours to ramp up hype for the game last year, he gave an interview with IGN talking about the game’s apparent lack of diversity. When asked if players can expect characters of color in the game, Yoshida had this to say:

Essentially, Yoshida said that because they’re basing the world of Valisthea on their idea of what the European continent was like in the past, the cast for their totally made-up world has to be all white. The quote was a rare miss from a generally well-liked developer, and it naturally upset fans of color.

There’s a lot riding on Final Fantasy XVI. Its predecessor, Final Fantasy XV, didn’t do so hot, critically speaking. And with FFXVI, the team at Square Enix is trying to right the ship by making a Final Fantasy that has a broader appeal.

To do that, the development team nixed some elements that have become synonymous with Final Fantasy. The static, turn-based combat system is out, in favor of a more fluid, action-oriented system filled with swift and flashy melee strikes, powerful and splashy-looking spells, and acrobatic dodging.

To cap-off the barrage of announcements and trailers unleashed during The Game Awards was a new trailer and release date for the latest single-player installment of the Final Fantasy series. Game director Naoki Yoshida made his first ever appearance at The Game Awards to present Final Fantasy XVI’s newest trailer and shared the game’s release date — June 22nd.

The Revenge trailer was very short but very bloody, revisiting one of the first moments of Final Fantasy XVI fans got to see. Because of all the blood, the trailer’s been slapped with a content warning meaning you’ll have to go to YouTube to watch.

A slightly embarrassing leak from IGN Southeast Asia tipped fans off that a new Final Fantasy XVI trailer might be dropping today, and here it is. The four-minute-long trailer titled “Ambition” doesn’t reveal too much new information regarding the next entry in the 35-year-old series, but hot damn, does it look cool. It is bloodier than your typical Final Fantasy fare, so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube.

The trailer is essentially a lore dump, priming fans with all the proper noun information on the peoples, places, and things we’ll see yet won’t remember until well into the game’s hopefully 60-plus hour runtime. (A girl can hope, right?) The trailer retreads most of the same information shared in The Verge’s interview with game director Naoki Yoshida earlier in the year.

The thing Naoki Yoshida is most excited about in Final Fantasy XVI is the eikon battles.

In speaking to The Verge, Yoshida, the game’s director, talked about how earth-shattering, knock-down, drag-out fights between some of the franchise’s most prominent and popular monsters featured heavily in this latest single-player, non-remake entry in the 35-year-old JRPG series.

Yesterday, Sony and Square Enix blessed us with the biggest chunk of Final Fantasy XVI news yet during the State of Play event. Square Enix released not only a new trailer but also a new blog and updates to the official Final Fantasy XVI website that has established a nice foundation upon which we can start building an idea of what this game is about and what we can expect.

Despite the number, Final Fantasy XVI is not the 16th entry in the series; it’s not even the 16th single-player mainline entry, either (thanks to FFXIII’s sequels and the FFVII Remake). There are a million and a half Final Fantasy games, far too many to count. This is simply the one that comes after the one with Noctis and his bro-dtrip.

If you’re a Final Fantasy fan, today’s State of Play is for you. Today, Square Enix has revealed a bit more information about Final Fantasy XVI.

In the new trailer, we get our first glimpse of combat, which features high-speed real-time action that looks reminiscent of what Cloud and the gang get up to in Final Fantasy VII Remake. The trailer also features more of the mysterious Eikons, powerful monsters that resemble the summons of Final Fantasies of yore and seem to reside in human controllers called Dominants. It seems like befriending or fighting these Dominants will be at the heart of the game’s story.

Final Fantasy XVI is the latest game to be hit by COVID-related development delays, with the game’s producer Naoki Yoshida announcing in a letter posted to Twitter that work on the upcoming PlayStation 5 RPG has been set back by about six months. Furthermore, Yoshida announced that the next major reveal for the upcoming title — originally promised for sometime in 2021 — is now being pushed out to sometime in spring 2022.

It’s not too surprising that Final Fantasy XVI has been hit by delays. As the first flagship Final Fantasy game for a next-generation console, the development process is a massive effort spanning development teams around the world. “In an effort to offset the effects of COVID-19, we’ve had to decentralize that workforce by permitting staff to tackle their assignments from home,” Yoshida’s letter explains. “This has unfortunately hampered communication from the Tokyo office, which, in turn, has led to delays in — or in extreme cases, cancellations of — asset deliveries from our outsource partners.”

Final Fantasy is heading to the PlayStation 5 with a new entry, Final Fantaxy XVI. The news was announced today during Sony’s console event with a brief teaser.

The trailer posted today teases a world in which “The legacy of the crystals has shaped our history for long enough” as part of the upcoming action RPG. Alongside its new fantasy setting, iconic figures from the series, from Chocobos to summons like Shiva, can be seen throughout. In a post from on the PlayStation Blog, producer Naoki Yoshida said the next big reveal for the game would take place in 2021.