Recently, I was lucky enough to be invited to the Square Enix office in Tokyo to be among the first in the world to have hands-on playtime with Final Fantasy XVI, the epic new mainline series entry being helmed by Final Fantasy XIV’s Creative Business Unit III and its fearless leader, Naoki Yoshida.
You can read all about my experience with more than two hours of the game here, but one thing in particular that stood out both in the enthusiastic personal introduction we had to the game with Yoshida-san himself as well as my time with the game is the way the team is hoping to acclimate old-school Final Fantasy fans and anyone else not entirely comfortable with action games to this very different new entry.
“We understand that this switch to real time action can be extremely overwhelming and intimidating for some players who maybe are not used to real time action games, or those players who are used to turn based type systems or simply want to focus more on the story, rather than on action,” Yoshida explains.
“So we have worked hard to make the game accessible for these fans as well.”
The way that CBU III is doing this starts with two selectable difficulty settings, a Story Focused mode and an Action Focused mode, with the core difference between the two coming down to some special “Timely” accessories. These accessories, of which up to three can be equipped at once, essentially work to automate or simplify certain aspects of combat without fundamentally changing how it works.
There are five of these accessories in total to choose from. Here is each one and what they do:
- Ring of Timely Focus – Causes time to slow down before an otherwise-avoidable attack lands, allowing the player to react to it with the appropriate action.
- Ring of Timely Assistance – Torgal acts automatically in battle without any input from the player necessary.
- Ring of Timely Strikes – Complex combos are performed automatically when the player repeatedly uses the base “Attack” command.
- Ring of Timely Evasion – Clive automatically evades any attack that can be evaded (doesn’t stack with Ring of Timely Focus).
- Ring of Timely Healing – Automatically consumes potions when Clive’s HP falls below a certain threshold.
For a portion of my hands-on I tried out a couple of these, namely the Ring of Timely Focus and the Ring of Timely Assistance. Immediately I found that having the onus of looking after Torgal taken away actually streamline things nicely and I wound up leaving that one one.
The Ring of Timely Focus, slowing the action right down to prompt me to quickly press R1 and evade, initially felt a little more intrusive until I realised it was gently teaching me exactly when I needed to be dodging and what the timing/positioning of my enemies’ attacks was in general. Crucially, it wasn’t taking anything away from me, merely sanding down the edges of combat a little while I got accustomed. More like having training wheels on that someone pushing the bike around with me on it.
It’s worth noting that, although selecting Action Focused mode means none of these accessories will be equipped from the outset, you’ll still have free reign to equip them should you choose. The limit of three at a time works just fine too, given a couple of them have some crossover in what they do. The only foreseeable downside is that they do take up your regular accessory slots, so hopefully regular accessories throughout aren’t game-changing enough to make using the assists a hindrance.
Digging through the in-game menus I had access to in my session, I couldn’t see anything else that I would realistically call an “accessibility” setting, at least from a gameplay perspective, but it’s hard to say whether or not that will be different in the full release. At this stage though, the approach here to onboarding action game newcomers feels like a thoughtful inclusion that doesn’t penalise, patronise or offer a watered-down experience.
You can read more about our time with Final Fantasy XVI and some of its key development team right here.
Final Fantasy XVI launches for PS5 on June 22nd, 2023. Amazon has the cheapest pre-order price at $85 with free shipping.
The author travelled to Japan as a guest of Square Enix for the purposes of this preview and interview content.
