A few weeks ago, we were lucky enough to travel to the Square Enix offices in Tokyo to get hands-on with Final Fantasy XVI and chat with the lead development team. We learned a ton about the game, and you can read all about it here, but as more outlets start to report on FFXVI, even more juicy details have begun to emerge.
One of the biggest morsels of info comes via Japan’s Famitsu magazine’s interview with Producer Naoki Yoshida and Director Hiroshi Takai, which Twitter hero @aitaikimochi has translated and broken down into the important bits, and centres around the game’s overall length and what players can expect once they’ve finished the story.
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In response to questions around how long the game will take players to complete, which Takai says is about 35 hours for the main path and then double that including side content. Presumably, that also includes the 11 hours of cutscenes in the core storyline alone. Yoshida and Takai described wanting to keep at least the golden path relatively brisk, knowing that players have less and less time and didn’t want them to tire out before seeing the end, but the pair admit that “more and more got packed in”.
It was also revealed that the game will include an “insanely difficult” New Game+ mode allowing players to carry across their stats from a completed save. It’ll amusingly be called Final Fantasy Mode and will also come complete with an online leaderboard so that players can compare their performance with others for what Takai calls “endless gameplay”.
The newest Famitsu magazine has new(?) bits of game info for FF16 from the previously released interview with the devs.
Takai says there will be a leader board that you can compete with players around the world, allowing for endless gameplay. Here's my translation:
—We heard… pic.twitter.com/hkC5KxjMWy
— ??????Audrey? (@aitaikimochi) March 17, 2023
In our hands-on preview of Final Fantasy XVI we said, “Regardless of the session having a more narrowed focus on combat and Eikonic battles, the two-and-a-bit hours I spent immersing myself in Final Fantasy XVI has painted a reassuringly positive picture. It’s been in good enough hands this whole time that I’ve always felt rather confident in the game to really bring the single-player Final Fantasy experience back into good stead, but knowing what I now know and playing what I played I’m almost certain that this will be the Final Fantasy to truly wow the world once again.”
Final Fantasy XVI launches for PS5 on June 22nd, 2023. Amazon has the cheapest pre-order price at $85 with free shipping.
