The Final Fantasy 16 release date is seemingly set in stone and won’t be delayed past summer 2023, producer Naoki Yoshida told Famitsu in an interview (translated by Audrey/aitakimochi). Yoshida also said the game is 95 percent complete and Square Enix is planning to announce the release date before the end of the year in another info drop. The launch will likely be earlier in 2023 than most people are anticipating, he said.
A demo for the upcoming PS5 game will launch sometime before the full game releases.
The comments come in a wave of new interviews about the hotly-anticipated RPG, alongside several other new insights about the game, some more welcomed by fans than others.
Creative director Kazutoyo Maehiro said Final Fantasy 5 inspired Final Fantasy 16’s combat, which includes a broad array of customization options. Game Director Hiroshi Takai told EveryEye the main game will take roughly 40 hours to complete, though the run time stretches to 70 or more if you plan on doing side quests. Enemies become stronger in New Game+ as well.
IGN asked Yoshida whether fans can expect to see people of color in Final Fantasy 16, as previous trailers showed only white characters in all of the game’s six kingdoms. Yoshida said the team based Final Fantasy 16 on medieval Europe and believed focusing on diversity would “violate” the narrative boundaries the team set for themselves.
Later in the response, he also said:
“It can be challenging to assign distinctive ethnicities to either antagonist or protagonist without triggering audience preconceptions, inviting unwarranted speculation, and ultimately stoking flames of controversy.”
The reaction on Twitter was largely negative, and Kotaku’s Sisi Jiang summarized it in an article that posed the question of why a game based on medieval Europe shouldn’t reflect the diverse people groups who actually inhabited the region, as is well documented.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
