Final Fantasy 16 will be a monumental release for the franchise. As its first current-gen offering on console, access to cutting edge technology has given the team at Square Enix a lot of flexibility in its approach to the next entry in the long-running series. Several trailers have shown off what that might look like - and it's pretty obvious FF16 is passing the eyeball test, at least - but it's trickier to get a sense of what these leaps and innovations mean for the gameplay.

Recently, Screen Rant had the chance to discuss the upcoming RPG with Final Fantasy 16 Producer Naoki Yoshida and Art Director Hiroshi Minagawa. The developers didn't hold back: they made it very clear what went into the process of designing this game, and, at its heart, what makes Final Fantasy 16 another successor in a long line of games that have preserved an identity that has been malleable as they've evolved. It's a smart discussion, and an insightful one, though at the end of it all, expertise and talent set aside for a moment, it's also a conversation about just how much Final Fantasy means to those who enjoy playing it.

Screen Rant: It feels like Final Fantasy 16 has a much more mature tone right from the start feels like it deals with themes that maybe the series has either shied away from or hasn't delved too deep into. I'm just wondering what the motivation for including those themes, both in the game as a whole and so early are and like what impact do you feel that will have on fans as they just start their journey and Final Fantasy 16?

Naoki Yoshida, Producer: The plan from the start wasn't to create something that would get that M rating. We weren't trying for an M rating from the start.

Using the current generation technologies, everything's going to look real. In the past, you could have tried to tell a mature story and gotten away with it, just because the graphical quality wasn't there. And you could use tricks to hide the things that maybe you wouldn't be able to show. But with the graphical quality being where it is, and you have a story that you want to talk about war and you want to talk people fighting for their lives - when you show that in this type of graphical quality, if you try to shy away from that and not show it if all of a sudden doesn't feel real. And we wanted to create a story that felt very grounded in reality and felt very serious. So we had to go with something that ended up, because of the graphical quality, feeling very visceral in that sense.

The other thing is, I'm going to be 50 years old in about two weeks. I've lived long enough to know how harsh the real world can be. I know that it's not all sparkles and rainbows. I wanted to tell a story that felt very, very real and not run away from that, and not look away from that reality. Also, before we started working on the game, we did a lot of research asking people what they thought of the series and a lot of people were saying that they have this image that the series is very juvenile. You have a very young character who's going out and having fun and saving the world. And I wanted to create a story that was more relatable, that felt more grounded in reality and is something that I could resonate with. It felt like Final Fantasy was becoming a template.

With Clive specifically, it feels like the series has a new riff on its protagonist. He's come across a little bit more human right away. We're getting a lot more of his backstory right up front rather than kind of learning as the game progresses. What goes into that decision-making - to shift the way we're learning about our protagonist and learning about the world around him? It's so different from what I've experienced in past Final Fantasy games.

Naoki Yoshida: Playing a character that you know nothing about, it's kind of harder to relate with that character. What we wanted is for players to be able to relate to Clive, to know what happened to him and know what drives him, so that the player and Clive can kind of grow together on their journey. Clive is growing through the journey, but the player is also growing on the journey. Clive is learning more about the world and what the truth is, the player is also learning more about what's going on in the world what the truth is. So being able to resonate with Clive better. We felt that letting the player know more about Clive at the beginning means that they can do that from the beginning of the game.

We've seen the chocobos feature pretty heavily into the imagery, we've seen the return of some iconic summons Shiva, Ifrit. I'm just wondering where we might see other potential returnees from the Final Fantasy series - something like a Tonberry or, we see the version of the Marlboro in this game, for instance. What kind of characters do you want to return? What kind of ones were you able to [bring back], which ones weren't because of the tone of the game? Is there ever a challenge bringing these characters back and tweaking them to fit the world that you've designed for this Final Fantasy?

Hiroshi Minagawa, Art Director: I think that we got a lot in that we wanted to get in. That was one thing that we wanted to do in the beginning, especially regarding monsters. You ask a lot of different people, they're going to give you a lot of different answers on what is the iconic Final Fantasy monster, and we tried our best to get as many of those in as possible and have them fit the world.

I mean, we've got Bombs. Tonberries, you're gonna have to look - maybe you'll find some Tonberries.

Maybe I don't want to.

Naoki Yoshida: [Laughter] But you asked about one that was difficult - Sabotender, the Cactaur, was - yeah. It doesn't really fit. But, well, Sabotenders - I was able to throw in a bit of an Easter egg for players. That was difficult for us to get just because you know, that design was really hard to bring into Final Fantasy 16.

We've got a lot of stuff in there, a lot of those callbacks to the series. Visually, character-wise, monster-wise, you're going to see that there's a lot of Easter eggs in there that are going to please fans of the series. Things that they're gonna be able to recognize and remember.

Speaking of visuals - are there any kind of ultimate weapons for characters, like legendary items that we'll kind of get to see them wield if we find them? Some of the series' most iconic weapons are kind of like those, "I spent 20 hours grinding a side quest to find a weapon that nobody's ever heard of." Is there anything like that in the game?

Naoki Yoshida: While we don't, again, have all of them from the series, there are definitely going to be things that players remember, and we did our best to visually represent those in the Final Fantasy 16 world as well.

From a game design perspective, players will not have to go for the 20 hour grind killing the same enemy over and over to get that one very rare drop.

That said, some of these are going to be more difficult to get. For example, maybe going out on one of the hunts and having to defeat an S-rank mark to be able to get the material to take back and then craft that legendary weapon. So it's going to be figuring out where that S-rank mob is, and then how to defeat it. Hopefully players will exchange information to find the best way to do that and then players will be able to go out and get that

Another thing - so we have Arcade mode. And if you're going to go for that high score on the leaderboard, it's all going to be about tuning your character. And even more so than the weapons that Clive's going to be able to use, it's going to be about the combination of accessories, and there are hundreds of different types of accessories that can help you customize those iconic abilities. There are very rare ones that are going to give players that little bit of advantage that's going to push them over the edge and get the high scores. It's about finding those items and then getting the right combination.

There's a lot of these accessories and they're all very specific to certain abilities. For example, so you have maybe one with one of the Titan abilities that will take its cooldown and make it seven seconds shorter. So you can use that ability more often. And that's just one accessory. You have to decide which three you're going to use.

Then you think, "okay, so what do those accessories do?" and reducing a recast time by seven seconds opens up a lot of different abilities for different types of combinations that weren't available before. And the battle director, Ryota Suzuki, basically created this giant Gantt chart of all the different types of combinations and what the accessories can do. There's going to be a lot of opportunity for that fine-tuning to get the best thing that's going to fit your playstyle and get you up on the leaderboard.

Does the team have any broken combinations or tips they want to give players to start right at launch?

Naoki Yoshida: That first run through [Final Fantasy 16], it's less about doing that fine-tuning and getting a high score because that first run through, it's all about the story. Again, while we are tracking scores in the background, that's never going to be shown to the player and that's not going to affect how you're going to be able to get to the story. You're going to be able to get the story without having to focus on a score. It's from the second run through where that fun starts, once you've attained all the abilities, and you do New Game Plus where you have all of your abilities. Now you're going to fine-tune to find something that's really exciting there. For that first run-through, to experience the story and have something that feels really smooth and looks really amazing, just go ahead and put on the Ring of Timely Focus and the Ring of Timely Strikes and just watch Clive do his thing and enjoy the story. Then when you get to that second run-through, it's the fine-tuning from there.

That said, when you do the Arcade mode and you're going for high scores, if you have the Timely Rings equipped, those are going to lower your score. Those aren't going to get you the highest scores. You need to have those off and be playing with the other [accessories] to get the highest scores.

We mentioned Arcade mode, we briefly touched on the hunts - it feels like Final Fantasy 16 has a lot more variety in terms of the modes it's offering players. Previously I went hands-on with the combat in February. The boss battles feel like they're different from the game entirely, which is great. Final Fantasy really does have its kind of core identity. How do you go about preserving that - or maybe what's the one quality that you focused on to really make sure this still felt like a Final Fantasy despite all the innovations that 16 is bringing to the series?

Hiroshi Minagawa: For me, it's about that graphic quality, that's what maintains that Final Fantasy feel. But it's not just about having great graphics, it's about having this graphical quality that matches the art style that we have. A lot of games are going in the direction of photo realism, but we can't go in the direction of photo realism because we have this art that we need to represent, and if it goes too much into photo realism it's not going to represent that art as well. So finding a good balance between the art style that we have, but also making that feel real, but not going FULLY photo real so that you lose the artistic side - it's about finding a good balance.

Naoki Yoshida: As a Final Fantasy fanboy, I'm looking at the game from what I want in my Final Fantasy, and what I've come to expect from what I've had in the past Final Fantasies. You look at the past Final Fantasies, and you look at the people who made it, and you think "whoever made this is absolutely crazy." Because you have this game with this massive amount of volume, you have the way that they use all this technology to get what they want, you have these battles that are absolutely inefficient - for example, our Eikon versus Eikon battles, they're one off. You spend all this time creating this, and it's only used once ever in the game. There's also this roller coaster experience, where you have all this content and all of this overload. Whoever created that has got to be crazy, and that's what I expect from this series. You're just pushing the limit all the time and doing something crazy, and that's something that I've told the development team since the beginning to do with Final Fantasy 16 as well, because that's what Final Fantasy is.

We've touched on graphics a couple of times. We mentioned making sure it felt real was really important with the technology, but we also want to preserve this kind of art style with the innovations you've been able to make with all these modern technological advances. What's one thing in Final Fantasy 16 that you were able to do that you wouldn't have been able to do in another game because of how powerful the graphics are and how they enable you to represent this art?

Hiroshi Minagawa: It has to be the Eikon versus Eikon battles, and just the size of the maps, and the size of the areas that we had to work with. To go from something that's this human-scale map, and then going to a large-scale map that's going to fit these Eikons in the battle. In switching between small to large areas, that's something that we probably couldn't have done [in the past]. I mean, I can't really talk about the stage, but there's this one stage where the scale is so massive, that it would have been impossible to do that without all the technology [we have]. I mean, when I was first told "okay, this is the stage we're thinking about and need to figure out how to do it," it's like, "there's no way we can do that." But we found a way to do it! Also, just the Titan stage, people are going to be really surprised by.

Naoki Yoshida: You have this battle where first you'll start off inside a castle inside a large audience chamber, you have two human-size characters and they're fighting, and then one becomes larger. And then the other becomes larger, and then they bust through the ceiling. And then now they're outside the castle. Now it's just going from this small scale to this large scale all seamlessly with no loading times. It all feels very natural. It's something that we wouldn't have been able to do without this generation's technology.

What we want is, when players play that, they can say "these guys are f**king crazy." That's exactly what we want.

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