Final Fantasy 16 Designers Discuss Why The Series Hasn’t Been Turn-Based For A While

[Herbert Playz]

I think its pretty obvious that Final Fantasy 16 has emphasized action because they are attempting to get the game into as many hands as possible and when you look around and see which games are doing well, they are games like Elden Ring, God of War, Hogwarts Legacy. All of these games have an action focus.

My personal opinion on this is that its possible that Final Fantasy's target market has a lower ceiling then something like those other games, and that's okay!

If square enix wants to make an action based 40-60 hour RPG game by all means do exactly that, just don't call it Final Fantasy. Let Final Fantasy be what it is, which is a grind heavy, turn based RPG, with an emphasis on story.

Nobody ever played the old games because they were amazed with how many cool animations Cloud would go through to hit some enemy for 50 points. 

But what we loved was the ability to go on a grand adventure, growing our party slowly throughout, leveling up, acquiring new skills, learning our party members back story helping them conquer some kind of past trauma or bad even and then once we learn who the real bad guy is, go take him out.

If there were some cool side quests and mini games along the way that was even better. 

It was never about combat. Combat is just what we had to do to get to the next big story moment. And fighting together with our party members for 40+ hours made victory at the end that much more enjoyable. 

During the golden age of Final Fantasy 7- 10. Final Fantasy 9 sold significantly less than 7, 8 and 10. Despite that, it still sold over 5 million. So if it costs you 100 million dollars to make a game and you sell 5 million units at 50-70 dollars, You're still making 250-350 million and that's on the low end.

I think Square should stop developing Final Fantasy for mass appeal and instead focus on designing a game specifically for players that play the game for the story and RPG elements. I imagine that they would easily have a solid base of gamers(5 million+) supporting every single final fantasy release.

And who knows maybe someday the series would reach over ten million in 2 weeks. Its possible, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet recent sales numbers are the perfect example. They did 10 million units in just 3 days!

Unlike Final Fantasy Pokemon has not chased ridiculous graphical fidelity, and crazy animations. Instead, the franchise has just focused on delivering more of what their fans love. I think that's the real recipe for success.

Once a developer successfully creates a fanbase. They need to feed it. Don't change what the fans love. Instead you should nourish it and give them more of what they already love. Surprise them along the way, but don't stray off the path trying to pull in more people from other genres.

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