During the five years at the turn of the millennium, final fantasy The series released an unprecedented undisputed JRPG game. Four games in a row — Final Fantasy VII through Final Fantasy X — each with its own adventure, and custom worlds with specific aesthetics and perspectives. What unites them is the sheer bombast of their work, huge cross-disc epics filled with cutting-edge graphics and sweeping narratives.
They’re real event games where you go to a friend’s house to watch the opening cutscene. These days, though, mainline Final Fantasy is a completely wrong affair: an overwrought and overblown event that goes on for too long and just leaves everyone tired and cranky.impending final fantasy 16 Be fully prepared to tackle all of them.
In their golden age, Final Fantasy games were structured like road movies—a grandiose odyssey in which a group of tight-knit characters travel the globe. This provides a great framework for their story, with a really convincing balance between combat-focused caves and narrative-focused towns. Neither element is ever welcome, and the natural pull toward the next major storyline makes these sprawling games something you can play through in no time—the characters and their motivations never stray too far from your ideas. Far.
Final Fantasy 10 is arguably the pinnacle of this; a more perfect formula than the previous three games, buttressed by arguably the most significant technological shift between console generations. FF10 is the most authentic road movie in the franchise – a linear hike from point A to point B, across dizzying environments and with a close eye on its central characters. With the transition to 3D environments, full voice-over and motion capture, camouflage that would be hampered by muted, expressionless polygons in movie theaters is finally achieved. It wasn’t the first game to feature these, but it did it all with such confidence, technical excellence, and directorial vision that it remains a landmark in mainstream video game storytelling.
Of course, this sort of thing has been the norm for big-budget video games for decades. We’ve moved far beyond anime melodrama, and performance capture can now take on the real and mundane, like Nathan Drake ignoring his wife at dinner. It’s been a while since Final Fantasy was able to rely solely on sheer cinematic spectacle as its defining feature. More than 20 years ago, when “Final Fantasy VII” positioned itself as a blockbuster sci-fi extravaganza, the budget and production cycle ballooned to the point of being completely unsustainable. A franchise that was once able to launch a mainline entry every 18 months is now hardly one in a decade. We only got Final Fantasy 15 when they had a spinoff that had been in development for six years through two directors and two console generations.
When it was finally released, it was accompanied by a feature-length movie, an anime series, and a custom Audi concept car. The kind of money and scattered creative vision involved in FF15’s decade-long history is almost incomprehensible. The race presented itself as a road trip with the lads, but it ended up feeling like the shortest ride in the series’ history.
By embracing a true open world, the game is forced to be honest about its geography–it can’t convey a sense of scale through scene transitions and world maps that suggest off-screen travel. Any sense of urgency from the narrative is completely removed by having the player make a big circle between the same locations, picking up pointless side quests. It’s not until the film’s end, when it abandons the open road for linear travel, that the narrative is able to reach the series’ usual dramatic and emotional climax.
Ever since they first saw the vast land of peace in FF10, people have been claiming they want an open world from Final Fantasy. Square Enix has finally done it, and while the game has a lot going for it (a gas station in a fantasy world is truly a top-notch atmosphere), it’s clear that such a design simply isn’t conducive to the kind of structural fantasy adventure that makes a great Final.
At its absolute best, Final Fantasy XVI is an almost linear 30-hour long action game. A really solid campaign with a unique tone and a well-executed vision that does a great job of telling a standalone story. It needs to prove that Final Fantasy no longer needs to be the absolute biggest thing on the planet. It needs to prove that other than waiting another 10 years for incomprehensible corporate politics to produce another giant transmedia mess, this franchise is possible. It needs to demonstrate that there is an acceptable fidelity baseline that people would rather see multiple visions than achieve one with the same technology.
The series needs to accept that it can finally stop the infinite chase, slow down and let the army of creatives behind the scenes actually tell some of the stories, instead of constantly grinding them into a paste to keep up with the larger world and the ray-tracing arms race.
This has the potential to be a real turning point. By all accounts, Final Fantasy XVI is the first mainline Final Fantasy game since Final Fantasy XI (a game released 20 years ago) that isn’t plagued by reboots, director changes, and skipped generations.
The producer said the game would not be a true open world, acknowledging that doing so would add another decade to development time. Of course, this upsets gamers who now expect every game to run 300 hours around huge empty fields, but it fills me with real hope. The developers say the game will only let players visit a limited number of kingdoms in the world, as if they’re telling an elaborate story through a linear journey. These games used to be about this kind of thing.
If FF16 is really as small and limited as it seems—if it really has a well-thought-out creative vision that guides its release within a standard human lifespan—it could be the most important thing to happen to the series in generations.
