Kingdom Heartsfans have pointed out thatFinal Fantasy 16has a gameplay mechanic that looks an awful lot like the Shotlock function that was introduced in Birth by Sleep and featured inKingdom Hearts 3.
Earlier this week, Square Enix lifted the lid off of Final Fantasy 16 with a new State of Play presentation that gave us our best look yet at the game. In fact,it might have ended up giving awaytoomuch thanks to some errant spoilers. Thankfully, lore drops aside, the showcase was mostly focused on gameplay and showed us how extensive Clive’s combo list is going to end up being - in fact, it looks like it borrows a little bit from another of Square Enix’s series - Kingdom Hearts.
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Around the seven-minute mark of the showcase, Square Enix shows a few minutes of various battles, basically giving us a look at what Clive can do. In one scene that takes place in the courtyard of a castle, Clive can be seen using an attack called Blind Justice which lets him aim at enemies, lock on, and then fire a bunch of different electrical projectiles at them.
It’s a flashy attack that we see Clive use several times throughout the showcase, but that’s not the reason why it stands out so much. The reason it was such an interesting scene is that the move looks exactly like a Shotlock from Kingdom Hearts. For those who don’t remember, Shotlocks were introduced in Birth by Sleep and then featured in Kingdom Hearts 3, and they let Sora and the gang do exactly what Clive did in the Final Fantasy 16 footage. Only, Kingdom Hearts did it first, of course.
Fans quickly took notice of the similarities too.Over on Twitter and Reddit, several Kingdom fans pointed out that Clive’s moves look exactly like Shotlocks in Kingdom Hearts. Most fans seem to be pretty happy about that fact, but a few Shotlock haters are probably realising right now that they’re not going anywhere in Kingdom Hearts 4.
It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to see Final Fantasy 16 taking some clear inspiration from Kingdom Hearts. Not only is it one of the most well-known action RPG’s out there but, earlier this year,Naoki Yoshida confirmed that the Kingdom Hearts development team helped shape Final Fantasy 16’s combat.
Back in June, Yoshida said, “The Kingdom Hearts team at Square Enix has been especially helpful in contributing to those real-time combat and boss battles. It can be said that the battles in ‘FFXVI’ are in some ways a culmination of the company’s past experiences”. It wasn’t clear what he meant at the time, but there are definitely echoes of Kingdom Hearts within Final Fantasy 16’s gameplay.
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