It’s been a bit of a hike. Clive’s chocobo is exhausted. Our hero, joined by heroine Jill and mentor Cidolfas, heads to bed for the night at a roadside inn. Just as he’s about to doze off, Cid gasps, lifting a piece of declaratory parchment from a table.
“Clive, your dad is dead. So is your brother. The Iron Kingdom has invaded. Or something. It was bad. It probably should have been the beginning of this game, but it isn’t. There’s a movie. Why didn’t you watch it?” Thank goodness Final Fantasy 16 isn’t Final Fantasy 15.
Related:Final Fantasy 16 Will Be My First Final Fantasy Game, And Here’s Why
Look, I enjoy Final Fantasy 15 for what it is. I’ve defended it, warts and all, for years. Unless next year’s Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth lets me drive around in a car while listening to FF soundtracks on the radio, Final Fantasy 15 will remain my bastion for that very specific need. But even the game’s most ardent fans will admit it’s a mess.
Final Fantasy 15 isn’t Final Fantasy Versus 13, but you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise. The latter was revealed all the way back in 2006, and it starred a blue-haired guy named Noctis and his leather-clad entourage of pretty boys. Tetsuya Nomura’s planned epic eventually went dark, and was rebooted with the 2013 announcement that it would suddenly be FF15. Noctis was still there. The pretty boys were still pretty boys. But the game that Hajime Tabata would direct ultimately took quite a different direction.
FF15 was a multimedia project first, a mainline installment in a storied series of RPGs second. The inciting event, when the Empire of Niflheim breaks a peace treaty to invade the Kingdom of Lucis, should have been the game’s opening chapter. In fact, initial trailers for the game had exactly that notion. Instead, the would-be opening was transformed into a CG film, leading Noctis to learn about his nation’s demise, his father’s death, you know, all the stuff I lampshaded at the start of this article… through a newspaper in a hotel.
Say what you will for Hajime Tabata’s team. They had the unenviable job of reimagining Nomura’s planned Versus trilogy epic into a single game, and they had about three years to do so. That’s not enough time. We got a road trip simulator with lots of fun moments, with a plot that absolutely falls apart, and gets told in several pieces of media. Weirdly, the ending is perfect. Go figure.
Naoki Yoshida, producer of Final Fantasy 16, is not Hajime Tabata. Nor is he Tetsuya Nomura. And not just because those are different names. Nomura’s a dreamer, a visionary, a guy who wanted his quartet of male models to go on a three-game tragic adventure. Tabata’s a practical, get-it-done guy, the fellow who salvaged the bits of Versus that were ever even made and turned them into a flawed but finalized project. Yoshida is the director of Final Fantasy 14, a beloved MMORPG with millions upon millions of players and a beloved habit of putting out expansions that are ridiculously good.
Yoshida is part visionary, part pragmatist. He knows something of salvaging lost causes - this is the dude who turned the failed original FF14 into the gem it is today. Yoshida didn’t settle when A Realm Reborn reversed Square’s fortunes on that front, and he wasn’t going to settle for letting Final Fantasy 16 become a multimedia circus like 15, with a hotel and a newspaper and a blockbuster movie with a 35 rating on Metacritic. ‘No’, thundered Yoshida’s booming voice, ‘FF16 will stand on its own, as video games should’.
Instead of Cid finding that piece of paper in a medieval inn with the offscreen revelations, Clive will experience the fall of his native Rosaria firsthand, through a several-hour playable flashback shortly into the story where we see it all firsthand. That pivotal flashpoint is the intended beginning of FF16’s plot, just as the fall of the Crown City in FF15 was the intended beginning of its plot. The developers of Final Fantasy 16 know how important it is for players to forge a real and meaningful connection with its sweeping storyline, and especially with Clive Rosfield.
Let’s take this thought experiment a bit further. Imagine if Final Fantasy 16 was developed in the same vein as its predecessor. What else would be carved from its narrative for the sake of time? Obviously, the game isn’t actually out yet, so I cannot empirically say that it will be a story well-told. But we know the game went gold weeks ago, we know the team was in the final polishing stages for a good long time - we know that, whether we end up agreeing or not, Naoki Yoshida and his peers believe they have constructed a complete tale with a beginning, middle, and end.
If Final Fantasy 16 was Final Fantasy 15, Clive’s core companions would require episodic downloadable content in order to expand their roles from bantering blokes to people who actually factor into the story. Jill’s history would barely be touched upon, until Episode Jill, at which point we find out she’s Shiva. Cid wouldn’t be the leader of the Hideaway, a place for the downtrodden of Valisthea to call home - not until Episode Cid, that is. And Torgal, sweet Torgal… oh, who am I kidding, I’d pay good money for an Episode Torgal.
Then again, there’s something to be said for variety. If there is one thing Final Fantasy fans still seem worried about with FF16, it’s a distinct lack of variety. The combat isn’t just the game’s bread and butter. It seems to be its meat and potatoes, too. The recent State of Play showed some side quests, and I think they look cool, but I also think we’re not going to get any major gameplay diversions like fishing, or chocobo racing, or card games.
Final Fantasy 15 had fishing. It had so much fishing, it got a spin-off game that expanded upon its fishing. It had chocobo racing, too, which is never unwelcome. It didn’t have a card game, but we can’t always have nice things, so whatever. Square Enix’s multimedia approach may have wrecked that game’s attempt at telling a thorough story, but it also led to bizarre live-service things like photography contests and festival-style crossovers with other franchises and just this whole slew of weird, weird stuff that makes the game so oddly memorable, and I don’t think Yoshida has it in him to be that weird.
So, thank goodness Final Fantasy 16 isn’t Final Fantasy 15, because for the love of Bahamut, I would cry if its opening got the Kingsglaive treatment, and its characters got the season pass treatment, and key late-game events got relegated to a dead-on-arrival online co-op… thing. But on the flip side, I wish it was, in a few little ways, in the realm of the funky, like diner mascot Kenny Crow, and the way there’s a guy with a New Yorker accent at a beachside resort literally saying the word ‘capiche’ to me, and look, I can wear a moogle on my head.
Maybe the perfect Final Fantasy for me, personally, is a development phase helmed by Yoshida and his crew, but someone secretly sneaks in and pours a few drops of Tabata into the mix just before launch.
Next:Final Fantasy 15’s Altissia Is The Worst City I’ve Ever Seen In A JRPG
