Final Fantasy XVI Trailer Impressions

Before reading anything here, check out the trailer if you haven't checked it out yet, if you already watch it, feel free to keep going past the trailer (or I don't know watch it again, I'm not telling you what to do).

Well before you saying anything, I should say that I'm not an unbiased fan of this franchise, I have been playing Final Fantasy games as far as I can remember, my favorite entry being the VIII, I'm such a big fan of Final Fantasy, that my name here on Hive is in fact, for those that don't know, a reference to Final Fantasy VIII itself.

So, with that said let's take a look at my first impressions of FFXVI.

The Final Fantasy series has become way bigger than back in the days of when we got a game every 1-2 years. It's a huge series and the more important entries are always the numbered ones so XVI is a big deal. The last numbered game came out in 2016 (unless you count Final Fantasy XIV expansions but that's an MMORPG so I wouldn't count the expansions as numbered releases after the main game release).

I'm going to start by saying that the Final Fantasy series fandom has always been divided, the two sides are mostly as follows:

• Those that want more fantasy and less tech
• Those that want more tech and less fantasy

The early entries to the franchise dating back over 30 years ago, where almost 95% fantasy with 5% tech powdered in here and there. Slowly as the series matured and dare I say exploded in popularity was when they decided to start expanding on what made them different in what it is known now as the golden age, which encompasses VI, VII, and VIII. What do these games have in common? They expanded the technology and futuristic elements so far that it became a Tech-world with Fantasy sprinkled in instead of Fantasy with Tech sprinkled in.

I'm on the tech side of the debate. I loved the golden age and also loved what came after with heavy tech worlds like XIII but there's always been a strong presence of those that want absolute return to fantasy, which I think is unnecessary. Final Fantasy XIV balances this pretty good, although I don't like that the people without the tech are the good guys and the empire with tech is portrayed as the bad guys but that's just Japanese story telling for you. I love the balance FFXIV and FFXV was pretty neatly balanced as well.

But inside Square, the desire to go back to full fantasy has been growing strong in the past couple of years and they seem to have won and completely overtaken the production of Final Fantasy XVI, being that the game producer is Naoki Yoshida, an advocate to go back to fantasy and director and producer of FFXIV, I'm not really that impressed by how the trailer turned out.

Looks like XVI will be taking us to a pure fantasy world again, is it going to be bad? Not really. Will I play it? Fuck Yes. Do I like them dropping the tech stuff. Heck no. But every numbered Final Fantasy game has been worth while the play for the past 30 years and I expect this one to be like that as well. Hopefully they don't take too much inspiration from Game of Thrones and the like, we all know how that ended....