Tag: ff16

You wait ages for Final Fantasy 16 news and then two bits come along at once. Such is the nature of the cycle. In a live stream today about an upcoming collaboration between the Nier Reincarnation mobile game and Final Fantasy 14, producer Naoki Yoshida stopped by and dropped some hints on how FF16 is doing.

Brought to us by well-known Twitter translator Audrey Lamsam, Yoshida implied the trailer had been done for a while (we’d heard similar from various sources) but that factors had delayed it being shown. To minorly translate that from game dev speak to likely real world: marketing, production, or executive management decided the game wasn’t going to come out for a little while longer and didn’t want to build the hype too early. That or they felt a particular period was already too packed with news and information.

Yoshida went on to say that they’ve been working hard on bug-fixing and polishing, which is still ongoing, but that the game is approaching a finished state. He also complained to Yosuke Saito, Nier-series producer and regular trouble maker on livestreams, that he was making him talk about FF16 again – this isn’t the first time an unrelated stream has resulted in news for the game.

Since you’re here for a trailer, here’s what they released at the event, detailing the Reincarnation X FF14 crossover that’s happening in May. The FF14 side of this is yet to be announced. Community speculation suggests that a few items added in the most recent patch are likely all that’s coming. There was a full raid series based on Nier just one expansion ago.

We’d expect this mysterious FF16 trailer to appear at some point between now and the end of Geoff Keighley’s not-E3, Summer Game Fest, perhaps even as part of the main show there. The game itself? Late this year or early next is your safe bet.

If your Japanese is better than mine you can scrub through the full archive of the livestream here. Yoshida shows up around the 40 minute mark.

Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.

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Due to the recent resurgence in interest in Final Fantasy 14, a few more folks have been reading through Yoshida Uncensored. It’s a fan-translated book that collects all of Naoki Yoshida’s Famitsu column (he’s the producer of FF14 and FF16) into one volume. That means a few more tidbits, with the added context of FF16’s development, are being highlighted. This includes today’s revelation that before FF16, Yoshida and director Hiroshi Takai were working on a “hardcore action game similar to Bloodborne.”

As highlighted by ResetEra, the game was targeting Western audiences and had the same gothic style and hardcore action feel. On top of what you might expect, there was also a 4v1 multiplayer component. Given this was the early ‘10s, that’s rather ahead of its time. Yoshida says he believes it would have been a “disaster” if development had continued and they hadn’t instead been moved on to working on FF14’s resurgence.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time this info has come to light. RPGSite, in a piece introducing people to Hiroshi Takai, makes mention of it. The author, professional translator Jérémie Kermarrec, highlights how diverging thoughts on how to handle the workload of early production were already occurring. Naturally, it all rather fell apart when Yoshida and Takai, along with many others, were drafted to FF14 to help build what it has become today.

Kermarrec also makes mention of Bloodmasque, a mobile game with a planned console release that was eventually canceled. There’s clearly some ideas in there with shared heritage, and the development team was the one that Yoshida handed projects off to when he was put in charge of FF14. It also looks mad as a box of rats, which is a bonus.

All that said, Takai and Yoshida are now late-ish in development on the action-focused, gothic-looking, combat-heavy Final Fantasy 16. Shared DNA or even a prototype that branched wouldn’t exactly be shocking. While it wouldn’t make huge JRPG-heads happy, “FF16 is like Bloodborne” is certainly a very exciting phrase to utter.

Plenty of other bits and pieces have come out of more folks reading through Yoshida Uncensored. This story of Yoshida breaking the heart of an American boy who thought he was a Japanese schoolgirl is also doing the rounds.

Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.