Summons have long been a staple of the Final Fantasy series, but in Final Fantasy 16, they become a stronger focal point than ever before. I spoke with producer Naoki Yoshida, art director Hiroshi Minagawa, and localisation lead Michael Christopher Koji Fox about it, and Yoshida-san explained that the idea came to him at the 2014 Tokyo Game Show, long before he had even been told he would be working on FF16.
He had to visit multiple booths at the event because of cross-promotions and understandably found it tricky to navigate his way from one booth to the next due to the large crowds. “I look up, and Square Enix has these giant floating Chocobos and giant Moogles,” he tells me. “I look at that and think, if I was that big, I could transform into an Eikon [the name for Summons in FF16] myself. Everyone would see me, and they'd get frightened and run away. I'd be able to take two steps, and I'd be at the booth. How easy would that be? I thought that might be a cool game idea — if you have me transforming into the Eikon, then you can tell my story, the Eikon story, and then you can learn about their struggles and what drives them.”
Yoshida kept the idea at the back of his mind hoping that one day he’d use it in a game, whether that was FF14 or something else, though he quickly adds while laughing, “Just to be clear, it's not that I want to become Ifrit and burn away all the fans.”
Ever since the first trailer, I had wondered how the team chose their protagonist’s name. After all, Clive isn’t exactly considered a cool name in the West. The team tells me that their creative director Kazutoyo Maehiro came up with the names, and laughed about how Maehiro-san tends to like names with ‘V’ sounds, hence Valisthea in FF16 and Varis zos Galvus in FF14. “There may be some deeper reasons,” Koji Fox says. “Maybe Clive because it sounds kind of like cry, like he’s crying out, but you’d have to ask [Maehiro-san].”
Yoshida-san even says the name came first, so there’s no deeper meaning to find. “We don't want you to think we didn't put any thought into this name. All the other names in the series have this deep meaning. Maehiro-san came up with the name that he wanted to use, and then it was our job as the developers to create a game that fits that so that by the time we finished, it could be no other name than Clive. We have a story that fits the name Clive, and now if you ask the dev team, they all love Clive. They think it's the greatest character, and everyone loves his name.”
Another notable name is Torgal, Clive’s faithful hound, who shares the moniker with a character from Square Enix’s The Last Remnant. The team tells me that both Maehiro-san and FF16’s main director Hiroshi Takai worked on The Last Remnant, so it’s likely that is where the name came from and promise, “It’s not just Torgal in Final Fantasy 16. You’re gonna see a lot of stuff from The Last Remnant.”
The throwbacks don’t end there either. “A lot of the staff involved with the graphics and the visual aspects of the game originally worked on Final Fantasy 14. So you're going to see a similar feel and way we approached it. The work on it was heavily inspired by what we did on Final Fantasy 14,” Minagawa-san says, while Yoshida-san says that FF12’s “DNA” may be present thanks to shared staff.
Though FF14 has influenced FF16 due to much of the team working on both games, it hasn’t come without a cost. “When people first found out that I was gonna do this, all these people were saying, ‘if Yoshi-P is going to make it, then it's going to be an MMO’. That was something I was a little bit worried about. I’m not a person who has only made MMOs. Before 14, I did a lot of single-player games.”
Koji Fox even says the perception has hampered promotion of FF16 a little bit. “When promoting 16, everyone wants to bring it back to 14 because people have this strong image of Yoshida as ‘the 14 guy’.”
They’re not wrong, either. After all, they’re telling me this because I asked whether Yoshida-san felt people had expectations of him that carried over from 14, as many consider him the saviour of the MMO. However, Yoshida-san did laugh when I assured him that despite being a massive 14 fan, I restricted the number of times I planned to mention it.
Game of Thrones has been cited as a major influence, with Minagawa-san saying the team watched the first four seasons when the project started. They also researched games like The Witcher and God of War and looked at the visuals, the type of storytelling, and how events were shown. “Once you have that, it's all about putting that in the Final Fantasy box and making it not feel like you're just copying those other games.” Minagawa-san says, while Yoshida-san adds that The Lord of the Rings was influential for its architecture too.
“It’s all about arranging it to make sure that it feels like Final Fantasy no matter where we get the inspiration from,” Yoshida-san says, using Amh Araeng’s wall from Final Fantasy 14 as an example, telling me it was inspired by the Wall from Game of Thrones, while Kholusia’s cliffside elevator was inspired by The Wall’s elevator.
There have been many discussions about the lack of diversity in Final Fantasy 16, so I asked the team whether the response from fans would change how they approached projects in the future. Yoshida-san emphasised that the team has taken from various people and cultures for this fantasy setting, but as Final Fantasy 16 has not yet been released, we haven’t seen all it has to offer.
“We want players to play it, and then once you've played it, if you still have feedback and you still think there are things we can do better moving forward — give us that feedback,” Yoshida-san says. “Of course, we're going to take that to heart, and we're going to use it moving forward for projects, but currently, we haven't shown you everything yet.”
On the other side of the coin, Yoshida-san was recently quoted as saying that JRPG was a discriminatory term. “There’s this image for some reason that I hate [the term] JRPG, and I think it’s absurd. That’s not the case.” Yoshida-san says, explaining the misconception came from a past interview he did. “They asked us, ‘So you've always created JRPGs up until now, why are you not creating a JRPG this time?’ That was the question. I answered that we're not going out of our way to create something that can be labelled a JRPG. That's not how we approach development.”
Yoshida-san says he told the original interviewer that while he realises that the term JRPG is ok now, many developers his age, especially in Japan, might think the term is being used mockingly.
“A long time ago, when the term JRPG first came out, we remember that there was this graphic, ‘What Makes a JRPG’,” he says. “It showed a lot of things that seemed to be putting down JRPGs, basically saying that these are the crazy things that are in a JRPG — mocking JRPGs. A lot of developers, such as myself, remember that graphic, and so a lot of those older developers, when that graphic first came out, we took it as an insult because it looked like it was making fun of what we were creating.”
When it comes to development, Yoshida-san explains they don’t think of labels like that. “We love our God of Wars and our Assassin's Creeds. We love our Personas and Elden Ring and Ghosts of Tsushima. We love many different games, and we don't go into it thinking JRPG or Western RPG. In approaching our development with Final Fantasy 16, we take all of these games into account, and we want to go above and beyond all of them.”
This preview is based on playing a bespoke version of Final Fantasy 16 made for media to experience, and the contents may differ from the final version. FINAL FANTASY XVI © 2023 SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. All Rights Reserved.