Final Fantasy 16 battles are "open-ended", says combat director
Devil may Clive.
Final Fantasy 16 combat director Ryota Suzuki is excited to see what players achieve with Clive's "open-ended" moveset.
Suzuki previously worked on Devil May Cry 5 and has been instrumental in Final Fantasy 16's real-time action combat.
Speaking to Game Informer, he said there's freedom in combat and teased some currently unknown abilities.
"I've always tried to give players a lot of freedom when it comes to the controls and the action in the game, and give them lots of options that they can take and then do their own thing with," said Suzuki.
"So I'm expecting that there's going to be a lot of weird things that they're going to do with certain abilities. I can't say what those abilities are, but I already have a few ideas because I've left a lot of things open-ended in that way.
"I'm really excited to see what players will do with them because there are definitely things that I didn't expect, but I do like putting that stuff out there so that they have stuff to play with and surprise me with. When they do things I expected, I'm happy, but I'm also really happy when they [...] do something that is completely unexpected. It's one of the exciting things about being a developer."
If Devil May Cry 5's combat is any indication, there will be plenty of ways for players to link together Clive's moves into long combos. It may not be turn-based, but there's still room for skill and strategy.
The real test of this will be in the game's New Game Plus modes: the hard Final Fantasy Mode and ultra hard Ultimaniac Mode.
Combat is one way that Final Fantasy 16 is modernising the series as Square Enix experiments with new ideas, but it still feels like Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy 16 will released on 22nd June exclusively on PlayStation 5.