Naoki Yoshida on FFXVI: "Kingdom Hearts team has been especially helpful"

[Oracle Spockanort]

In an interview with the Washington Post, Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida spoke about his history with Square Enix and how projects like Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and the Kingdom Hearts series have allowed Square Enix the ability to create a "compelling action combat system" in FFXVI.

When discussing FFXVI's development with the Washington Post, Yoshida gave his acknowledgements to the long-running Disney franchise, stating that the Kingdom Hearts team "has been especially helpful in contributing to those real-time combat and boss battles." 

Considering Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind superbosses are considered some of the best battles in the action genre, it is no surprise that the FFXVI team would turn to games like Kingdom Hearts to draw inspiration from. 

Final Fantasy XVI is set to release in 2023 on PlayStation 5.

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[Oracle Spockanort]

The Washington Post has a reading limit so it's okay for us to summarize off of this. c:

 

[Launchpad]

Cool to hear. Something that's had me spooked about FF XVI is that it has a lot of Dragon's Dogma in its blood, AND it's following up FF XV. They can make the most satisfying physical combat and fun enemies to fight, but none of it will matter if they include the awful system from both aforementioned games where you can pause reality and pop potions for the whole party before returning to the gameplay. Ultimately, it's that bad mechanic that caused both XV and Dragon's Dogma to eventually be less about skill and more about chugging potions every time an enemy taps you.

One might say "just don't use the potions," and that's fine, but it feels like this type of system always leads the developers to make the hardest battles unfair wars of attrition. I really hope they took KH's approach to healing.

 

[Oracle Spockanort]

Cool to hear. Something that's had me spooked about FF XVI is that it has a lot of Dragon's Dogma in its blood, AND it's following up FF XV. They can make the most satisfying physical combat and fun enemies to fight, but none of it will matter if they include the awful system from both aforementioned games where you can pause reality and pop potions for the whole party before returning to the gameplay. Ultimately, it's that bad mechanic that caused both XV and Dragon's Dogma to eventually be less about skill and more about chugging potions every time an enemy taps you.

One might say "just don't use the potions," and that's fine, but it feels like this type of system always leads the developers to make the hardest battles unfair wars of attrition. I really hope they took KH's approach to healing.

Yeah I’m really hoping they took the good parts of KH to form this game. They could do some really interesting things with the combat considering they are taking inspiration from KH and DMC.

 

[rokudamia2]

Yoshi p "all of square enix's action games suck except for those made by the kingdom hearts team"

 

[Oracle Spockanort]

Yoshi p "all of square enix's action games suck except for those made by the kingdom hearts team"

My guy is really out here calling SE mid lol

 

[Lulcy]

Yoshi p "all of square enix's action games suck except for those made by the kingdom hearts team"

The man has clearly not played them beyond a superficial look.

 

[Sign]

Yoshi p "all of square enix's action games suck except for those made by the kingdom hearts team"

He did a fair bit a dunking on XV in these interviews. Took me by surprise lol

I'm glad someone as highly regarded as Yoshi-P gave the KH team the respect they deserve. The Remind superbosses are a masterclass in boss design and hands down the best in the genre. Gives me high hopes for XVI.

 

[Launchpad]

The mainline KH games have always been pushing the envelope of quality. KH1 INVENTED air combos in 3D action games. There was not a single game in 2006 on par with KH2 in terms of animation quality, polish, and intelligently interwoven systems. I'd argue it's still mostly peerless. And KH3's superbosses are such a pristinely designed challenge that no other action game feels as inviting to me anymore. Fourteen superbosses and not one of them feels cheap, too easy, or unfair. They're all fun.

KH has always been leading at Square, and as FF becomes more action oriented, I'm glad they're not pretending to ignore KH's long list of innovations.

 

[Luminary]

This is a great approach for the franchise considering we’re far past them ever going to turn-based battles at this point. One of the things that disappointed me most about XV was that they pulled away from that original gameplay in Versus XIII that was derived from KH. So I’m glad to see them return to something similar.

SE’s strategy may be to plant FF’s footing firmly in the real-time action RPG genre while elevating Dragon Quest internationally as its star turn-based RPG franchise. With DQXII reportedly having a darker tone, it may be moving into that void left behind by the turn based FFs.

Then you have the FFVIIR series with a nice middle ground battle system that I hope some other future games utilize.

I will say, I would like to see the FF series find it’s identity in a battle system again. We’ve had vastly different systems since XII. So if this does well, I hope they keep it and build upon it for the next mainline title.

 

[Elysium]

I don't mind them imitating KH to some degree--depending on what it is--but I wish it was going to be more like XV (itself having a lot of similarities to KH gameplay) as far as you still having direct control over the party members. Having minimal control over the party members post-1 is one of the bad things about KH. Hopefully that will just be for XVI only.

 

[Oracle Spockanort]

I don't mind them imitating KH to some degree--depending on what it is--but I wish it was going to be more like XV (itself having a lot of similarities to KH gameplay) as far as you still having direct control over the party members. Having minimal control over the party members post-1 is one of the bad things about KH. Hopefully that will just be for XVI only.

XVI is going to offer varying levels of control over the buddies that join Clive based on your difficulty and play style.

XV didn’t really let you control your party members as much as issue orders to them to make them do their special ability until they finally patched in manual controls after the DLC episodes released.

 

[rokudamia2]

And they were super op and removed any remaining challenge from 90% of the main game. It was clearly done because Tabata and the ffxv team had no true vision of what ffxv was.

 

[Sorakh212]

No surprise there all things considered. Figured they had quite the history with one another lending each other hands here and there and what not. I'm curious and somewhat cautiously optimistic to see how FFXVI turns out.

 

[Sign]

No surprise there all things considered. Figured they had quite the history with one another lending each other hands here and there and what not. I'm curious and somewhat cautiously optimistic to see how FFXVI turns out.

We were aware that the KH team and the 7R team were in communication with one another, which makes sense as they have shared leadership, some similar backgrounds, and use the same tech, but I think this is the first time we were informed of cooperation across divisions, on games that seemingly have no overlap. That's why this is extra impressive!