Yeah all previews mentioned it too . The trailer released yesterday the writing / delivery definitely made me sure I will be playing in Japanese

Clive versus Dion is about to go insane. The developers mentioned that Dion’s character serves as a foil to Clive so I’m really interested fo see how the conflict between them unfolds (and having a dragoon wrestle with the morality of their actions is always a good time).

I can already tell this quote is gonna piss off weebs who act like TLoU killed their dog

A lot of it goes back to what Yoshida was saying about JRPGs having rigid expectations that you just aren’t allowed to break from in the eyes of gamers. FF in my opinion has always worn its western influences on its sleeve, but expressed them in a way that some JRPG fans felt was “Japanese enough” so it wasn’t a problem then. People, particularly westerners don’t realize just how racist it is to call a team full of Japanese people sellouts just because the first trailer wasn’t anime enough for their weeb ass taste.

That said, I fully expect the bulk of FFXVI’s political narrative to be resolved by the third disc of the game, with the final act going all-in with the classic mecha-anime influences and it will be awesome and very much Final Fantasy. I think they alluded to something like that in an interview a few years ago

u know that some of the greatest anime ever produced was inspired by movies right?

Wait until you play literally any Matsuno game

Wait til you find out what almost every single FF story takes inspiration from

Wait til you find out what games FF was cribbing from since its inception

Hint: FF has always been firmly rooted in western fantasy outside of entries like X, which literally was created to call back to Japanese mysticism as almost its sole focus. I mean ffs, XII is Star Wars. Or did you think Japanese culture involved European knights in huge armor and western dragons lol? Think back to how Japanese/Asian culture is typically represented in FF through its characters. They're almost always represented as foreign to a Euro-coded region that the game takes place in. FFXIV's expansion Stormblood is literally about going to a damn samurai city and helping samurai lmfao

If this game ends up being mid then I’m gonna go beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to create something even more degenerate than anime that can be inflicted on the rest of the world.

Taking inspiration isn’t as bad as trying to grossly appeal specifically to westerners with gameplay, art direction, setting, etc

They could’ve made 15 and 16 a new IP and let FF stay a JRPG

Insane post

Basically my mood but waiting to play ( in Japanese because that American voice acting and writing in recent trailer is painful )

apparently they wrote and record english dialogue first and consider it the true experience

Yeah that’s cool but that most recent trailer the voice acting didn’t hit for me so I can’t do it .

things gotta evolve bro, if you want to play a classic style jrpg just do octopath, or triangle strategy

ah word, im not looking at anything until it drops. i feel like i’ve seen enough and want to be surprised by the rest

Oh launch trailer is a lot of voice lines that miss for me all respect to voice cast . I can always switch back and forth

also saying grossly appeal is a bit of a reach i feel, i mean who can say the motivations for them even mentioning it. they could’ve just had got bookmarked in their design doc, and then marketing said mention that in an interview. i just don’t feel like the guy who called western game journalists racist for coining the term jrpg is gonna bend over any more than normal for western audiences

also i liked 15 it’s good!

that’s cool, yeah i guess i’ll just see how it goes. rn i’m on a experience as it’s intended vibe with them

I get what they saying though . When all previews mention god of war devil may cry ( yes I know why ) and he sees inspired by game of thrones . It’s fair to want final fantasy to be final fantasy . I’m all for accessibility in terms of opening it up to main people but won’t know if it retains its soul til we play . Only true miss for me is controlling each member of a party and them playing differently / upgrading their abilities/ recruiting them like tactics advanced would slap for me . The hack and slash nature risk sponge enemies or boredom . I’m sure they’ve put in work though.

It’s obvious to me that this call for a ‘culturally pure’ Final Fantasy is bad faith criticism borne from zero media literacy. It’s predicated on having no clue that the entire high fantasy genre is rooted in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or that western tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons served as a precursor to the earliest JRPGs, never mind that XVI is the latest in a lineage of games starting with Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre that have always had this distinct style in tone, theme, and setting.

The developers keep drawing a comparison in storytelling between XVI and Heavensward so I imagine that some kind of revelation about the Mothercrystals and the Eikons will occur at the end of Clive’s twenties and an act break in to Clive’s thirties will lean in to another classic Final Fantasy trope by having him deal with some sort of alien or ancient threat posed by the Fallen civilisation.

i completely understand, i guess personally i feel like the battle system has been changing since 1 so i'm fine with it taking a left turn. I think to me the coolest part about FF is that it represents what the developer thinks of as a hyper modern rpg, so i can see them reading game's climate and saying f*** it lets go full arpg.

yeah I mean as long as it still retains the rpg feels then I am all for the adaptation. I won't fully grasp how fun the combat is til I play it for myself so again in for the demo after their June 14th event or whatever.

The previews have been almost universally blown away by the story in a way that we haven’t seen from the single player games since like, X maybe. I loved Heavensward and can’t wait to see what Maehiro can do with a brand new world with no baggage.

For all this talk about its GoT influence, they’ve mentioned Attack on Titan, Godzilla and classic Tokusatsu in general as big points of reference. Koji talks about it in depth in the video below. You can tell this team really understands what the essence of FF is. Aesthetics and specifics aside it’ll still be a sincere game about hope and humanity that draws from several different global media scenes and tells a progressively more and more batshit story while pushing its genre forward in some way or other. With chocobos and crystals.

These games are always so fascinating to really break down on a textual and especially metatextual level imo more so than most other AAA games. Being the biggest JRPG franchise globally, it doesn’t have the luxury to just be good on its own. FF has the burden of being having the best graphics in the east, groundbreaking gameplay, and, for the sake of “keeping identity,” taking concepts that were around in the NES era and stretching them so far past their limits that they can STILL draw tears from players 35 years later. They have to reinvent literal 8-bit era story beats to be on par with the best of the best. I can’t think of another series with this kind of baggage.

I play those games and I love them but they aren’t FF

I’m less concerned with the “J” and much more opposed to losing out on the “RPG”. The way it looks rn this game looks like DMC with damage numbers. It looks like Bayonetta 3 with a higher budget. I don’t think those are RPG’s at all.

They said in a previous showcase they would show us all the RPG elements they’ve included but it didn’t seem like much at all.

I’ll still buy the game day 1 and play the game and most likely enjoy it too so at the end of the day I’m a stupid s*** but I still miss FF7-13 and will always hope they return their roots.

GoT… Families… Barnabas is the daddy 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔