Despite being the latest in Square Enix’s long-running series, Final Fantasy 16 is doing things differently. The most obvious is the real-time combat, with combat director Ryota Suzuki of Devil May Cry 5 involved. Suzuki spoke to Ars Technica in a recent preview and revealed a scoring system that becomes available in the player’s second playthrough.
It’s akin to the Style system in Devil May Cry and Bayonetta. Once the player reaches their second playthrough, “that’s when we throw down the gauntlet and offer a challenge that is going to be above and beyond what you see in Devil May Cry 5.”
An arcade-style mode becomes available where you can earn high scores and rank on the leaderboards (with different difficulty options). There’s also Ultimania mode, which is extremely hard to hit S rank on. “To maintain an S rank throughout the Ultimania mode, we believe, it’s more difficult than doing the same in Dante Must Die [the highest difficulty in Devil May Cry 5],” said producer Naoki Yoshida.
Final Fantasy 16 has wearable assists called Timely Support Accessories, but no difficulty options. New Game Plus is present and offers tougher enemies with new placements and brand-new fights. It should be interesting to see how Ultimania mode comes into play here.
The action RPG launches on June 22nd for PS5. It’s exclusive to Sony’s console for six months, and though Yoshida would like to work on PC version, don’t expect it to release anytime soon.