Final Fantasy is an institution in and of itself. Square Enix’s beloved franchise spans a frankly ridiculous number of games and many genres, and in the many years that it’s been around, the series has reinvented itself multiple times even with its mainline entries. One man who’s been a crucial part of the franchise’s success in recent years, however, feels it is struggling to adapt to current industry trends.
Naoki Yoshida, director and producer of Final Fantasy 14 and producer of the upcoming Final Fantasy 16, recently said the same in an interview with Inverse. According to Yoshida, Final Fantasy as a series is unable to keep up with the wide range of demands and requests from its fans- and he feels the best way to go about attempting to do that is to have many different types of Final Fantasy titles trying many different things.
“In terms of whether Final Fantasy is successfully adapting to industry trends, I believe the series is currently struggling,” Yoshida said. “We’re now at a point where we receive a wide variety of requests regarding the direction of our game design. To be honest, it’d be impossible to satisfy all those requests with a single title. My current impression is that all we can really do is create multiple games, and continue creating the best that we can at any given time.”
Of course, there are a number of major Final Fantasy games coming in the near future, and they all seem to be going for very different (but very interesting) things. This Winter, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion launches for PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC, while Final Fantasy 16 arrives in Summer 2023 for PS5. Winter 2023, meanwhile, will bring Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth to the PS5 as well.
Whether or not any (or all) of these games will be able to live up to expectations remains to be seen, but there’s plenty of optimism surrounding them nonetheless, and what we’ve seen of the titles so far – Yoshida and co’s Final Fantasy 16 in particular – has looked promising.