Final Fantasy as a franchise has consistently delivered moments of incredibly epic scale across its many instalments over the years, but, as with many other things, it looks like the upcoming Final Fantasy 16 will be cranking things up a notch on that front. And interestingly enough, the inspiration from that comes from Sony Santa Monica’s God of War franchise.
Speaking in a recent interview with Push Square, Final Fantasy 16 producer revealed that the action RPG took quite a few cues from the older God of War games, back before the series reinvented itself in 2018. In particular, Yoshida says the boss fights of the action titles, and how varied and uniquely designed each of them was, inspired Final Fantasy 16’s Eikon vs Eikon battles quite a bit.
“I love the two games, especially God of War,” Yoshida said when asked about whether the likes of God of War and The Witcher served as influences for Square Enix’s upcoming megaton RPG. “The craziness of the boss battles in God of War, when it was a more traditional action game, is just… The game design is so different for each stage, and the boss is so unique, everything is made with power, and you can feel the power. So, while I personally also really like the most recent God of War games, I look back further to the original God of Wars, and especially the boss battles in those, how the boss battles are all crazy, they’re all different designs for each, they’re all unique, they’re all over the top, and in getting inspiration from that and creating our Eikon versus Eikon battles to kind of have that same feel.”
Art director Hiroshi Minagawa added that Final Fantasy 16’s development team frequently looked at God of War games while working on the title to try and ensure they were surpassing them with what they were doing themselves. “We really looked deeply at the God of War games, looking at all the leaves on the trees and comparing them to what we have to make sure what we have is hopefully better than what they have,” he said.
In a recent interview, Yoshida also talked about how the development process of Final Fantasy 16 was focused on looking at Final Fantasy 15 and ensuring that the upcoming game doesn’t repeat the mistakes of its predecessor in telling an incomplete story. You can read more on that through here.
Final Fantasy 16 is set to launch exclusively for the PS5 on June 22. It will receive a demo shortly before launch that will be roughly a couple of hours long and will allow players to transfer their progress into the full game.
