Despite not being an open-world game, Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 16 is pretty massive. Protagonist Clive Rosfield explores several regions with unique main and side quests, as seen in the PAX East 2023 presentation. A brief glimpse of the map is revealed.
In PLAY Magazine’s cover story for the game (via Reddit), producer Naoki Yoshida revealed that the structure is similar to Final Fantasy 10 and Final Fantasy 12. Speaking about the world map, he noted, “You have the areas that you can travel to, and you select that area and then jump to it seamlessly. And then you follow the main quest there, and then, once you finish that, you’ll go back to this hub area […] called The Hideaway.”
The Hideaway was also briefly seen during the raw gameplay. Along with vendors, a blacksmith and hunts, there’s an Arete Stone to teleport to a training space called the Hall of Virtue. Arcade Mode and Stage Replay are also available, the former for replaying past stages to garner a high score and the latter to revisit them at your current level. You may even stumble on some new side quests.
“Each place you unlock then becomes available to visit at any time. And so if you decide, ‘Okay, I want to try something else. I’m done with the main scenario for now.’ You can go back to places that you visited before and explore them. And in some of those places, there’ll be new side quests that you can start.
“And you can go off and do things like that. You can explore, you can do hunts. You can find items and do the quests.” Fans can expect to spend plenty of time with the action RPG. The story takes about 35 to 40 hours to complete (with over 11 hours of cinematic cutscenes), but pursuing optional content can increase that to around 70 hours or so.
Final Fantasy 16 is out on June 22nd for PS5. Stay tuned for more details en route to its release.
