In a recent interview with Yahoo! Japan, Final Fantasy XV director Tetsuya Nomura addressed issues of the game being an out-and-out action title without being an RPG. “It is being presented as ‘a Final Fantasy action game,’ but I wasn’t thinking of it like that.”
Surprisingly, there was the intention to make Final Fantasy XV a pure action title. “True, we did want to get rid of the UI, remove hit counters, restrict the playable character to Noct and so on. But if we did all it that it would become just another action game like all the others. The team is saying, ‘don’t forget this is Final Fantasy before it is an action game.’”
Understandably, there’s no confirmation on whether it’s an RPG at all, so when asked how he would describe Final Fantasy, Nomura stated that, “I think it is thinking about the numbers while fighting in a party. ‘FF’ is different to existing action games and FPSes, you can see the quantity of damage you’re taking and inflicting, and how much you are healing. Managing those numbers is the ‘thinking about the numbers’ part.
“And in FFXV you can switch freely between 3 characters, so it is also about party combat. There are lots of combos and you need to be aware of characters outside the party.”
Final Fantasy XV is currently slated to release for Xbox One and PlayStation 4