In our detailed and revealing interview, the creative minds behind Final Fantasy XVI, including producer Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) and The Rising Tide DLC director Takeo Kujiraoka, shed light on the game’s development journey, from its initial concept to the launch of its DLC. The team discusses the intricate decisions that shaped the game’s narrative, the challenges of delivering a complete story at launch, and their strategies for enhancing the game with DLC that respects the core experience.
Yoshi-P, alongside the main director, Kujiraoka-san, reflects on the game’s evolution, their commitment to avoiding incomplete narratives, and how player feedback influenced the development of post-launch content. This conversation offers an insider’s look at the creation of Final Fantasy XVI, highlighting the team’s dedication to crafting an immersive and fully realized world that honors the franchise’s legacy while pushing its boundaries forward. The Rising Tide DLC will be released on April 18, 2024.
Azario Lopez: Regarding the DLC announcement, was it expected that the DLC for Final Fantasy XVI would come at launch, or did that come after the reception, and you thought there’s more to be told here?
Yoshi P: It was probably about eight years ago when I first started developing a concept for Final Fantasy XVI. It was just myself, the main director, Takai-san, and the creative director, Maehiro-san. The three of us talked about what kind of story we wanted to create, what type of systems we wanted to implement, and how many Eikons-versus-Eikons battles we wanted to have in the game. And we started with eight elements, so eight battles. But as we got further into those discussions, we realized after looking at the schedule and production costs we weren’t going to have enough to make all the battles. So we decided to make one of them kind of a lost Eikon, and that became Leviathan, the lost.
But the plan was that Eikon would always exist. And, if, by chance, we got the opportunity to make a DLC after the game was released, then that would be the story that we would tell. With the development of Final Fantasy XVI, the one thing that I really wanted to avoid was creating a game that, at launch, wasn’t complete and that you would need to play DLC to understand the main scenario. I did not want to do that. We had Final Fantasy XV, which was released before XVI, and they announced four DLCs but had to cancel two. There were parts of the story that you couldn’t get unless you played the DLC. That is something that, from the beginning, we didn’t want to happen for Final Fantasy XVI.
We wanted to have a full, complete experience with the main game. As we got closer to the main game’s release, we began receiving responses from the media and players from the launch events and demo, which was very good. Seeing that, I thought, “Okay, maybe this response is going to be good. This may be a chance for us to explore the idea of doing DLC.” Taking that and talking to the team, we already had this idea for Leviathan that we could bring in and incorporate into the DLC. In addition, we have Echoes of the Fallen, which is this last dungeon-type experience for Clive, and bring those experiences in. Once we received that feedback and that good response, the game was released, and we continued to receive high praise. We want to thank the players for giving us such great feedback, which allowed us to release these new systems and tell the rest of our story.
Azario Lopez: The first DLC was a little more action-focused. Will we see more story interaction in this DLC? Did that allow your team to revisit these relationships and see where you could expand?
Takeo Kujiraoka: In the DLC of Echoes of the Fallen and The Rising Tide, one of our main themes was that we wanted it to be kind of like one last adventure for Clive, Joshua, Jill, and Torgal before heading to Origin. With Echoes of the Fallen, the story focuses on Clive and Joshua, who had more of a role in the narrative, whereas with The Rising Tide, that focus will shift from Joshua to Jill. In The Rising Tide, not only will we get information on Leviathan, but the story will focus on Leviathan and learn why it was lost and where it went. Who is Leviathan’s Dominant? Why hasn’t it appeared in such a long time that we learned those things? We’ll be going to the new area, Mysidia, which is in the Northern Territory and where Jill is from. You’ll see Jill’s home territory and how that ties to her background. We’ll also get to see a little bit more of her story in addition to that story with Leviathan.
Azario Lopez: So, is it tough for you and the team to say goodbye to all these characters in this DLC?
Yoshi-P: It’s not over in the sense that we have the PC version. Once the PC version is released, we’re thinking about hopefully moving to other platforms as well. However, that’s not really talking about the story; it’s more about moving it onto different platforms. So, there is a sense that while the project is still going, there is not that sense of being sad and having to leave them yet. But I’m pretty sure that once everything is released and we’ve moved on to the next project, that would be the time that it kind of hits us that, “Oh, it’s really it’s over?”
Azario Lopez: How did you approach The Rising Tide in terms of updates to any of its systems? Did you look back on some of the content and say, “Oh, we can tweak this a little bit for this DLC?”
Takeo Kujiraoka: After the game’s release, we received a lot of feedback on many different issues, and we’ve been implementing those fixes and tweaking things within the game over the past few months. When The Rising Tide drops, an update will be available to the main game for all players that will address many different issues and tweak many different systems.
For example, we’re adding updates and adjustments to the existing Eikonic abilities, but we aren’t nerfing anything or making something overly powerful. Some of the abilities haven’t been used by players a lot, maybe because they weren’t easy or too difficult to use. Changing those up, making them easier to access, making them more beneficial to players, and giving the players more motivation to use them. We’ve changed how some feats work, like with Behemoth and Ramuh. Changing those fundamentally to make them easier to use. A lot of customization will be implemented with this new update, but I’ve only mentioned the battle system.
On the other hand, we’ve also implemented a couple of quality-of-life things. For example, within the side quests, there are important side quests that touch upon important characters and connect more to the main story and those characters than the other side quests do. We’ve decided to change the icons to make them stand out more so the players know, “Oh, these are the important side quests.” There are more minor side quests and quality-of-life adjustments with how you complete quests now to reduce the stress of having to do something and then travel all the way back.
When you get to the final stage of a quest, all you have to do is return to the Quest Giver. Now, we’ll be adding a quick, complete function where you can just pop back to the quest giver rather than having to teleport and figure out where you have to go. All players will be able to take advantage of these updates. But we’ll also be looking at other feedback that we received from players regarding content difficulty or content, the rewards for content such as getting unique items, and things like that are what we’ve definitely been implementing during the development of the DLC feedback as well. Players want more difficult content, which we have added in the DLC, but more than that, they want to be able to explore and get into battles that don’t just yield the same items. We have implemented ways of getting unique types of items, which were created from that feedback.
Azario Lopez: Many players have applauded the team for creating unique side quests that are not required but do benefit the overall story. In terms of lore, was that by design? Are you going to take what you learned about creating memorable side quests to other games or into this DLC?
Yoshi-P: When it comes to the side quests in The Rising Tide, we’ve tried to do that same thing and not just have them kind of be thrown in. Instead, we want them to actually tell the story that is going to tie in with what’s going on in the main scenario, which is connected to what’s going on in the world. We have a new key character named Shula who will be appearing in these quests, and she’ll become a close ally who will accompany players on the journey. Here, we will learn her story, what motivates her, how she got to where she is, and how she became who she is. But on top of that, you have a city there as well, and you have a group of people living in that city who all have their stories, how they’re connected to where they came from and how they’re connected to the region.
For Final Fantasy XVI, you’re going to have players who skipped all the side quests and those who only played the main content. And then you’re also going to have players that wanted to complete everything. Then, amongst those people, you’re going to have people who think, “Wow, this was such a great quest. Why wasn’t it part of the main scenario?” But the other side is that if it was part of the main scenario, then you might have had people on the other side complaining like, “Why was this question based here? There are no interesting battles. There are no interesting rewards.” This may lead to people putting the controller down there because it’s just not interesting, so it’s moved to the side.
But for me, I mean, I look at Final Fantasy XVI as it had a good balance of the main scenarios with the side quests. This leads back to what we touched on before about adding new icons to the more important side quests, which may improve the player’s experience. Again, you still have that balance between the main and the side, but if within the sides, these are the important ones, which tells the players, “If you’re only going to play a few, these are the ones you play.” Adding this new feature will make it more apparent to new players to know that if they want to take on a side quest, maybe these are the ones you should do. We put a lot of effort into creating these deep story-connected side quests, which we definitely want to continue focusing on in the development of pretty much all Business Unit III games, XIV, XVI, and moving forward.
Azario Lopez: Looking at the word “Fantasy” in Final Fantasy, I’m curious how you retain that connection to your imagination that fuels your creative works within this series.
Yoshi-P: It’s a combination of anime, manga, and tokusatsu. The other thing that helps me, though, is that I’m 50 years old, but rather than trying to ignore that, I actually embrace it and look at it as, okay, I’m an older gamer, and we have younger gamers, and you have that gap there. I’m trying to understand where that gap comes from, what is in that gap, and how to fill that gap, which is important.
But the other thing is that even though we’re older now, and I’m 50, we’re still young at heart in the sense that we’re all about 13 years old. We still love things we thought were cool when we were 13, even though they’re kind of cheesy now. But I mean, yeah, we’re still young at heart. It’s part of our job to develop games. And we talk about watching anime and manga and books, but the thing is, I don’t look at that as work. I look at it as just something that I like. It’s part of my life. And because it’s part of my life, I’m able to absorb that and hopefully relay that back to the users.
Azario Lopez: When you began your career as a developer, you likely only had to think about developing games for an Eastern audience, but as you got older, the industry became global. How has that shift been for you and your team?
Yoshi-P: When I first began developing, I was about 20 years old; all I was thinking about was just making games for people my age, like me, and I didn’t really think about the larger global market. I was fortunate enough to be in an environment with my first company, Hudson, where I had many people I worked with who didn’t really work and instead played Diablo, EverQuest, or Ultima Online all the time. Even then, getting anything done was difficult because I wanted to work and play these online games.
It was here that I could play many of those PC games and make friends all around the world at a very early age. I had friends in Singapore, Korea, Europe, and the U.S. This gave me an early idea that the gaming community existed all around the world. When I was about 36, I joined the Final Fantasy XIV team as director and quickly drew back to these early moments. But one thing I realized is that gamers are pretty much the same everywhere, so maybe we don’t have to think so globally.
When developing Final Fantasy XVI, I can see how you look at it and think our approach to development has changed to a more global focus because we recorded the characters’ audio in English. However, that’s not the reason we did this. We didn’t decide to record in English first for Final Fantasy XVI because we were thinking about making the game more global. It just ended up being a design decision. After we finished the character designs, it quickly stood out that these characters weren’t Japanese people; they were not Asian. They have more of a Western look. Because the graphics fidelity of the PS5 is so high, we thought it would be awkward to have a character like this speaking Japanese. We thought, okay, maybe it’d be more matching to the character if they spoke English. And that was pretty much the only reason we decided to go with English and why we decided to record English first. During that time, we had a Japanese script, translated it into English, and recorded it first, and then we adjusted the Japanese to fit any revisions.
Azario Lopez: Takeo Kujiraoka, you’re the director of the Final Fantasy XVI DLC. I want to ask what it was like filling in the role previously held by Hiroshi Takai and what personal touches you brought to the title.
Takeo Kujiraoka: *laughs* Of course, I get the hard questions when we only have 10 minutes left. You have a game already completed and directed by someone else, who is a pretty big personality in the company; of course, I was part of the team, but it was directed by someone else, and now I have to take over that. There was a lot of pressure. As pointed out before, after the release of Final Fantasy XVI, I got to see the response and feedback from the players. I got to see how that creation resonated with players and what they liked and disliked, and then I was able to take that feedback and implement it into my version of the game.
With all that in consideration, I like to think that I took everything to build upon the main game to create an expansion to the entire experience through this DLC. I wasn’t able to go in and do whatever I wanted or go crazy with my creativity because there was already the base game, and players had what they loved about that experience. I took it upon myself to take that and create something that would supplement it and be what people would expect from that rather than just doing what everyone did.
Yoshi-P: From the producer’s perspective, I believe the direction style is completely different. Takai-san, early in his career, was a VFX artist. Because of his roots, when you look at how he approaches direction, he always starts with that visual presentation and how things look, and he’s going to focus on that. Kujiraoka-san started off as a game designer, so his direction is about the type of experiences that the player will have, how the levels will be created, how they will feel, and beginning with that. There’s that big difference in what he puts that focus on.
I think it really comes out in our end-game content. After you finish The Rising Tide story, we have this special end-game content where you can see Kujiraoka-san’s roots and where he came from on display in this DLC. He’s again focusing on what players will enjoy and what they will take away from this DLC. And it could have been easy to just create the story and then have that be the end. The base game was created so that players could just play through the game and be content with the conclusion. However, Kujiraoka-san’s approach adds elements that make players want to keep playing Final Fantasy XVI even after the ending. Coming up with these ideas to keep players in the game after that is something that, again, he does very well. When you think about it like that, you may think, “That’s a trait that should be in all directors.” But that just shows how good of a director he is, and that’s what we all really appreciate.
