Final Fantasy 16 seems to be hovering somewhere just beyond the horizon, and fans are eager to hear more from it. The game has gone for a while without news, with most of it having come from around the time of its announcement last year. While the initial trailer was a little underwhelming to some, Final Fantasy 16 promises to take the series back to its fantasy roots, and further improve on the action-oriented gameplay that recent Final Fantasy games have been pursuing. As the game skipped Tokyo Game Show, Final Fantasy fans have been left in the dark as to what secrets it holds, and when it will be out.
Recently, there seemed to be a big opportunity for FF16 to reappear. Late last week, Sony announced that it would be holding a State of Play presentation focussing on third-party games. This roughly twenty-minute presentation took place today, and promised to be illuminating for a wide variety of different fandoms. Final Fantasy 16 was thought to be one of these, but unfortunately, the evidence that fans dug up led them astray.
Why Final Fantasy 16 Was Suspected To Be At the State of Play
While there was no guarantee that any given game would be at the State of Play, a list of games came under scrutiny due to a small leak early last week. Attentive fans noticed that the PlayStation landing pages for Final Fantasy 16, Gotham Knights, The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum, Tchia, and The Dark Pictures Anthology were updated, but they paid no mind at the time.
It was a few days later, post-State of Play announcement, that fans reflected upon this and realized that the updated games were probably the contents of the show. Sadly, this list of web pages was updated for completely different reasons, and those looking forward to those games will need to wait for their next official appearances.
Also, now seems like the right time to bring Final Fantasy 16 out of the oven to show it off again. FF16 has been in development for a while thanks to the efforts of the former Final Fantasy 14 team headed by producer Naoki Yoshida. The intent behind it seems to be to avoid the typical cycle of a Square Enix game being announced years before it's ready.
News regarding the game was promised for some time in 2021, and status reports have been steadily trickling out over the past few months. It sounds like the game is nearing its polish phase, and a lot of work on visuals, localization, writing, and gameplay is done. While Tokyo Game Show missed its chance to show FF16 gameplay due to polish concerns, an extra month might have been the time the game needed to be in a fully presentable state.
What's Next For Final Fantasy 16
The odds seemed good for Final Fantasy 16 to appear in Sony's live stream, but it turns out that it wasn't to be. There is a sentiment among the development team that Final Fantasy 16 should not be shown until it is sufficiently impressive, and a month is not necessarily all it takes to bring the game into such a state, especially during a pandemic. There are still a couple more months left in 2021 to fulfill the promise of FF16 news, and chances of a release window in that news are high, but fans will have to wait and see. Besides, Square Enix fans looking for a new action RPG just got the surprise announcement of Star Ocean: The Divine Force instead, so it's not all doom and gloom for them.
The chance remains for Final Fantasy 16 to show up at The Game Awards, which would be the perfect stage for such a high-profile game. There is another possible place, if less likely, for FF16 to show up. Final Fantasy 14 and 15 have long histories of having their own dedicated shows for imparting information to the fans, and there's no reason for Final Fantasy 16 to break this trend.
An announcement of a larger showing could come in the next month-and-a-half, possibly including other Square Enix announcements to make a Square Enix Presents livestream. There's certainly no shortage of upcoming action RPGs from the company, so Square Enix would probably be able to heap tons of reveals onto fans on top of the long-awaited Final Fantasy 16 news. Until then, though, FF fans can sit tight knowing that 16 is coming along and will be shown when it's ready.
Final Fantasy 16 is in development for PS5.