Final Fantasy XVI will be the first mainstream numbered Final Fantasy game with a Mature rating. The assumption could be that the Creative Business Unit III developer wanted the game to have more violence to accompany the new action-packed fights, but that’s not the case. The team gave little thought to ratings – it came naturally, according to various members of CBUIII I spoke to for our FFXVI cover story.
“We actually get this question a lot – people ask us if we have to increase our ratings because [we] wanted to make a more violent game, and the answer was no,” said producer Naoki Yoshida. “From the outside, it doesn’t look like anything [the rating system] changed. You’re still E, you’re still Teen and you’re still Mature. The thing is that over the years, as more games come out, and as we move forward, the regulations have really changed a lot.”
Final Fantasy XVI Producer Naoki Yoshida
Yoshida said the team understands that these ratings are ultimately meant to protect kids from sensitive content, but it’s still more limited than what a studio can do in a single game. In the past, he said, studios can do “much, much more,” but now, “we find we can’t do as much to reach the ratings as we did before.” This.” One example he gave was that it’s okay to kill a zombie violently these days, but if the character is human, you’ll push the ratings higher. Assuming someone gets pierced by an arrow, Yoshida says that will no longer be allowed with a Teen rating – it will immediately land you an M rating “because it’s so realistic now.” ” in the case of games that are promoting higher fidelity images.
He also points out the differences in ranking systems between different regions of the world. In the end, however, CBUIII made the game they wanted.
“We wanted to create something that is based on reality, feels really authentic, and talks about complex and violent topics like war,” says Yoshida. “You can’t have a war without a certain image. Clive is in the trenches, he’s fighting for his life, he’s covered in dirt and blood. When you start limiting that when you’re trying to create something very real […], it takes the player out of reality and makes it more like a game. That’s what we don’t want to do. So instead of maintaining a Teen rating, this greatly limits what we can do and [what we] shown in the cutscenes, the Maturity rating allows us to tell the story we want the way we want to tell it.
“We will not try to create violent or sensational content. We just want to create […] the story we want to tell will feel real and the story will resonate best with players without hiding anything. It is by allowing yourself to judge Maturity [that we’re allowed] to not hold back and tell the story we wanted to tell.
I asked Yoshida if he and CBUIII were worried about being pushed back by Square Enix because the Mature rating could theoretically limit the player base. He said it wasn’t a big deal, joking that he probably wasn’t as scared of the people overseeing his company as he should be. But in the end, he said Square Enix understood why the team needed to be unrestricted with FFXVI. It certainly didn’t hurt that Yoshida was on Square Enix’s board of directors, they were the same people he had to announce the news.
Director Hiroshi Takai echoed Yoshida’s thoughts, citing that the Mature rating has “allowed us to […] shows more now that there are less restrictions on our story and how we tell our story.
“The Final Fantasy series has always tried to get as many people playing the game as possible, and that’s why historically the series has been aimed at people with lower ratings – like Teens – to get the game into the hands of as many people as possible. the better the player.”
It’s a lot easier, he said before, because of hardware limitations. But as the panel gets more powerful, the images come to life, and it gets harder to get a lower rating.
Final Fantasy XVI director Hiroshi Takai
“With new generations of hardware and visuals becoming more and more realistic, if you want to tell a story that feels authentic, it needs to be lifelike,” says Takai. “By showing [realistic] visuals, it’s hard to keep that in the lower ratings as it becomes so obvious and I think you can see this trend since PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 when the graphics have become a bit more realistic .
“By moving up to a higher rating, it allows us to tell the story we want to tell without having to fake it. If you’re trying to tell a war story, but you can’t show gore, that’s not going to be realistic.”
Takai reiterates that CBUIII doesn’t use the Maturity rating to make FFXVI super violent – it just helps the team maintain a “feeling of authenticity”.
Localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox said the Mature rating allows him to expand the dialogue because “there are certain words that will take you from the Teen rating to the Mature rating, and if you’re stuck with a Teen rating, you have to avoid those kinds of words, even if the character sounds like a character that would use those kinds of words.”
Final Fantasy XVI Localization Director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox
He said if you get the feeling a character is avoiding words they might be saying, the character doesn’t feel natural anymore, which is something the Mature rating allows CBUIII to avoid.
“Like it or not, a lot of people around the world swear, and it’s part of the way they communicate,” Koji continued. “There’s a whole world where no one swears at all, it’s not like the real world.” However, he adds that this doesn’t mean every character will swear – there are people in the real world who don’t swear, after all.
“While Clive will use [swear words and Mature language] sometimes, we try to do it in the right situations, like, ‘Oh, a giant rock is coming towards me.’ Of course, they would say, ‘S—!’ But then he doesn’t use it in everyday conversation because that’s not Clive’s personality.”
If you’ve been following the FFXVI trailers, you’ve heard and seen how the Mature rating comes into play in the game’s action and dialogue. That rating (and tone) also spanned the hours of the game I played for this cover narrative trip, and I can’t wait to see how far this game will push it this summer.
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