Final Fantasy XVI

Ryeleigh

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Rye
Nothing grinds me more than equating "more explicit graphic" violence/sex with "more adult", that's a juvenile mentality.

Stories are only as dark and mature as the author's way of handling them. Adding murder, torture and blood etc. doesn't actually make anything more dark or mature. It just makes it a stupid, immature story with murder, torture and blood. I wish more people would learn the difference.
 

Wol

None Shall Remember Those Who Do Not Fight
AKA
Rosarian Shield
I can see Benedikta becoming a loved character, her story seems very tragic + romantic subplot + extremely badass and sexy so far.
 

cold_spirit

he/him
AKA
Alex T
SE (newly merged with Enix) seems to have decided that they didn't want to stir the bucket too much. They seem to have sanitized FF8 quite heavily, out of the fear that now that the whole world was playing Final Fantasy, they might offend the parents of their target market (teenage kids).

There's a lot to unpack here, but keep in mind that Kitase, the director of VII, VIII, and X, didn't fully understand the popularity of FF in the West until 2002 (their own words).

FF until that point (and likely for a while after) was made with the Japanese audience in mind first and foremost. I think the company's decision to make the series generally T rated was done to drive sales, not appease parents.

https://blog.playstation.com/2021/0...of-creating-the-timeless-playstation-classic/

Screenshot_20221024-072817.png

In XVI's case, Creative Business Unit III pursued a M rating because they "felt it was necessary to explore those more mature themes that the game tackles". And fortunately the higher ups agreed. The next mainline FF could very well be rated T again. Very little is guaranteed with this series.

https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-16-m-rating-adult-themes/
 

Nandemoyasan

Standing guard
AKA
Johnny
It does seem strange to me that FF has strived for such an overwhelming sense of realism for years now, but failed to acknowledge that a) people have sex, and b) when you put swords in people they bleed

You wanna call me juvenile for that then fine, but it becomes patronizing after 30 years of following the series for it to keep pretending I haven’t seen bewbs or that I want my kids to play it.*

What grinds me is that I’m consistently encountering people angry at me for having an opinion in the FF Fandom, year in and year out

Yknow there are literal actual people getting brutally slaughtered in the real world every day, I’m sorry my opinion about FF “grinds” you, but I’m also gonna keep saying what I think please and thank you

*I don’t and am never having kids
 

Makoeyes987

Listen closely, there is meaning in my words.
AKA
Smooth Criminal
I mean. We've had FF couples literally make out under water, have a baby, raise a child, sleep together outside before the end of the world, and share a kiss under fireworks.

I don't think FF fails to acknowledge people having sex. It's just not showing it.

I mean, do we really need a scene like TLOU2 to really hammer in that couples like Cecil and Rosa fuck each other? I wouldn't mind it, but that's not "acknowledging people have sex," that's just showing sex. We know they have sex already because we see they've made a baby :monster:

The real travesty in all this is the fact Zack may have straight up died a virgin.
 
Last edited:
D

Deleted member 13557

Guest
Perhaps “adult” isn’t the correct term considering how FF has frequently used serious themes in the past. Imo, it’s all in the presentation. Meteor crashing down is probably going to have an extra weight added to it due to the fact that it’ll be presented in a PS5 game rather than a PS1 game. Dealing with people facing the end of all they know with modern graphical capabilities should be emotionally brutal and due to that harder to market to a younger audience. If FF XVI wants to present the serious matters that the series typically deals with in a more gritty fashion, I quite frankly am all for it.

This doesn’t mean I’m against subtlety, telling can definitely be better than showing in some circumstances. But shouldn’t showing, especially via gameplay, be encouraged in an action-adventure game? It’d be pretty boring if DMC just told you about demons and you never actually get to fight them, for example.

I mean, do we really need a scene like TLOU2 to really hammer in that couples like Cecil and Rosa fuck each other? I wouldn't mind it, but that's not "acknowledging people have sex," that's just showing sex. We know they have sex already because we see they've made a baby :monster:
Great example of showing being better than telling. I do think TLOU2 was going for something different though, which is fine.
Stories are only as dark and mature as the author's way of handling them. Adding murder, torture and blood etc. doesn't actually make anything more dark or mature. It just makes it a stupid, immature story with murder, torture and blood. I wish more people would learn the difference.
Agree with the first point. But, I don’t think adding “murder, torture and blood” makes a story stupid or immature. They can absolutely be handled in a way that doesn’t feel unnecessary. Say if FF6 gets remade,
are we just not going to show Kefka poisoning people and stabbing the Emperor to death? Blood in those scenes would make a lot of sense and quite frankly I wouldn’t view it as immature in the slightest. Or even Aerith’s death scene in FF7. Does she need to gush with blood like some sort of blood geyser? No. But would having Sephiroth’s sword having a little bit of red on it symbolising that he actually just took a life make sense? Imo, yes


My two cents. Feel free to disagree :mon:
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Ryeleigh

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Rye
Agree with the first point. But, I don’t think adding “murder, torture and blood” makes a story stupid or immature. They can absolutely be handled in a way that doesn’t feel unnecessary.

Sorry, but you misunderstood my point (or I didn't present it well). I meant that blood, torture or murder don't magically make a stupid, immature story any more "dark" or "mature" just by their presence. Hence those things are only as "dark" and "mature" as the author's way of handling them. What I didn't mean was that adding those things makes a story automatically stupid or immature.
 

Nandemoyasan

Standing guard
AKA
Johnny
There was a time when FF was more or less totally oblivious to people's pearl-clutching regarding certain things. It's good to see FF be a bit bold again, about it.

I guess that sums up what I was trying to say a bit more concisely. I like typing and I like writing... FF9 was amazing too golly I just meant I like how the new game looks :P
 
  • Like
Reactions: Wol

Wol

None Shall Remember Those Who Do Not Fight
AKA
Rosarian Shield
If the depiction is realistic and the story is already good, then it can only help.

Zack's death wouldnt have the same impact if he vanished with a thousand magic particles.
 

Nandemoyasan

Standing guard
AKA
Johnny
IGN: Final Fantasy 16’s Developers Open Up About Game of Thrones Comparisons, Sidequests, and Representation

Famitsu interview: 95% complete, release date to be announce later this year.

Eveveyeye: Director Hiroshi Takai estimates that the game story will be 35-40 hours long.

...Hmph. Here I thought they were trying to take some risks.

Nope, marketing-centric custom-made-for-our-upstairs-suits garbage again.

Disregard my previous posts; there's nothing mature about hemming and hawwing about the intrinsic racism of your society, and MakoEyes is right, it would have been better just to decline to comment

"It's based on Medieval Europe" is a dumb excuse, and did I mention lots of us FF fans are in our 40's now? Just...


Stop making Final Fantasy games please
 

ForceStealer

Double Growth
I'll say that in the full answer, his point about the game focusing on a small specific region of a larger world is a stronger one than "the world's based on Europe." More like, well, Game of Thrones that has regions of the world and people from the various regions look different from one another. As opposed to the Rings of Power strategy that takes a world that has such places but just sprinkles in the token diversity everywhere and says don't think about it.

That said, that only means the world building is more logical, doesn't really say anything about the story when it could easily involve those places or people from them. A Final Fantasy not involving the entire world is actually a pretty big departure in itself. Or, as stated, just not bother with it and just make the fantasy be a fantasy. If we've got airships, populations are lot more mobile than they'd have been in real Medieval times, so populations could very likely be more diverse like today.

And then from there the answer meanders into maybe even worse territory but that I don't even really understand. So, yeah, he'd have been better off just not saying anything at all :monster: I expected questions to be more about the lack of women, honestly.
 
Last edited:

Leafonthebreeze

Any/All
AKA
Leaf
Periodic reminder (not that anyone here really needs it) that Medieval Europe was pretty fucking diverse, probably more so than in later centuries. Even saying it's due to focusing on one country doesn't really make sense. If that's their logic, like Force said, airships exist? Also this seems to be a pretty war torn land presumably involving large numbers of people moving around and I just...

I mean I'm (hopefully) preaching to the choir here, but even if your excuse is that you're being accurate to medieval Europe (which already doesn't work for a fantasy world), that doesn't actually work because medieval Europe was pretty well connected, with a lot of movement of people and trade.
 
Last edited:

Makoeyes987

Listen closely, there is meaning in my words.
AKA
Smooth Criminal
Like real talk, if Yoshi P had shut up and not said such a stupid answer, I'd have gone on thinking Hugo, the Titan dominant, was just a light-skinned POC. I mean, really.

Look at him.

lidq3l2moa391.jpg

LOL just. Come on. The most "European" FF series, Tactics & XII, somehow managed to have diverse as hell casts of characters. That's such horseshit. Europe, even in it's past, was diverse as fuck.

I'm still hyped for XVI. Hell, if this was a deal breaker for me, I'd have not enjoyed XV as much as I did. But it's such a braindead justification for a fantasy story. Not only that, but he's done better. XIV is testament to that.
 
Last edited:

Strangelove

AI Researcher
AKA
hitoshura
do they know that you could literally walk on foot from europe to africa, to the middle east, to asia. they're all connected by land without some invisible forcefield stopping anyone from crossing. the umayyad conquest of iberia happened in the middle ages, european missionaries and merchants were in china, there was the crusades. it wasn't all neatly siloed-off homogenous nations that didn't interact. the historical/cultural/political/anthroplogical/whatever standards of the time also included relations between different people. especially if you're telling a story involving war, a classic way for civilizations to mingle.

also no one was summoning big giant magical monsters

it's disappointing to hear this line trotted out again. not a deal breaker since i'm used to it by now, but it's still a pretty passé answer. i doubt characters are going to be suffering from dysentery or lice. are you really being true to medieval europe if everyone isn't shitting blood and itchy all the time. even if it wasn't going to be a balanced cast, it wouldn't be a stretch to have a migrant neighbourhood in a larger city or something you visit during a quest, emissaries and ambassadors from different nations featuring in the story even if you don't explore those places in-game. because you're not actually making a documentary or something, this is a fictional story where you can make up whatever you want and there's already hundreds of medieval fantasies full of white psudo-europeans out there.

anyway 'kupka' is a moogle's name, pretty sure that's one of good king moggle mog's knights. is the twist going to be that he's the dominant for a moogle instead of titan
 
Top Bottom