Minor story elements have been clarified.

Someone translated some interviews done in a recent issue of Famitsu and published them on twitter.

Highlights:

• The main character is in fact the knight sword to protect Joshua.
• He calls Joshua his brother in the trailer
• Joshua has the power to heal wounds with fire. He's nicknamed the Phoenix.
• Humans cannot survive without the aid of Crystals. Though no detail on if this is literal or figurative.
• There will be more summons besides the four seen in the trailer.
• Action battle system where the player can "shift" warp and use summons to augment his attacks.
• Yoshida mentioned the trailer was done in real time and promises the quality will be better in the final product.
• He mentioned the team has grown and is currently working towards the game's completion.
• Director Takai Hiroshi mentioned he got into FF playing the first entry when he was a student. The first FF he worked on was FFV and he's mostly been working on XI and XIV until getting his second biggest break (the interview doesn't mention this, but he was also the director of The Last Remnant) with this entry.
• He also mentioned it will still be awhile before the game will be in fan hands.

Not a whole lot of new content, but good to see they're a t least talking about the game and not just going to stay coy about it until next year. Man Versus XIII has made me bitter...:lol:

I wonder why they seem to be trying to bring back "crystals" as some major plot device in all the recent games. They're acting as if it's just a series staple, even though they pretty much abandoned that after FF5 completely.

You can see shades of the crystal idea in some of the games after FFV, like magicite in FF6 and the huge materia in FF7. And FF9 explicitly has the crystal.

I'm pretty sure they just randomly introduced a crystal at the end of FF9 just so they could have something to use as the game logo, Lol. It was so unrelated to the rest of the story.

Nah. The four treasures used to summon Alexander were obviously supposed to be like the four crystals too.

As Lord Golbez says, all of the FFs have had a crystal element. VIII had Lunatic Pandora which encased a massive crystal that summoned the Lunar Cry. IX always had the crystals for the summons as a backstory in Madain Sari besides the World Crystal that appears at the end. X has the spheres and XII has nethicite. I'm not sure if there is an FF title that doesn't have some plot important crystal element.

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

• He also mentioned it will still be awhile before the game will be in fan hands.

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Well frick, there goes the prediction that it will come out sooner than we thought.

What Wolf and Golbez say is correct, not to mention that the crystal aesthetic has been prevalent throughout all games and marketing for many years. And then there’s titles like the FNC games and Bravely Default which go out of their way to deconstruct the way these Crystals work (though tbh the FNC-specific themes have already kind of been already set up in XII? Though I guess it’s far more front and center in FNC).

FNC is weird though because apparently in XIII the fal’Cie are supposed to represent the crystals (despite not really looking the part) while in Type-0 the fal’Cie and the Crystals are two separate things. But that’s neither here nor there


Back on topic, it’s really nice to have confirmation that there’s actually stuff that’s been done before announcing this game!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

As Lord Golbez says, all of the FFs have had a crystal element. VIII had Lunatic Pandora which encased a massive crystal that summoned the Lunar Cry. IX always had the crystals for the summons as a backstory in Madain Sari besides the World Crystal that appears at the end. X has the spheres and XII has nethicite. I'm not sure if there is an FF title that doesn't have some plot important crystal element.

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Ok yes, they all contain something that's literally made of crystal, but I meant crystals in terms of the specific role they filled the early games (hence the quotation marks). The crystals in FF1, FF3, FF4 and FF5 are pretty much the exact same thing in every game, as far as I remember (though those are not the games I know the best, so I'm probably forgetting some details). So the crystals are not just any old magical item, they're specifically playing the role of a kind of magical guardian over the forces of nature, and often protecting the specific kingdom where they're located. Which means it's usually part of the story that the crystals will be under threat of being destroyed or taken, which will lead to some kind of worldwide disaster.

That is a story-telling trope they largely abandoned after FF5. Then in recent years they seem to be putting it back into all of their new games. They used in Bravely Default, they used it in FFXV, and based on the specific dialogue in this trailer, it sounds like they're doing the exact same thing in FF16.

I'm just wondering why they thought that was an idea they should resurrect. Not saying I have any problem with it or anything. It just seems a bit random. Maybe it's because they're trying to compensate for the fact that the gameplay has moved more and more away from the traditional series formula, so they're deliberately including more of the story tropes as a way of saying "see, it's definitely still final fantasy".

I feel ever since they announced the FNC back in 2006, they've been coming back to the roots of the series. SE has been playing around with deconstructing the Crystal/Warriors of Light theme all the way up to XV. So I imagine XVI might be SE deciding to make an entry that reconstructs the themes for once, which is likely why they're being up front about it. Of anything, the era they didn't make a deal out of it was shorter than the ones they did.

Also to answer my own question. The only mainline FF to not feature a crystal as an important plot element is Final Fantasy II. Even that has changed as it seems like the remakes with the Arcane Labyrinth have added a crystal element to it as a plot point.

If they are going back to the literal "Four Crystals" plot device (as opposed to just alluding to it), maybe they simply wanted to bring it back for whatever reason? Like they wanted to see if they could do that storyline in the series' current look, or they just felt it had been gone long enough, and it was time to revisit it? Or maybe the decision was simply fuelled by nostalgia, be it targeting the fans', appealing to their own, or both?

I definitely wouldn't mind them going back to the four crystals in a modern FF and see how that plays out, but I think it's premature to assume they're doing that. At least I don't recall any information explicitly referring to four crystals.

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Originally Posted by Lord Golbez

I definitely wouldn't mind them going back to the four crystals in a modern FF and see how that plays out

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FFXV had 4 crystals until very late in development. It's definitely something they're wanting to do. They ditched this just because they ran out of time. I guess this was a different team of developers though, so it may not mean much about other games.

https://i.imgur.com/ouKPKj2.jpg

Four crystals was part of Nomura’s Versus. Tabata has only one crystal probably due to the story just naturally being developed and the narrative really requiring one crystal. That’s because stories really change drastically as they get workshopped and Versus XIII was announced at a ludicrously early stage of story development.

Type-0 has four crystals though!

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Originally Posted by Fynn

Four crystals was part of Nomura’s Versus. Tabata has only one crystal probably due to the story just naturally being developed and the narrative really requiring one crystal.

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You sure about that? This particular trailer was after they changed the name to XV. It was after they'd swapped Stella for Luna. My assumption was they switched it to just 1 crystal later on, probably at the same time they cut out the second continent open-world section and replaced it with a train ride. We know that happened much later on in development (so wasn't a Nomura->Tabata switch) because there was a gameplay trailer about 1 year before release where you saw Noctis exploring outside of the mine area, which you couldn't do in the final game. So it seems like they made that decision to force it onto a train ride within the final year of development.

The four crystals were last mentioned in a trailer that still had Stella. And this was before Tabata was even announced as co-director. Heck, in that trailer we still had that conversation between Noctis and Stella about seeing the afterlife or something. Even after It was rebranded you XV, it was still pretty much Versus - then came the changes since they needs to get this out at a reasonable time and Nomura was just... way too busy to make it happen.

Side note here, I know people blame Nomura for this a lot but the thing is he really is super busy in that company - like he does so much stuff with character designs, the KH series, and then to his surprise he’s suddenly the VIIR director. And then they snatch his pet project away from him which, to be fair, he was sitting on for way too long, but also they just shouldn’t have announced it so soon or swamped him with so many projects and just let him work on it :(

But now he’s cannibalized that old vision into the KH universe so it’s all good :monster:

You might be right it was still Stella actually. It doesn't say in the trailer who it was, and you only see her face in that final pre-rendered segment. This could frankly be either of them. I just assumed it was Luna, because they look so damn similar (Left is the announcement trailer, Right is Luna in the final game):

https://scontent.fbhx2-1.fna.fbcdn.n...14&oe=5FAD6FEC