The Final Fantasy 16 developers have had a helping hand from another group at Square Enix, the Kingdom Hearts team.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Naoki Yoshida (aka Yoshi-P), producer of the upcoming Final Fantasy title, reveals that the Kingdom Hearts team at Square Enix contributed to Final Fantasy 16’s development, being particularly helpful when it came to developing real-time combat and boss battles, says Yoshida.
"The Kingdom Hearts team at Square Enix has been especially helpful in contributing to those real-time combat and boss battles," Yoshida said. "It can be said that the battles in [Final Fantasy 16] are in some ways a culmination of the company’s past experiences."
Those who have ever played a Kingdom Hearts game will know how on-brand this is for the team considering the Disney series is full of memorable bosses and mainly features real-time combat.
We have also had the opportunity to talk to the one and only Yoshi-P and the Square Enix icon gave several insights into Final Fantasy 16. First of all, it has been revealed that Final Fantasy 16’s combat wouldn’t have happened without Devil May Cry veteran, Ryota Suzuki.
Elsewhere in our interview, we found out that Yoshida thinks the new action gameplay in Final Fantasy 16 is good for the entire series and that Final Fantasy 16 has "fully AI-driven" party members in battle."
If you’re wondering about the latest on Kingdom Hearts 4, we’ve got some updates about that too. In a recent interview, Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura revealed that Final Fantasy’s involvement in the future of the series is currently undecided - meaning the likes of Cloud, Yuffie, Sephiroth, and more might not appear in future installments of the franchise.
Speaking of the overall franchise, Nomura also revealed that the upcoming mobile game Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link will have connections to Kingdom Hearts 4.
Want to find out more about Final Fantasy 16? You can read the full 12DOVE Naoki Yoshida interview here.
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