Final Fantasy 16 is coming in summer 2023, Square Enix announced with a new trailer today. This trailer is our first look at Final Fantasy 16 since its reveal in 2020, and it spends a good chunk of its three minute runtime devoted to the series' iconic summons like Ifrit, Bahamut and Shiva. And they look huge. Like, Greek Titans huge.
The summons have health bars on the screen and look like they'll be directly controllable by players, or at least be directly involved in combat in some way; they're definitely not just cinematics that play after tapping a menu item. There's a lot of swirly action-RPG combat in here in general, in keeping with the trend of the recent Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Stranger of Paradise.
The trailer also gave us a look at some of the incredibly medieval locations in the game and they sure look a lot like Final Fantasy 14. If you slap some action bars on there and told me that was Ishgard, I would believe you. Producer Naoki Yoshida isn't subtle with his experience bringing the MMO back from the brink and it shows.
The footage we saw of Final Fantasy 16 was tied to the PlayStation 5 and so was the Summer 2023 date at the end. The PC release is still an unknown at the moment. Final Fantasy 15 took a whole year to come to PC, so it might not be a while until we see it outside Sony's platform.
