Square Enix hasn’t really started work on the next big Final Fantasy yet.

When the Japanese company does start, we can expect a very different game, as the producer of Final Fantasy XVI (and the long-running but genre-bending Final Fantasy XIV, which is more of an MMO), Naoki Yoshida, aka Yoshi-P, was asked about the next installment in the latest episode of the Game Maker’s Notebook podcast. As a member of the Director’s Council, he couldn’t really comment on the game in depth, but he did say that nothing is set in stone about it yet.

According to Yoshi-P, it’s time for a younger generation to work on the franchise with more youthful sensibilities, because then Final Fantasy XVII could be a game that fits into today’s world. He was also asked what advice he would give to young developers, to which he replied that the franchise has always been about challenging what has been done before, and that’s exactly what Hironobu Sakaguchi (the creator of Final Fantasy) and Yoshinori Kitase (the franchise’s brand manager) have been doing, suggesting that the next Final Fantasy could be very different from the previous installments.

Final Fantasy XVI also significantly changed the franchise’s previous traditions, as it was more of an action game than an RPG (and therefore, not coincidentally, can be freely mocked as Devil May Clive, after the game’s protagonist), and the role-playing elements were more of a plus in the gameplay, as they weren’t the focus of the game released last summer for PlayStation 5 and coming soon to PC, where the open world and plethora of character-based action sequences were a significant change from Final Fantasy XV (that game had a troubled development history): It debuted as Final Fantasy Versus XIII as a PlayStation 3 exclusive, but didn’t arrive as XV until nearly a decade later).

We’ll be curious to see what Final Fantasy XVII brings to the table that we won’t see for another 4-5 years.

Source: WCCFTech