Square Enix and Final Fantasy XVI developer Creative Business Unit III have been open about the game spanning decades of protagonist Clive Rosfield’s life for years. It’s an interesting aspect of this story because it shows just how broad his horizons could be. What begins as a story of revenge will turn into a story of war, its effects on people, and ultimately Valisthea’s place in a fight between Eikons, Dominants, and more over the crystals.
It also means we’ll see a lot of Clive’s life. During my cover journey, I’ve played through some of FFXVI’s opening hours, much of which took place in the past, when Clive was just 15 and his younger brother Joshua was even younger. . I learned a lot about their relationships with each other as well as their parents, and I’m not going to spoil any more here. But I also flashed a 28-year-old Clive to catch up with him years after a deeply traumatic childhood event, and CBUIII and Square Enix say we’ll take Clive’s life even further into his 30s.
I asked FFXVI Creative Director Kazutoyo Maehiro about the decision to have the game cover decades of the protagonist’s life and the challenges that come with it. To my surprise, he said there weren’t many.
“Overall, I don’t think there was too much difficulty writing Clive’s story,” says Maehiro. “I knew where I wanted to go and was able to create the story pretty quickly, focusing on that revenge but then showing the rest of that life.”
Maehiro said the real challenge was writing about time-consuming things in real life, like wars, which are central to the story of FFXVI.
“The story ended up being something that would take place over a long period of time,” he says. “In a novel it would be very easy to do because you just write about it and then you go to the next chapter and 10 years have passed. But when you do that in a game and you want people to play those things, it requires creating assets and creating things for the end game, and it also takes development time and cost.
“And so, probably the biggest challenge was taking this story that spanned so many years and morphing it and translating it into something that players could play in real time, but also feel like that time has passed at low development costs.”
He says that creating a model – say, Clive’s youngest model – could take between one and two years. And FFXVI has at least three Clive models. Add all the other characters that age over time and those hours start to add up.
I didn’t get to see Clive in his thirties, but I’m excited to see how he differs both as a narrative and controllable character compared to younger versions of himself. Luckily, we have just under a month left as FFXVI is coming to PlayStation 5 on June 22.
For more, be sure to check out Game Informer’s exclusive FFXVI coverage hub by clicking the banner below.