Final Fantasy 16 developers revealed that it would take players around 35 hours to get through the game’s story and 70-80 hours to do everything besides it.
In an interview with Famitsu (translated by a Twitter user @employee), director Hiroshi Takai and producer Naoki Yoshida said that they considered the gameplay time for Final Fantasy 16’s story mode to take into account that players have busy lives outside of video games, so they wrote it in a way that allows players to do only the bare minimum if they are too busy to do any side quests. The team initially targeted 20 hours, but the additional content they put in brought the story time up to 35 hours.
“When the game’s development was just beginning, I had an idea that players these days are really busy with other things, so I wanted them to be able to aim at least completing the story,” Yoshida said. “I thought making the game something you could complete in about 20 hours would make sense, but more and more just got packaged.”
“[Final Fantasy 16] It is a story based game that will take you on a roller coaster ride,” said Takai. “You’ll see Clive’s whole way of life, and the game will probably take about 35 hours to illustrate. If we include side content, it’s twice as much.”
By “twice that amount,” Takai means the playtime for the side content is between 70 and 80 hours, depending on how much players need to play — and there’s plenty to do. To reach the maximum playtime indicated by Yoshida and Takai, players will need to complete side quests, level up abilities, obtain all accessories, and complete each monster hunt.
In addition to the story mode and side missions, there will also be a New Game+ mode dubbed Final Fantasy Mode, which will allow players to transfer stats from the previous game file to the new one. The difficulty level in Final Fantasy Mode appears to be equivalent to Proud Mode in Kingdom Hearts, which means you’ll take longer to beat everything. And for players who want more, there will be a leaderboard that will allow people to compete with other players around the world.
Final Fantasy 16 will be released on June 22nd. For more information, check out our hands-on preview of the game, or what we know about the world of Final Fantasy 16.
Christina Alexander is a freelance writer for IGN. She has contributed her work to numerous publications, including Digital Trends, TheGamer, Twinfinite, Mega Visions, and The Escapist. To paraphrase Calvin Harris, she wears her love of Sonic the Hedgehog on her sleeve like a big deal. Follow her on Twitter @SonicPrincess15.
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