Final Fantasy XVI: The JRPG That Wanted to Be Devil May Cry

Final Fantasy XVI shipped in June 2023 for PS5, arriving on PC the following year, developed by Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit III under director Hiroshi Takai and producer Naoki Yoshida — the same Yoshida who rebuilt Final Fantasy XIV into the genre’s most successful subscription MMO. The credit that actually explains the game, though, is combat design: Ryota Suzuki, who built the combat for Devil May Cry 5, was brought in specifically to make Clive Rosfield move and hit like a character-action protagonist rather than a JRPG one. That’s not a stylistic flourish. It’s the entire premise of the game, and the clearest evidence yet that Square Enix has decided the traditional turn-based Final Fantasy fight is a hard sell to a console audience that grew up on Dark Souls and Devil May Cry rather than Dragon Quest.

What the combat actually borrows

The comparison isn’t marketing shorthand — the systems genuinely map onto each other. Clive has a light attack, a heavy attack, a dodge with an invincibility window, and a set of cooldown-based special moves tied to summoned Eikons that function exactly like a character action game’s sub-weapons: each Eikon grants a small toolkit (Phoenix gives fast, chainable melee strings and a warp-strike; Garuda gives grapple hooks that pull enemies in or pull Clive to them; Titan gives a parry-heavy, block-focused kit) and you can slot two Eikon abilities at a time from whichever you’ve unlocked, building a loadout the way a Devil May Cry player picks a weapon set for a mission. Suzuki’s fingerprints are clearest in the way the game scores you: after every fight a rank appears — not attached to a story consequence, just a private readout of parry timing and combo variety — which is a character-action convention Final Fantasy has never used before and never needed to, because Final Fantasy fights didn’t used to have combos worth grading.

The systems reader’s question is whether that transplant actually holds up divorced from a Devil May Cry mission structure — short, replayable, built around scoring. It mostly does, because the Eikon boss fights are where the borrowed grammar earns its keep: these are enormous, multi-phase set-pieces (Ifrit versus Garuda, Ifrit versus Titan, a late fight against Bahamut that trades the ground-level camera for something closer to a mech duel) built with clear tells, punishable openings, and a rhythm that rewards the parry window Suzuki tuned. They are, straightforwardly, some of the best boss encounters Square Enix has shipped in a decade, because they’re built by someone whose entire career is boss encounters.

Where the systems fight the story

The cost shows up between the Eikon fights, in the long stretches of side content and regular enemy encounters that make up most of a forty-hour playthrough. A character-action combat system is built to be replayed in short, self-contained missions where the player chases a rank; Final Fantasy XVI instead pours that combat into an open, semi-linear RPG structure with sidequests, hub towns, and a levelling curve, and the friction between the two design traditions never fully resolves. Trash encounters against wolves or bandits use the same combo toolkit as the Ifrit fight, at a fraction of the stakes, and the game doesn’t have the mission- select structure that would let a player skip to the good part on repeat. The RPG scaffolding — experience points, gear with numerical stat increases, a hub town with fetch quests — sits uneasily against a combat system that doesn’t actually care what your stats are, because Suzuki’s system is about player skill, not character build.

That tension is worth naming honestly rather than waving away, because it’s the same tension every action-RPG hybrid runs into and few solve. Final Fantasy XVI solves the fight itself brilliantly and solves the pacing around the fight only adequately — the difference between the two halves of the game is stark enough that long stretches (a mid-game hub sequence juggling sidequests before the plot lets you leave) feel like padding around the parts that justified Suzuki’s hire.

The accessory rack as an honest admission

One of the more revealing design choices sits in the equipment menu rather than the fight itself: a set of accessories that, equipped, will auto-execute combos, auto-dodge on a timed press, or otherwise soften the exact skill checks Suzuki’s system is built around. They’re opt-in, clearly telegraphed, and stackable, so a player can dial the game from full character- action difficulty down to something closer to a power-fantasy button-masher without a difficulty-select screen ever using that word. It’s a smart piece of design honesty: rather than pretend a mainline Final Fantasy audience — used to menus, not parry windows — will universally take to Suzuki’s system, the game builds an off-ramp directly into the gear you’re already managing. The interesting tell is how good the fights feel once you take the training wheels off, which suggests the accessories exist less because the base combat is too hard and more because Square Enix understood exactly how large a departure it was making from what Final Fantasy fans were promised by the numeral on the box.

Valisthea, Bearers, and the tonal swing

The story leans harder into grim political fantasy than any mainline Final Fantasy before it — Valisthea’s kingdoms are built on Mothercrystals that produce magic, and the people who can cast that magic, Bearers, are treated as a servant class, worked and discarded. Clive’s arc runs from a betrayed protector of his younger brother Joshua (bonded to the Phoenix) through years as a mercenary carrying that grief, to becoming the Dominant of Ifrit himself. It’s a mature-rated Final Fantasy in tone as much as content — the violence is graphic, the politics are closer to Game of Thrones than to the series’ usual crystal-fantasy register — and the game earns that tonal shift mostly through Clive’s specific, small-scale grief rather than the larger war, which stays comparatively thin as written.

Torgal, Clive’s wolf companion, is the one piece of old-school Final Fantasy warmth let into the cast, and the game is smart enough to let him carry entire scenes without dialogue.

Staging the Eikon fights as escalating cameras

The craft worth naming specifically is how each Eikon fight changes the camera contract rather than just the enemy’s health bar. The Ifrit-versus-Garuda fight plays at roughly the scale of the rest of the game — large but grounded, Clive-sized against a slightly bigger Clive-sized opponent. The Titan fight breaks that scale once, mid-fight, into a building-sized brawl staged like a kaiju film, then hands control back at normal scale for the finish. The Bahamut fight breaks it again, further, into what’s functionally an aerial dogfight with context-sensitive prompts standing in for a genre neither Suzuki nor the rest of the team had built a full control scheme for. That’s a legitimate design risk — quick-time-adjacent sequences are exactly the kind of thing a systems-literate audience distrusts on sight — and it mostly earns the trust back by keeping each escalation short enough that it reads as a fourth act rather than a new genre bolted onto the game. The trick isn’t the spectacle itself, which any studio with the budget can buy; it’s the discipline of returning to the grounded combat immediately afterward, so the game never lets the scale-up become the new baseline the way some open-world blockbusters do once they’ve shown you a flying mount.

The ancestor worth naming

The instinct to trace this back to Devil May Cry is correct but incomplete — the deeper ancestor is Square Enix’s own history of trying to reconcile spectacle combat with RPG structure, a fight the studio has been having since Kingdom Hearts first grafted real-time action onto turn-based sensibilities in 2002. Final Fantasy XVI is the cleanest version of that argument the company has produced, mostly because it stopped hedging: no menu-based option, no turn-based mode to fall back on, just Suzuki’s system, all the way down. Readers who want the fuller pivot from turn-based tradition toward real-time systems should also read Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: the middle chapter with everything in it, which solves a version of the same problem with a hybrid ATB system instead of abandoning turns outright, and makes an instructive contrast in how much of the old system a Final Fantasy game can shed before it stops feeling like one.

The verdict: the Eikon fights alone justify the hire and the pivot, and the game around them is a good, occasionally padded vehicle for delivering roughly six of the best boss fights Square Enix has ever shipped. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much patience a reader has for hub-town fetch quests between spectacle — the same patience the series has asked of players since its earliest sprawling entries, just redirected here toward waiting for the next fight instead of the next dungeon.

Spoilers below

Joshua’s apparent death at the game’s opening — burned, along with the Phoenix Gate and most of Clive’s home — turns out to be a survival: Joshua is alive throughout, having been the actual Dominant of Phoenix all along rather than Clive, a fact withheld from both the player and Clive himself for the majority of the runtime. The reveal recontextualises Clive’s entire arc as one built on a false premise of guilt, and the endgame’s darkest turn — Ultima, the being manipulating Valisthea’s entire crystal-and-Bearer economy from behind the scenes — casts the Mothercrystals themselves as a farming operation for a magic-eating god rather than a natural resource, which retroactively indicts every kingdom’s political structure the game spent thirty hours building up as sympathetic infrastructure.

What to play next: for the parry-and-boss-fight rhythm without the RPG scaffolding getting in the way, Sekiro: the rhythm game with a sword runs the same idea with nothing softening it.