One of the nicest features of FinalFantasy 16 is something called Active Time Lore. You can pause the game at any time – even and especially during cutscenes – to display this screen with a click of the touchpad, and it gives you handy little capsule biographies of all the characters in a scene, plus notes on the location, the factions, all the concepts the characters discuss and any jargon they use. It’s like the X-Ray feature on Amazon Prime Video that can tell you the name of a character actor that looks familiar, but for arcane video game lore.
It is handy. It is also quite necessary, because FinalFantasy 16 has a byzantine setting that even confused its own developers to begin with.
FinalFantasy 16The world contains multiple nation-states with names like Waloed, Sanbreque and Dhalmekia battling and vying for power. Each of these cultures has a different approach to things like magical uses, the giant Mother Crystals that tower over the land, and Dominants – humans who can summon and control the divine Eikons that protect each kingdom.
It’s a lot, and FinalFantasy 16 chooses to throw players into the deep end with all of these, rather than spell it out for them in exposition scenes. It’s a good choice for the story’s momentum, but it can be confusing.
This is intentional, producer Naoki Yoshida tells Polygon; when his team at Square Enix started working on the game, HBO’s Game of Thrones was at the height of its popularity and they wanted to create something equally large scale, detailed and plot heavy.
“It was always our goal to tell this kind of story, this compelling, grand, epic story, with this huge cast — something that was very complex and intertwined,” he says. “And by throwing the players in at the beginning, you prepare for what’s to come. Not necessarily overwhelming the player, but showing the player that we are trying to tell this great story very early on.”
However, the team realized that players might need a little help, when an early read script left even the game’s developers baffled and struggling to keep up.
“I think it was May 2019,” Yoshida recalls. “We pretty much brought together the main staff from all the sections that worked on the game and we all read the entire script together. […] And we found out that many of even the internal core staff were lost, they didn’t know what was going on! So we suddenly realized that we needed a way to support players who would feel the same way. Because if we as developers feel it, players definitely will.”
In addition to the Active Time Lore system, the team has included a number of characters in the Hideaway – which serves as the home base for the game’s protagonist, Clive Rosfield – that can help players keep track of everything. Loresman Harpocrates manages an unlockable library of lore fragments, while Vivan Ninetales is a political scientist who can explain the current state of the Empire and its key players, chart characters’ relationships on a radial map, and the military situation on the ground can show.
You can argue that these are solutions that shouldn’t need a well-told story and a convincing setting. But, based on a few hours of play, Active Time Lore is a simple, generous and easy-to-use feature that can be just as useful when you pick up the game after being away for a while, or when you’re trying to understand it for the first time . time. It will likely be widely copied by other games – and I can think of a few TV shows that could use it as well.
FinalFantasy 16 will be released on June 22 on PlayStation 5.