Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida said during the RPG’s latest previews that Game of Thrones was a big inspiration – and it turns out the team didn’t really have a choice in that. Yoshida told Eurogamer in an interview that he made the core team buy the entire Game of Thrones box set and watch the full thing.
“As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that I like my fantasy based more in reality,” Yoshida said. “We wanted to create something that really resonated with a lot of people. And when we saw how Game of Thrones, and before that the Song of Ice and Fire series, has really resonated with players, we knew that this was something that we wanted to do as well.”
“When we first started creating the game, we had our core team of about 30 members very early on buy the blu-ray boxset of Game of Thrones and required everyone to watch it, because we wanted this type of feel.”
It might sound authoritarian, but at least some members of the team were keen to experience as much Western grim fantasy as possible.
“If we want to create something that has that kind of Western feel, we have to look to the West for that kind of inspiration,” art director Hiroshi Minagawa said. “And so things like Game of Thrones are things that we look to, because that type of stuff does not exist where we live in Japan.”
From the early hours of the game that our Ryan Woodrow played during a recent Final Fantasy 16 preview, it seems like the switch to high fantasy paid off.
Final Fantasy 16 launches for PS5 on June 22, 2023, and if you know ancient Greek, make sure to avoid the victory fanfare and its spoilers.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
