Final Fantasy 16's Lead Developers are an All-Star Line-Up, Including a Combat Director from Devil May Cry 5

Final Fantasy 16's development team consists of an all-star line-up, with several industry veterans from not just the Final Fantasy series, but Dragon Quest and Devil May Cry .

Shared on the game's Twitter (below), Final Fantasy 16's combat director, Ryota Suzuki, was a gameplay lead on Dragon's Dogma, an effects designer on Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and a designer on Devil May Cry 5. It seems fair to say that the action elements of the new RPG come with some pedigree.

Producer Naoki Yoshida, while most known for turning Final Fantasy 14 Online from a dead-on-arrival game into an incredibly successful MMO, has also worked on Dragon Quest X and Dragon Quest Builders, and director Hiroshi Takai has plenty of JRPG chops having previously worked on Final Fantasy 5, SaGa Frontier, and The Last Remnant.

An introduction to the team behind Final Fantasy XVI. #FF16 pic.twitter.com/NpFv0a6XBe

— FINAL FANTASY XVI (@finalfantasyxvi) June 3, 2022

The Final Fantasy 14 experience goes deeper as creative director and screenplay writer Kazutoyo Maehiro and art director Hiroshi Minagawa worked on the game with Yoshida, alongside character design lead Kazuya Takahashi who also worked on Final Fantasy 12 and Tactics.

The game's music is being composed by Masayoshi Soken, who created most of the music in Final Fantasy 14 and its expansions plus the Nanashi no Game series and music from Mario Sports Mix.

PlayStation's June State of Play showed a new trailer for Final Fantasy 16 and revealed its release window as summer 2023 for PS5 and PC after a lot of teasing from Yoshida.

The producer has been fairly open about its development timeline though, saying in July last year that the story and English voice over was almost complete but the game was later delayed as a result of COVID-19.

This Final Fantasy news was just one of several announcements made at the State of Play, with everything else you need to know available in IGN's round-up of the event.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.