Ever since its reveal and in nearly every press cycle it has appeared in since, Final Fantasy XVI has garnered a lot of conversation over its battle system. The upcoming title in the longstanding RPG franchise known for command-based combat has foregone even referencing its turn-based history in favor of a Devil May Cry-style battle system designed, not coincidentally, by Ryota Suzuki, game designer on Devil May Cry V. While the production team has pitched this as a reinvention of the series, as many other entries have done before, it feels less like a reinvention than the final step in what has been a thirty-year evolution- an inevitable conclusion.

For me, this starts fairly early in the series’ history. Active Time Battle (ATB), a turn-based command system centered on waiting for character’s action bars to fill before selecting a move, has become so intertwined with the fabric of the series that FFXVI producer Naoki Yoshida even included a question and answer about why the game wouldn’t have it in a recent PAX panel. But while ATB was initially conceived as a way to differentiate the series from other RPGs releasing around the same time, it’s also supposed to be more engaging by keeping the player’s focus on inputting moves before enemies get another action.

It can also be read as the designers feeling a turn-based system on its own would not be engaging enough. If that were not the case, it feels like any of the 6 Final Fantasy games that used it through the PS1 era would have come up with more interesting uses for it other than certain instances where you needed to wait to attack.

Final Fantasy XII would finally see a drastic change come to ATB by, once again, making it more like an action game. In this case, it could be described as more MMO-like, but including free movement and fighting enemies directly in the overworld are two of the largest steps the series has taken in this direction. FFXII also highlighted the biggest quandary the series would face going forward, and the heart of one of the largest criticisms levied against FFXVI: how do you allow a player to control a party of characters in a more action-focused system without overloading them?

Turn-based command systems made this easy by just giving players the ability to select each move one-by-one, and basic ATB worked much in the same way, even letting players choose to pause the game while making a selection. The problem FFXII ran into was that this becomes immensely more difficult to manage when you also need to worry about each character’s positioning during a fight. Their solution to this was the Gambit system, which allowed players to program their characters with IF… THEN… statements directing them what actions to take in what situations without player input in the moment at all. It remains a brilliant but complicated solution, as it arguably fully solved the issue, but is a level of complicated that some players may immediately bounce off of.

Final Fantasy XIII, which returned to instanced ATB battles, finally implemented a huge addition to the ATB system: a stun meter. With this, characters could build or maintain the stun meter and break opponents if it filled completely. The entire system was based around it, and switching between roles to accomplish it became another layer on top of the normal battle system. Then, as their own idea to not overload the player, and maybe the greatest indictment of ATB as a whole, they decided to have the game automatically choose which moves to use for the player. Technically, you can still choose your moves, but the times you would were limited, and the ones that were even worth using outside of the auto-attack were even more limited.

In between all of this, another game had solved the issue in a separate way: Final Fantasy XI. The two Final Fantasy MMOs are considered separate from the action genre, but mostly operate similarly to a top-down dungeon crawler. Similarly to FFXII, they needed an elegant solution for players controlling a party that could all freely move around, which they found by simply making a multiplayer game. Coincidentally, Final Fantasy XIV has been updating most of the game to operate with NPC controlled party members instead, which no one seems to mind.

The other shoe finally dropped with Final Fantasy XV, which is the first game in the series that could truly be called an action game. Players controlled a single character, Noctis, and most of the controller’s inputs are dedicated to him, solely. Your interactions with the other party members during battle were mostly restricted to assisting them when they fell in battle, having them combo off your attacks on occasion, and special combo attacks with Noctis that took up the d-pad on the controller. You did not control the party, and what little control you did have taking away four buttons on the controller may have contributed to why the entire combat system feels off.

Finally, there’s 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake, the last bastion of player-controlled parties… to an extent. ATB exists in the game in name-only. Instead of a meter bar filling up over time before you can take an action, the player can do normal attacks at all times, which builds up a meter that, once full, will allow them to use one action. Because the designers decided to give the player control of every character, building up the meter through normal attacks acts to slow down the combat, acting as a buffer between needing to make a decision on what command inputs are needed. They also added a quick input menu, removing the time needed to scroll through a menu, which as we’ve established, is not exciting enough on its own. It’s a fairly nice solution, which seems to have worked for a lot of players, but is still a little archaic, leading to many players not able to make it work. It absolutely could have used the Gambit system. Just bring it back.

Once you reach FFVII Remake, it should be pretty clear how small of a jump the developers needed to take in gameplay to reach a character action game like Final Fantasy XVI. All they had to do was take out the inputs that controlled party members and use them to give the playable character more options and you have everything you need for a compelling character action game. And you still have party members supporting you in battle!

But with a gameplay director known for character action games, why, outside of the producers own comments, has FFXVI drawn the most comparisons to 2018’s God of War? To me, this all comes back to the real tying thread to the Final Fantasy series: Square Enix spending a ton of money in an attempt to make each entry the most technically ambitious and prestigious game of the year it releases.

For the longest time, they didn’t need to take much action to do this. In the SNES era, they simply differentiated from the competition and then went with a massive scope. In the PS1 and PS2 era, they did this by pumping a ton of money into CG effects. Not only were these simple solutions, but they were in line with the common perception of what a prestige game looks like. As the industry progressed into the PS3 era, however, that stopped being the case. A lot was spent on CG cutscenes, of course, but due to issues developing for the HD consoles, developers were being forced to choose where their scope would be allocated or risk extremely bloated budgets. Inevitably that lead to FFXIII being a very linear experience- something needed to change.

The big change for Final Fantasy XV was in becoming an open world game, which had become synonymous in the previous generation as the prestige genre. Considering, then, that the term “prestige game” has become synonymous with Sony first party output (both complimentary and disparagingly), it shouldn’t really be a shock that FFVII Remake basically looked and felt like one. Those games- The Last of Us, God of War, Horizon, are also, of course, action games.

But what they also do more often than blockbuster games in the past have is to not run cutscenes that pull control away from the player completely. 2018’s God of War’s biggest accomplishment isn’t in its gameplay, but its presentation, heavily advertised for how it tries to maintain a single shot throughout the entire game, where cutscenes and gameplay flow together to keep players engaged. You can see this in Final Fantasy VII Remake, but it exists even more obviously in what we’ve seen of Final Fantasy XVI. Rather than the gameplay, that’s where the comparisons come in.

But why shouldn’t it? AAA games steal from each other all the time, and if this is the developer’s ideal of how they want to tell a story, is it really so bad to emulate an aspect of your game from a critical darling that swept developer-voted awards?

I think with all this in mind, it’s important to remember that just because FFXVI is learning lessons from God of War, it’s very much its own game and designed based on the story it’s trying to tell. This is a globe-trotting adventure featuring huge open areas meant to be explored, just like past Final Fantasy games. A lot of the game is very much still a Final Fantasy game, just with a battle system the mainline series has never had.