Those of you who have played
the recent Final Fantasy XVI demo for PlayStation 5 will have likely experienced the Chirada and Suparna fight in the “Eikonic Challenge” section of the demo. This boss battle sees you facing off against Garuda’s two sisters, much as you do in the Howling Eye trials in Final Fantasy XIV, and makes heavy use of telegraphed attacks that go off shortly after appearing. This latter aspect in particular feels like it’s been pulled
directly from Final Fantasy XIV’s intricately designed boss battles, and ensures that combat is always more than simply getting up close and spamming attacks as much as possible.
This sort of thing shows up elsewhere, too; again in the Eikonic Challenge section, Benedikta will make use of abilities that will be familiar to anyone who fought Garuda in Final Fantasy XIV, but Final Fantasy XVI’s ability to evade in real-time puts an interesting new twist on dealing with them. These mechanics are comfortingly familiar for those who have played and loved Final Fantasy XIV, but work well on their own merits for those who skipped it.
The Final Fantasy XI homages, meanwhile, are a little more subtle. Probably the most obvious is in the naming conventions of the goblin characters seen in the Stillwind section of the main demo. “Goblin Mugger” and “Goblin Weaver” enemies will be well familiar to anyone who played Final Fantasy XI — in fact, they were usually enough to make solo players run away screaming during their early levels — though here they look a little different, since they don’t wear the masks they’re typically seen wearing in both Final Fantasy XI and XIV.
Mechanically, there’s one big carry-over from Final Fantasy XI to XVI, and that’s Magic Burst. In Final Fantasy XI, a big emphasis in high-level party play was creating “Skillchains”, which involved players setting off specific combinations of weapon skills in succession, one after another, in order to create specific elemental effects and deal heavy damage. The effectiveness of these could be further improved if a mage tossed an appropriate-element spell into the mix as a final flourish, and this was known as Magic Burst.
Auch wäre eine Anpassung der Steuerung super. Alle 3 Schemas sind nicht optimal. Aber ja mal sehen. Wenn die Story auch nur annähernd FF14 Niveau hat dann kommt da was ganz großes.
