Final Fantasy 16 is fully playable, but voice recording and combat fine-tuning are keeping it from releasing

We’re only about a year out from Final Fantasy 16 releasing – but the full game is actually playable from back to front, right now.

In an interview with PlayStation Blog, Square Enix veteran and Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida reiterated that the game is pretty much done – there’s just some tweaks, fixes and fine-tuning that needs to happen before it can be unleashed upon the world at large.

“Right now, the game is fully playable from start to finish, but we have a lot of voiceover in several languages that still need to be recorded,” he told the blog. “Final Fantasy 16 is a very action-oriented game, so we’re also doing a lot of playtesting to fine-tune the difficulty levels, as well as putting the final touches on the cutscenes, and going through a full-scale debugging process. A year is a short time in game development, so we’re all straining at the bit to get it over the line.”

Here’s hoping, then, that the game will stick to its nice-and-vague ‘Summer 2023’ release date, and that we won’t see any more delays between now and the game finally being in our out-stretched, greedy hands.

It’s not the first time that we’ve heard the game is pretty much ready to fly, either; back in April, Yoshida noted that Final Fantasy 16 is in “the final stages of development.”

In the same interview, Yoshida also noted: “For those who have grown up and realized that reality isn’t kind to you, and have drifted away from Final Fantasy, we hope that Final Fantasy 16 will be a game that can bring back the passion you once had with the series.” An odd way to say quite a nice thing.

In a spate of interviews that released today, we also learned that Final Fantasy 16 takes “inspiration from recent triple-A open world RPGs”, but isn’t actually an open world game itself.

We look forward to seeing this brave new entry in the series in all its glroy when it launches next year. So far, it has only been announced as a PS5 game – though it’s rumoured the title will hit PC (and maybe other platforms) later.