Maybe you were wondering why final fantasy 16Square Enix’s highly anticipated action RPG will only be available on PlayStation 5 when it launches on June 22. Well, according to Square Enix, it’s because of “the power of PlayStation 5” that allows the team to achieve next-gen (when do we call it current-gen combat?).

FFXVI is the next installment in the long series of role-playing games. Pretty much since the game was revealed in June 2022, FFXVI has been dragged down for a variety of reasons, including the terrible explanation of why the game is so white and the apparent lack of a cross-platform release despite previous marketing saying otherwise. Now in a new IGN interviewSquare Enix shed some light on the latter of those two points.

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After playing a selected section of FFXVI, IGN found that the game’s boss battles switched seamlessly between player-controlled combat and cutscenes. The games publication asked Square Enix about this combination, and producer Naoki Yoshida said that the team was able to achieve these seamless transitions because the PS5 is hard at work in the background.

“While you are fighting Ifrit and Garuda and having that big battle [in the hands-on demo]in the background, the PlayStation 5 is loading the next scene,” said Yoshida IGN. “It is being prepared, so we can pass without problems.”

The “big battle” Yoshida talks about is an Eikon battle. These are Massive kaiju-style fights in FFXVI in which you, as protagonist Clive Rosfield, can assume the body of the iconic Summons from the series to stomp on another Summons. While they may be simpler combat situations, giving you access to a limited moveset and restricted moves, they are also a bombastic spectacle worth watching due to the stunning visuals on display. They look great! And it is these Eikon battles that seem to be the main reason why FFXVI it’s PS5-only, as combat director Ryoto Suzuki said that without Sony’s behemoth of a skyscraper-looking machine, the game would “still be in development right now.”

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“You are graphically representing the fists and the claws and the wings [of the Eikon abilities] and all in real time and all in these beautiful graphics and with all these different options,” Suzuki said. “But being able to do all of that perfectly without any [load] times is possible thanks to the power of the PS5. If we didn’t have the memory that the PS5 has, and also the transfer speed of the SSD that the PS5 has, we would still be in development right now.”

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my city reached out to Sony and Square Enix for comment.

Still, I can’t help but think that Square Enix’s logic is a bit over the top. What Yoshida and Suzuki are talking about are mere continuous cutscenes in the games, things we’ve seen in lost odyssey, Max Payne 3, Metal Gear Solid 4: Weapons of the Patriots, the opening race sequence in each Force Horizon game, and many more. Heck even super mario 64 had smooth transitions from scene to game and that was in 1996. So to say that the game can only apparently achieve next-gen combat (whatever that really means) because of the power of the PlayStation 5 seems a bit presumptuous to me. I guess we’ll know when final fantasy 16 It comes out this June.