Final Fantasy XVI: Realistiske temaer og mature rating.

Final Fantasy XVI Rated Mature for Realistic Themes

Final Fantasy XVI will be the first mainline-numbered Final Fantasy game to receive a Mature rating. While some may assume that developer Creative Business Unit III wanted to make a more violent game to accompany its new action-heavy combat, that’s not the case. According to various members of CBUIII, I spoke with for our FFXVI cover story, the rating was just something the team thought about a little bit – it came naturally.

“We actually get this question quite a bit – people ask us if the rating went up because we wanted to make a more violent game, and the answer to that is no,” says producer Naoki Yoshida. “On the outside, it doesn’t appear to have changed. You still have your E, you still have your teen, and you still have your mature. The issue is that over the years, as more games have come out, and as we move forward, the rules within those have actually changed quite a bit.”

Yoshida says that the team understands that these ratings are ultimately meant to protect children from sensitive content, but it’s still more restrictive for what a studio can do in a game. He says that studios could do “much, much more” before, but now “we’re finding out that we’re not able to do as much to get the same rating that we did before.”

One example he gives is that it’s okay to violently kill a zombie today, but if that character is a human, it will push the rating more. Assume someone gets pierced with an arrow, Yoshida says that it won’t be allowed with a teen rating anymore – it will immediately take you to the M rating, “because it’s too realistic now” in cases where games are pushing for higher-quality visuals. He also brings up the differences in rating systems between different world regions.

However, CBUIII still made the game it wanted. “We wanted to create something that was based in reality, that felt really real, and talked about complex and violent themes like war,” says Yoshida. “You can’t have a war without certain imagery. Clive is in the trenches, he’s fighting for his life, he’s covered in dirt and blood. Once you start limiting that, when you’re trying to create something that’s very real, it takes the player out of reality and makes it feel more like a game. That’s what we didn’t want. So instead of maintaining the teen rating, which would have limited many of the things we could do and show in cutscenes, the mature rating allows us to tell the story we wanted to tell in the way we wanted to tell it.”

Pushing for Realism

Director Hiroshi Takai echoes Yoshida’s thoughts, stating that the mature rating has “allowed us to show more now, with fewer restrictions on our storytelling and the way we tell our story.”

“With the new generations of hardware and the visuals becoming more and more realistic, if you want to tell a story that feels genuine, it has to look genuine as well,” says Takai. “By showing visuals, it’s hard to keep it within the confines of a lower rating, because it becomes so visceral, and I think you can see this trend since PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, where the graphics became a little bit more realistic.”

Localisation director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox says that the mature rating allowed him to expand the dialogue, as “there are certain words that will kick you from a teen rating to a mature rating, and if you’re stuck with a teen rating, you have to avoid those types of words, even though the character seems like a character who would use those types of words.”

“Like it or not, many people in the world curse, and it’s part of how they communicate,” continues Koji. “Having a whole world where nobody curses at all, it just doesn’t feel like a real world.” He adds that this doesn’t mean every character will curse – there are, after all, people in the real world who don’t.

A Realistic Feel

If you’ve been following FFXVI’s trailers, you’ve already heard and seen how that mature rating manifests in the game’s action and dialogue. That rating (and tone) also carries through the hours of the game I played for this cover story trip, and I can’t wait to see how far this game pushes it this summer.

Source: Game Informer.