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The developers of Final Fantasy 16 said that players will need about 35 hours to complete the game’s story and 70-80 hours for everything else.
In an interview with Famitsu, director Hiroshi Takai and producer Naoki Yoshida revealed that they thought about the timing of Final Fantasy 16’s story mode with gamers having a busy life outside of video games, so they wrote it in such a way that players could only complete the bare minimum if they are too busy to do the side quests. Initially, the team aimed for 20 hours, but the additional content they put into the game brought the story time to 35 hours.
When the development of the game was just starting, I had the idea in my head that gamers these days are very busy with other things, so I wanted them to be able to at least try to play through the story. I thought the game could be completed in about 20 hours, but more and more was pushed into it.
“Final Fantasy 16 is a story-driven game that will take you on a rollercoaster ride,” said Takai. “You’ll see Clive’s entire life path and it will probably take around 35 hours to complete the game. If we include side content, it’s double that.”
By “twice as much”, Takai means that the playtime for spin-off content is between 70 and 80 hours, depending on how much players take on – and there’s a lot to be done. In order to reach the maximum playtime that Yoshida and Takai talked about, players will need to complete side quests, upgrade abilities to the max, purchase all accessories, and complete all monster hunts.
In addition to the story mode and side missions, the game will also feature a New Game+ mode dubbed Final Fantasy Mode, which will allow players to transfer statistics from their previous game file to the new one. The difficulty level of Final Fantasy Mode seems to be the equivalent of Kingdom Hearts’ Proud Mode, which means it will take you even longer to complete everything. And for players who want even more, there will be a leaderboard to compete against other players around the world.
