Final Fantasy 16 looks like an intense action-RPG with an emphasis on colossal summons, coming summer 2023

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The first trailer since FF16's reveal packs in a *lot*.

Final Fantasy 16 is coming in summer 2023, Square Enix announced with a new trailer today. This trailer is our first look at Final Fantasy 16 since its reveal in 2020, and it spends a good chunk of its three minute runtime devoted to the series' iconic summons like Ifrit, Bahamut and Shiva. And they look huge. Like, Greek Titans huge.

The summons have health bars on the screen and look like they'll be directly controllable by players, or at least be directly involved in combat in some way; they're definitely not just cinematics that play after tapping a menu item. There's a lot of swirly action-RPG combat in here in general, in keeping with the trend of the recent Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Stranger of Paradise.

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Square Enix Sony State of Play 2022 official screencap
(Image credit: Square Enix)

The trailer also gave us a look at some of the incredibly medieval locations in the game and they sure look a lot like Final Fantasy 14. If you slap some action bars on there and told me that was Ishgard, I would believe you. Producer Naoki Yoshida isn't subtle with his experience bringing the MMO back from the brink and it shows.

The footage we saw of Final Fantasy 16 was tied to the PlayStation 5 and so was the Summer 2023 date at the end. The PC release is still an unknown at the moment. Final Fantasy 15 took a whole year to come to PC, so it might not be a while until we see it outside Sony's platform.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).