Look, normally we don’t cover rumours or ‘leaks’ here at WellPlayed unless it’s a sure thing and we won’t have egg on our faces when the time comes. Sometimes though, it’s fun to speculate, and so the following should be taken with a hefty grain of salt.
After being rumoured for a long time, and once thought to be shown at the PlayStation 5 event that Sony held back in June, it seems that a few simple retweets and a domain registration have stoked the Final Fantasy XVI rumour fires once again.
Let’s look at what’s going on:
Way back in June a Resetera member by the name of Navtra predicted/leaked a large portion of what was eventually shown off at PlayStation’s June reveal event, and was completely on the money aside from one game – Final Fantasy XVI. The user has since reiterated that FF16 is indeed real, is quite far into development, and is a timed PlayStation exclusive. That’s about where this rumour ended.
Now, some fresh new ‘evidence’ has surfaced that includes one pretty solid fact – a Final Fantasy XVI Japanese Twitter account cropped up last month out of the blue, which seems to be registered to the same email domain as all of publisher Square Enix’s other Twitter accounts (square-enix.com). The account is currently set to private, and there’s every chance it was created simply to hold the username in the face of a growing number of FF16 fan accounts, but it’s a tasty little morsel nonetheless. An English account has also been ‘registered’, although this looks to be the doing of a fan and is attached to a Google email address.
Adding further fuel is Square Enix’s Shinji Hashimoto’s Twitter activity, with the game producer enthusiastically retweeting the PlayStation 5 announcement before quickly deleting it – something that the Horizon Zero Dawn account did before the last event where that game’s sequel was announced. Again, hardly an indication of anything solid but a fun nugget of information to add to the rumour pile.
We also know that the team behind Final Fantasy XIV is hard at work on a new title following a recruitment post on the Square Enix Japan website, which was accompanied by some new artwork.
It seems like all of this has been enough to get fans riled up about the possibility of a reveal, with industry insider Imran Khan even agreeing that now would be a good time for a reveal. Some fans are obviously drawing attention to the Square Enix title that was shown last time, Project Athia, being developed by none other than the Final Fantasy XV team, though we already know that this is supposed to be a brand new IP (and was included separately in Navtra’s leaked list of games).
Seems like it would be a good time for it, yeah.
— Imran Khan (@imranzomg) September 12, 2020
Once again all of this is extremely circumstantial and should not be treated as hard evidence that Final Fantasy XVI is due to be announced any time soon, or even exists, but as someone who’s grown up with the series and is champing at the bit for a new entry it’s only natural to want to know right now!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on whether this all sounds too good to be true or if Final Fantasy fans have reason to be excited for this week’s PlayStation event, so sound off in the comments or over on our social media channels.
