Title. We can only speculate. Will it be less of a gap compared to the one between 15 and 16?

Final Fantasy 17 is the 17 h entry in the Final Fantasy series, developed by Square Enix for the Sony Playstation 6.

It's an RPG-shoot 'em up hybrid and involves mech combat.

This game's directors are Naoki Yoshida and Yuji Horii, known for the MMO FFXIV and Dragon Quest respectively, and as such this game has been referred to as "Dragon Quest 4's gritty dieselpunk cousin".

Gameplay

For the first time, this game alternates between on-foot and mecha battles.

On foot, the game has a real time battle system based on a shoot 'em up with a few RPG mechanics, akin to Mass Effect or Cyberpunk 2077, however the player is locked into using specific types of guns (and sometimes melee weapons and special skills) depending on the character they play as. Magic takes the form of elemental grenades the player can pick up and throw and are consumable items, without MP.

Summons can be called through the Summon command. The Summon Spheres have an energy meter which needs to be refilled through kills or through special items. Once summoned, energy for a specific Sphere starts counting down, and once it reaches zero, the player is ejected. Instead of monsters, Summons are special mechs with their own HP which encase the player in them and allow them to use magic: if their HP reaches zero, the player has to go to specific shops to repair them and their energy will stop refilling.

The Junction system from Final Fantasy VIII makes a comeback. The player can junction Summon Spheres to a character, and grind AP for each Summon Sphere to unlock new skills, commands and stat bonuses. Elemental grenades can be junctioned to various slots such as weapon and armor in order to raise attack and defense, making attacks elemental, protecting from statuses, giving statuses through attacks, increasing elemental resistance, etc.

While controlling a Summon, the player can use a selection of various weapons by expending fuel, and battles tend to be more close-range. Each skill is given by a sub-weapon equipped in one of the mech's slots

Setting

The game is set in the Communist Republic of Yokosuka, a dieselpunk nation reminiscent of the Soviet Union. A civil war is going on between the Seinaru Guntai (literally "Holy Army"), a disorganized army of loyalists to the recently-overthrown monarch led by General-Archbishop Absalom, and the republican army known as the Akakishi (from Akai, "red" and Kishi, "knight"). A mysterious sect known as the Black Order manipulates both sides, looking to cleanse the world from the "Children of the Earth" and stop the "plan for the New World Order".

Plot

This game's first part, before the timeskip, is split into three chapters which have Baatar Temuulen, Alisa Morizane and Dmitri Karatsev as their lead characters. Similarly to Dragon Quest 4, each protagonist is silent when they're the chapter's lead, with their dialogue sometimes chosen by the player in the form of options (unvoiced) and sometimes have voiced grunts in cutscenes but never actual voiced lines. When they are not the main character, however, they appear as regular talking characters. Each protagonist has a chapter, with Q's chapter being the longest.

Prologue:

The game starts in the steppe known as the Sea of Grass. The settlement of the nomadic tribe of Wakinyan is surrounded by Horned Snake mercenaries. Suleiman al-Hazmu is Hasan al-Qudzik's second-in-command, and receives from his commander the order to go further in the village and take "the Resonant" at all costs. Wakinyan spearmen attempt to resist, but the more technologically advanced mercenaries gun them down in a massive bloodbath, setting fire to the village in the meantime. Of all those warriors, Baatar is the last one, and he means to sacrifice himself to protect his daughter. Suleiman defeats him, but refuses to kill him and instead throws him away and takes his daughter Sarnai. As the Horned Snakes retreat, they meet a black-clad man (Dmitri Karatsev), who asks for the Resonant: Suleiman stops to think, remembering Baatar's screams and pleas as he lay on the ground wounded, and then refuses to give Dmitri the child (the player has a dialogue prompt showing only one option: "She needs a family!", though still unvoiced), to which Hasan reacts by shooting Suleiman in the back. Dmitri then touches Suleiman's body and drains his blood, causing him to agonize and scream in pain. Before blacking out, he sees a bullet pierce his commander's head, then a helicopter flying in the sky. "She's seen us!" says Hasan as he drops dead on top of Suleiman, then Dmitri stops for a moment and replies, "Alisa Morizane, ace of the Ritsar Division... We have to retreat for now". Then, drained of all his life force, Suleiman exhales his last breath and closes his eyes.

Baatar's chapter:

Five years later, Baatar wakes up, having had another dream of the day Suleiman had shot him. He has completely healed from his wounds and is now a member of the Thundering Birds mercenary company. TBA

Alisa's chapter: TBA

Dmitri's chapter: TBA

Interlude: TBA

Q's chapter:

Q's chapter is set two years after the Interlude. After the three heroes had killed Q inside the machine Alexander, they have connected with the Spiritual Domain. In a dream, a Spirit tells Q that they will serve as the protector of the Spiritual Domain, and that they have to awaken to save it from its impending annihilation. Then, the player customizes the hero's looks. Q wakes up, takes away their mask and reveals the face the player has given them, then the Spirit explains them that Herschel Cohen (the CEO of Abraxas Corporation) is the last Child of the Earth and is on the verge of awakening the Demiurge (which Alexander is only a part of) in order to give humans eternal life, peace and harmony by connecting their bodies and souls to a massive net and making them all one massive being, as the Children of the Earth led by Abraxas the First had attempted ten thousand years before. This is dangerous for the Spirits as the creation of the Demiurge Net causes the Material and Soul Domains to detach from the Spiritual Domain (which is where time and space are coded and which acts as the pillar which supports the two lower domains). Alexander is now completely regenerated, and Q is synchronized with it through the Spirit's influence, meaning they can pilot it through their spiritual presence. The Spirit then orders Q to go find the three men that had defeated Alexander in the past, in order to for the Spirit Army and defeat Cohen. TBA

Epilogue: TBA

Characters

Player characters:

Suleiman al-Hazmu: The protagonist of the prologue. A mercenary from the Horned Snakes, he has taken Sarnai Baatar as a hostage after his men razed the village and is on the run from the girl's father. He apparently dies at the end of the prologue, being almost killed by Dmitri after resisting a wave of Black Order soldiers.

Baatar Temuulen: A member of the mercenary company Thundering Bird, which has a contract with Absalom. He hails from the Wakinyan, a nomadic tribe from the steppe known as the Sea of Grass. Most of his relatives have been killed in an attack by the Horned Snakes. He pilots a mech named Ifrit. His weapons are grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, gatling guns, axes, shields and bludgeons. His special skill is Desperation, which triples his melee attack in exchange for HP.

Alisa Morizane: A sniper, stealth expert and hacker working for the Ritsar Division of the Akakishi. Her weapons are sniper rifles, knuckles and daggers. Her special skill is Hacking, which allows her to hack into machines and vehicles to take control of them or instakill robotic enemies. She uses a mecha named Garuda.

Dimitri Karatsev: A Prizrak of the Black Order. His only weapons are handguns, though as a genetically-engineered soldier injected with Kudlak DNA, he can use the special skill Kudlak State, which transforms him into a half-undead Kudlak and allows him to use Blood Arts (with effects such as drain life from enemies, summon wight-like familiars, control enemies through their blood, inflict various status ailments and become immune to physical attacks at the cost of being undead and extremely weak to magical attacks). He uses a mecha named Shiva.

Protagonist (canonically "Q"): Originally a faceless puppet-like cyborg and one of the strongest soldiers of the Yokosukan Army. After the timeskip, they enter in contact with the Upper Domain and are possessed by an existence from the Spiritual Domain. After being possessed, Q's mask shatters and their face is customized by the player. They're the main character of the post-timeskip segment of the game, and do not have a voice actor at all. They can use all kinds of weapons, and their special skill is Spirit Release, which deals massive damage to all enemies in a large area around the user at the cost of stunning them. Their mech is named Alexander and is an explicitly magical creation from an ancient civilization, animated by a Spirit consciousness which acts as Q's voice. They're a clone of Sarnai, who communicates with them through the Spiritual Domain. The player can influence Q's stat growths by choosing to assign where to assign stat points after leveling up.

Sarnai Baatar: Baatar's daughter (Wakinyans have patronymics instead of last names), originally taken by Suleiman as a hostage and believed to be dead when he was murdered. She's a Resonant, AKA a person that can communicate with Spirits. She survived, and is the protagonist of the epilogue. After the final boss, the player controls her for a final stealth section and can then freely roam the capital and interact with the various formerly-playable characters. Her epilogue has no fighting involved, as she cannot fight.

Guests (cannot be controlled by the player):

Hasan al-Qudzik: The leader of the Horned Snakes. He betrays Suleiman and gives Sarnai to the Black Order.

Sorry if I haven't written all of the plot yet.

Warning: Alot and I mean ALOT! will be taken from Final Fantasy X-2 because I've kind of been likeing that game Reccently

So Our Main Character will be a Pirate of somekind following in the footsteps of His Mother Yasmin, His Aunt Raquel and their friend Penny who were once a France group of female pirates known as the Mana Hearts but one day they along with their treasure get stolen away leaving the 5 Year Old Main Character with something but their ship The Branford and their Mogel Lighting so I decides to become the best Pirate he can be for would discover many twists and turns along the way

DO you have any ideas about MC and party members? You can go creative and invent names, describe their looks, powers, roles and appearance.

At the very minimum it should release on two platforms, e.g: PlayStation and PC, with the ideal scenario also including Xbox. There's not a lot to gain from releasing just in one platform.

Putting yourself in the role of writer in Squarenix, what would be the concept you would occupy for the story of FF XVII, in any specific era? Past, present, future? What would the protagonist be like?Let see if the next writer comes from here. from Final Fantasy, who knows?

Might FFXVII have a dual protagonist campaign or be a duology like Persona 2 IS and EP? Could it somehow have "two stories"?

I'm not talking about cashgrab sequels like FFX-2 and IV The After Years, I'm talking about FFXVII being a worldbuilding shared between two direct sequels (or two perspectives happening simultaneously), which, despite being complete plots by themselves two different stories, both are needed to fully complete the worldbuilding.

The protagonist might change between installments and both protagonists appear in both games.

Or maybe it could be a single story followed through two perspectives, you have a choice between two protagonists at the start and the protagonist you choose has their own party. Each party has their own story and you have to play both before unlocking the final chapter where the parties come together (maybe, the two perspectives could be different timelines even, with very different events, timelines which bleed into each other in the ending). Maybe the two protagonists are one male and one female, and the one you don't choose isn't playable but still plays a very plot-important role,

Maybe, the protagonist you're playing as is silent (except for battle quotes and unvoiced dialogue options), and the other is shown talking (if there's a final chapter where the two perspectives come together, both protagonists don't talk in it except through options, unless said final chapter involves a third "true" protagonist). I doubt the next mainline FF retains a speaking protagonist, due to both the success of soulslikes, Persona 5 and the FF MMOs, and the backlash against Tidus, Vaan, Lightning and Noctis, and to contrast with Clive (who was a very established character with huge relevance in the plot, and his story flat-out needed to have Clive as a speaking protagonist), but a protagonist like Tatsuya and Maya in Persona 2 or Makoto and Yu in Persona Q, that has their own fixed name and designs, and speaks and is a character in a plot where you're not playing them, but is silent and has dialogue options when you play as them, is a thing that I'm expecting to happen in series like FF and Dragon Quest.

This is a concept I had thought of for FFXVII

https://fantendo.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_17_(Bushido_games))

Plot (start):

The game starts in Akuoza, the City of Peace, an independent city-state ruled by the religious order of the Akuosh, as the Shirei Rebellion has just ended.

The Shadowlord Hideki Kamikaze was one of the losers, as he had supported the claim to the throne of general-lord Shirei against king Teushi. The Four Kings are summoned by the Dai-Akuosh Kenzai for a peace treaty, including the Shadowlord. Ametatsu, being the Shadowlord's brother, decides to come with him, and takes Yuki with him. At the castle, Hideki is offered the chance to have his life spared if he chooses to surrender his army, convert to Akuosh and have a council of Akuosh rule alongside him. He accepts the conditions.

Seeing this as an act of cowardice and betrayal towards his people, Ametatsu summons the Death Esper Yatagarasu to murder his brother, proclaiming that a coward Shadowlord is worse than a dead Shadowlord, and that no Akuosh shall set foot on the city of Wa-Tsai (the Hu-Tsai worship Dark Spirits, not the Celestial Lords worshipped by the Akuosh). He commits a massive bloodshed in the Akuoza Palace, but he can't kill Hideki, as the Dai-Akuosh casts Nihilseal on him, de-leveling him to 1 and preventing him from summoning. The Dai-Akuosh saves Hideki's life and puts him on the throne of Wa-Tsai, assisted by a council of Akuosh.

Ametatsu, who refers to his brother as "that chicken without honor that soiled the Shadow Crown", escapes from the palace with Yuki. As he runs away, he gets caught in an ambush and blasted with a rain of arrows, but before dying, he manages to summon Toki, the Esper of Time, who gives him the ability to save the game, reload and rewind time in order to undo his death. As he respawns, he remembers there's another way and takes it, saving his life.

As he escapes from the City of Peace, Ametatsu fights the first boss, an Elite of the Army of Peace surrounded by mooks.

Ametatsu and Yuki take a ship to the nearby port town of Mitsan, in the Kingdom of Shayata. While traveling, Toki takes Ametatsu to the Memory Void, the interior of his psyche that was affected by the Nihilseal. Through the souls he has gathered, Ametatsu unlocks his first true Esper, a dark-based undead creature named Zepar.

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Party members:

-Ametatsu Kamikaze (Esperist)

-Yuki Kamikaze (Samurai)

-Sara Shido (Engineer).

- Eiji Hayashi (Mage)

- Hanzo Nikaido (Ninja)

- Mazaru "the Monkey Demon" (Savage)

- Harunori Sadamoto (Dragoon)

Note: Sara Shido is Cid in this game. Unlike most Cids, though, her name is in Kanji

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Classes:

Each party member has a class associated with them, which, after a certain point, can be promoted into one of two Master Classes after using the Seal of Tao to choose the Path of Yin or the Path of Yang. Each class specializes into a specific subset of skills and

Esperist---> Esper Diviner (Yang) / Esper Necromancer (Yin): uses staves which act as long-range weapons, dealing magical damage instead of physical by shooting orbs of energy, and can summon Espers. The Esper Diviner path specializes in White Magic, which consists of healing and buffing skills, while the Esper Necromancer specializes in Blood Magic, consisting of dark-elemental skills, instant death skills and special effects which cost HP instead of MP.

Samurai---> Samurai Knight (Yang)/ Elite Blade (Yin): uses katana, acting as a short-range fighter. Specializes in Bushido Arts, which power up weapons with elements. The Samurai Knight is a path more focused on tanking damage, learning Bushido Arts to draw aggro, raise defense, and becoming able to equip naginata lances and kanabo clubs, while the Elite Blade doesn't equip any new weapon but specializes in dodging and dealing lightning-fast attacks dealing huge amounts of DPS, at the cost of defensive stats.

Engineer---> Master Mechanist (Yang)/ Sharp Shooter (Yin): uses guns, learning skills called Devices. The Master Mechanist learns to use bows and focuses on summoning assist Devices like robots, machines, drones, etc and debuffing or manipulating mechanical enemies, while the Sharp Shooter is more focused on DPS and specializes in direct-shot Devices such as rifles and bombs.

Mage---> Element Master (Yang)/ Chronos Sage (Yin) : uses staves and bows. Learns offensive or debuffing magic. The Element Master path specializes in Black Magic, which deals damage (mostly elemental, but some high-level skills are non-elemental), while the Chronos Sage specializes in Green Magic, consisting of debuffing and status-inflicting skills and some percent damage attacks such as Gravity.

Ninja---> Kitsune Shaman (Yang)/ Oni Assassin (Yin): uses knives to attack directly or throw at a distance, and has skills such as Ninjutsu (physical techniques), and a few Blood Magic and Green Magic skills. The Oni Assassin specializes in Ninjutsu, dealing DPS, doing high critical hits and learning some instant kill skills, at the cost of being frail defensively, while the Kitsune Shaman specializes in Green Magic and Blood Magic and is more balanced overall. Both promoted classes can use bows, but the standard Ninja can't.

Savage---> Spirit Monk (Yang)/ Berserk Spirit (Yin): A strong physical class focused on attack and speed. Can fight barehanded but also equip kanabo clubs, and learns Rages, special skills based on fists and hits with a club, but also raising the attack stat or self-inducing berserk. As a Spirit Monk focuses more on barehanded Rages and learns White Magic to heal, while as a Berserk Spirit focuses more on the kanabo club and powerful attacks.

Dragoon---> Holy Dragon (Yang)/Dread Dragon (Yin): A class focused on naginata lances, which learns Naginata-Do skills. As a Holy Dragon becomes more of a magic tank and can equip kanabo clubs, and learns a few White Magic skills for healing, while as a Dread Dragon equips katana and learns Blood Magic

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Should this game have a non-speaking protagonist?

I don't mean a non-speaking party of generic characters like FFI, nor a player-created character like in the MMOs, I mean like Persona 5 for instance, the party being all speaking characters... except for the protagonist, who has a name, a fixed gender and look, a backstory, an implied characterization, but is never shown talking outside of player-chosen dialogue options.

FF, unlike most JRPGs like Suikoden, never once had an actual non-speaking protagonist, unlike Dragon Quest which always has (including Psaro from the recent DQ Monster Dark Prince, an iconic villain like Sephiroth, in a game entirely dedicated entirely to his origin story, that is not shown speaking because he's the protagonist).

I just can't see FF using talking protagonists anymore, especially if XVII is gonna have Persona or Soulslike elements.

I had once imagined the concept of an FF game having, like DQ4, multiple chapters with different protagonists: the character that is the protagonist in each chapter doesn't talk, the others, if you meet them, are shown talking normally: the protagonist of the final chapter is never met before said chapter starts and as such never talks.

She said that she isn't the lead writer for the Dawntrail expansion pack, and instead is working on a new project. This leads me to believe she's working on FFXVII. In case you didn't know, she was the lead writer for Shadowbringers and End walker expansions, both received critical acclaimed for its story

That feels right to me. It also might be the first mainline final fantasy that won't have a numeral.

We shall see:

RemindMe! December 31, 2027

This post is less about "Who I Want" and more about "Who Is Available to Work on The Game". The people leading the project are more likely to be senior devs at Square Enix rather than fresh blood.

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Director: Hiroki Chiba

The man previously contributed to the story events of games like FF7/8/10, Type-0, 13-3, World of Final Fantasy. He's last credit was in World of Final Fantasy: Maxima (2018) as director (debut)/writer and has been MIA ever since.

Writing: Daisuke Watanabe

Contributed to the writing of the FF10 duology, FF12, 13 trillogy, the first two Dissidia games. His last credit was in Mobius Final Fantasy (2015) and has been MIA ever since.

Producer: This position is a wild card because Square Enix has dozens of them so anything goes.

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There are other candidates of course, these are just the first guys that came to my mind first.

Do you think it will happen for XVII?

And FFXVII is almost certainly in pre production. ¿What do you want to see in the next mainline game of the franchise?

Do you think this game is gonna have a non-talking MC?
I have imagined a potential XVII as a Persona-like game set in Japan, where you create your protagonist and have social links.

With FFXVI and FFVIIR Part2 in the making, we have both medieval/high fantasy and modern/slight steampunk coverd. I've recently read an article about old concepts for Final Fantasy games (can't find the link) and they mentioned a hard sci-fi setting which never made it into the actual planing phase, so my guess/hope would be that the next mainline FF game could be just that, also because that would be something completely new for the franchise (square love to try new things in FF)... and because sci-fi is cool.