Now that Final Fantasy 16 is out, fans of other games in the series are eyeing up some of its flashy new features.
One that's caught the eye of Final Fantasy 14 fans is FF16's Active Time Lore system. The nifty quality-of-life feature allows you to quickly access the backstory of the area you're in alongside the characters relevant to the story at that moment, all you have to do is press or hold the touchpad.
While it's not wholly necessary to understand everything going on, it is one of the few things that make FF16 approachable to newcomers. The lore entries also reappear once you return to an area or when a character reappears in the story.
Given that Final Fantasy 14's story has unfurled over the past ten years – and only gets better the more you dig into it – the idea of something akin to Active Time Lore to make keeping up or serving up reminders is appealing from an approachability point of view.
It's unlikely to happen, as there's a heap of Final Fantasy 14 to catch up on – heck, the team is extending duty support to older expansions as it's taken the better part of the past 12 months. You've also got The Unending Codex, which does something similar since it was introduced during Endwalker's first patch. Mind you, there isn't a heap there pre-Endwalker, so I can understand the desire for something as comprehensive as the Active Time Lore system.
Another highlight of Final Fantasy 16 is Cid, because who doesn't love Ralph Ineson's gravelly tones? To the actor's surprise, he didn't imagine Final Fantasy 16 would release so close to another game he featured in, that being Diablo 4. Who is having a better 2023 than Ineson? Certainly not me.
Check out our Final Fantasy 16 review to see why we nearly gave the new action-RPG a perfect score.
