What makes a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game? A world in crisis? Probably. A group of youthful combatants with assorted skills and body types? Usually. A reality reliant on gems and infested with monsters? Typically. A cast of mythical creatures summoned to battle from the ether? Frequently. The loss of a beloved character? Occasionally. That tinkling, crystalline, arpeggiated melody? Yellow chocobos? White moogles? Ethnic diversity? Fifteen mainline games and a host of spin-offs have shown that while these ingredients are characteristic of the series, none is essential. Final Fantasy is a generously pliable fiction, a series built from touchstones that teams can pick and arrange in any number of configurations, to varying degrees of success.

Within five minutes of Final Fantasy XVI’s opening, we have seen a character light a cigarette using a magic finger, witnessed an almost-sex scene up against a wall in a castle corridor, and watched a soldier who fights in a squadron called The Bastards sprint across a battlefield while repeatedly shrieking, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck”. Even within the loose boundaries that encircle this longrunning series, it’s clear director Naoki Yoshida is eager for everyone to know this is not Final Fantasy as we have known it. Having salvaged the 14th game, a failing MMORPG, and turned it into a long-running, highearning success, he is perhaps the only person who has earned the right – or maybe the institutional power – to modernise Final Fantasy with only nods to tradition.

The extent of the renovation is clearest not in the bedroom (although there is more nudity in this game than in Square Enix’s entire back catalogue) but on the battlefield. Final Fantasy’s developers always sought to introduce time pressure to its fights. The Active Time Battle system allowed players to ponder which moves to make from a list of menu options, but without pausing the clock on their opponents. All of that is gone. This is Final Fantasy performed in the style of Bayonetta: a game of rapid stabs and flicks interspersed with cinematic crescendos powered by onscreen button prompts. Each fight is composed from a deeply customisable set of sword swipes and magical spells issued like bullets fired from an Uzi. Feints and time-slurring parries grant skilled players room to showboat. Even against the most modest foe, the screen fills with so many fizzing particle effects that it’s often impossible to tell man from monster. It is glorious and mildly scandalous – the first of several design decisions intended to broaden the series’ appeal at the risk of alienating its keenest followers.