The Washington Post has a reading limit so it's okay for us to summarize off of this. c:

Cool to hear. Something that's had me spooked about FF XVI is that it has a lot of Dragon's Dogma in its blood, AND it's following up FF XV. They can make the most satisfying physical combat and fun enemies to fight, but none of it will matter if they include the awful system from both aforementioned games where you can pause reality and pop potions for the whole party before returning to the gameplay. Ultimately, it's that bad mechanic that caused both XV and Dragon's Dogma to eventually be less about skill and more about chugging potions every time an enemy taps you.

One might say "just don't use the potions," and that's fine, but it feels like this type of system always leads the developers to make the hardest battles unfair wars of attrition. I really hope they took KH's approach to healing.

Yoshi p "all of square enix's action games suck except for those made by the kingdom hearts team"

The mainline KH games have always been pushing the envelope of quality. KH1 INVENTED air combos in 3D action games. There was not a single game in 2006 on par with KH2 in terms of animation quality, polish, and intelligently interwoven systems. I'd argue it's still mostly peerless. And KH3's superbosses are such a pristinely designed challenge that no other action game feels as inviting to me anymore. Fourteen superbosses and not one of them feels cheap, too easy, or unfair. They're all fun.

KH has always been leading at Square, and as FF becomes more action oriented, I'm glad they're not pretending to ignore KH's long list of innovations.

This is a great approach for the franchise considering we’re far past them ever going to turn-based battles at this point. One of the things that disappointed me most about XV was that they pulled away from that original gameplay in Versus XIII that was derived from KH. So I’m glad to see them return to something similar.

SE’s strategy may be to plant FF’s footing firmly in the real-time action RPG genre while elevating Dragon Quest internationally as its star turn-based RPG franchise. With DQXII reportedly having a darker tone, it may be moving into that void left behind by the turn based FFs.

Then you have the FFVIIR series with a nice middle ground battle system that I hope some other future games utilize.

I will say, I would like to see the FF series find it’s identity in a battle system again. We’ve had vastly different systems since XII. So if this does well, I hope they keep it and build upon it for the next mainline title.

I don't mind them imitating KH to some degree--depending on what it is--but I wish it was going to be more like XV (itself having a lot of similarities to KH gameplay) as far as you still having direct control over the party members. Having minimal control over the party members post-1 is one of the bad things about KH. Hopefully that will just be for XVI only.

And they were super op and removed any remaining challenge from 90% of the main game. It was clearly done because Tabata and the ffxv team had no true vision of what ffxv was.

No surprise there all things considered. Figured they had quite the history with one another lending each other hands here and there and what not. I'm curious and somewhat cautiously optimistic to see how FFXVI turns out.

More internal help to make ensure fluid/fun combat is welcomed. I hope they are going to showcase soon.