Final Fantasy XVI’s new trailer has huge monsters and even bigger crystals

A slightly embarrassing leak from IGN Southeast Asia tipped fans off that a new Final Fantasy XVI trailer might be dropping today, and here it is. The four-minute-long trailer titled “Ambition” doesn’t reveal too much new information regarding the next entry in the 35-year-old series, but hot damn, does it look cool. It is bloodier than your typical Final Fantasy fare, so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube.

The trailer is essentially a lore dump, priming fans with all the proper noun information on the peoples, places, and things we’ll see yet won’t remember until well into the game’s hopefully 60-plus hour runtime. (A girl can hope, right?) The trailer retreads most of the same information shared in The Verge’s interview with game director Naoki Yoshida earlier in the year.

In the realm of Valisthea, the mothercrystals (because what’s a recent Final Fantasy game without big ass crystals, right?) are controlled by a handful of kingdoms, each seeking to claim other mothercrystals to enhance their power. To aid these kingdoms in their conquest are the Dominants, beings who can call forth the great and terrible power of Eikons — what we know as the typical Final Fantasy summons: Garuda, Ifrit, Shiva, Titan, and more. Into this turbulent equation steps Clive Rosefield and his younger brother Joshua who seems to be the Dominant of the Eikon Phoenix. That’s all we know, and the new trailer merely adds a bit of extra flesh to that bare-bones story.

But man, for little as we know now, this trailer makes it seem like FFXVI is going to be the kind of high-fantasy, top-tier political intrigue and struggle shit that I love. Final Fantasy 12 is one of my absolute favorites in the series, and that was the last time the series felt like a palace intrigue drama with chocobos. “Rise, ye crownless kings. A reckoning is upon you” is a hell of a line that goes hard as shi — Shiva. Hell yeah!

Still no firm release date yet, but Square Enix seems firm on its Summer 2023 launch window.