This article con🐼tains major end-game spoilers for Final Fantasy 16.

With Square Enix announcing at PAX East in Boston this year that The Rising Tide, the second of two DLCs for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16, would be launching on April 18, I was eager to accept the opportunity to sit down and chat with some of the team from the project. I met with Naoki Yoshida (longtime series producer and director of multiple Final Fantasy titles), Takeo Kujiraoka (who’s responsible for The Rising Tide DLC), and Michael-Christopher Koji Fox (English localization editor on the series) the day before the launch date was announced to discu🀅ss both the game’s storied past and its exciting look to the future🦄.

In talking with them about what’s already happened in Final Fantasy 16 before diving into what’s to come with The Rising Tide, we naturally found our way to the subject of Clive and the amᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚbiguity of his fate in the game.

After defeating Ultima in the final battle and getting imbued with their power, Clive removes magic from the world entirely. Shortly after, he washes ashore, badly beaten but alive. 🌼Unable to use the flames of Ifrit and with his arm being consumed by the Bearer’s Curse, he fades into unconsciousness. In the final moments of the game, we see Jill break💯 into tears as she sees the red star Metia fading out in the night sky.

Final Fantasy fans have been de꧂bating what happened to Clive at the end of the game, and given the incredibly diffe𒅌rent implications of each option, we had to ask the team if they could share a bit about Clive’s fate.

But the request for info was met with knowing laughter and sly smiles. 𓆏Yoshida and Kujiraoka spoke through a translator with Fox answering on their behalf, but the two Japanese speakers didn’t need anyone to speak up when they heard the words, “Clive dies,” in my question🌠.

“Amongst the dev team, we know the answer – there is an ans𓆏wer,” Fox emphasizes with a grin before allowing Yoshida to a🐼nswer more completely.

“It’s not for us to say,♚” Yoshida tells me, “because we believe that each person is going to take something different from the story. They’re going to feel what they feel, and everyone is going to have their own interpretation of that story. We wanted to have a story that, at the end, brings players hope for the future, for what comes next.”

"We wanted to have a story that, at the end, brings players hope for𒈔 the future, for what comes next."

It’s the second time Yoshida has brought up the notion of allowing players to find hope within Final Fantasy. He said earlier in our interview that the team wouldn’t consider exploring the time without magic at the end of Final🧸 Fantasy 16, imagining what kinds of chaos would occur if we were to lose any commodities in real life (like the internet). The decision not to explore that world was made b⛄ecause there’s already too much darkness in our own world, the team said, and it’s a theme that continues straight through to the last moments of the game.

Yoshida continues, “If some people are going to see [the ending] and say, ‘Okay, Clive is still alive,’ that’s what's going to bring them hope because… he’s going to be able to come back and bring people together… But if people also think, ‘Okay, he sacrificed himself,’ and by sacrificing himself, that’s how he’s going to bring people together and that sacrifice is what’s important, then that’s up to the player to interpret it in a way that’s going to bring them hope.”

With Clive on track to obtain the power of Leviathan after a challenging battle in The Rising Tide, discourse has kickstarted once again a𓄧bout what the DLC means for the character. Some fans on either side of the “what happened to Clive” debate suspect that this additional power may be enough to change the outcome of his final battle, hopeful for whatever they needed to find in Clive’s sacrifice.