Final Fantasy 16 will have a new game plus mode, Square Enix announced during its final promotional push before the game’s launch this week.
In a Japanese livestream on Saturday (as reported by Twitter user Genki), the developers revealed Final Fantasy Mode, an option that will become available on the main menu after completing the game once. Final Fantasy Mode allows players to carry their character level, abilities, and equipment into a new playthrough, with a raised level cap of 100, and higher-level enemies to face. There’ll be an Ultima Weapon to craft, and a gold trophy on offer for completing the game again in this mode.
The training and challenge modes accessed via the Arete Stone in-game will also get an upgrade in Final Fantasy Mode, with an Ultimania difficulty setting and a hard time-trial mode called Chronolith Trials.
Producer Naoki Yoshida also said that the game would get a day one patch to fix a few “very minor” issues — an announcement he made with some humility, after the team had earlier pledged to avoid such an update.
The patch will be about 300 MB in size, and fix some rare progression and crash bugs, correct minor text errors, and optimize performance in a few areas where frame rate was suffering. Applying the patch won’t be required to play the game.
It had been a point of pride for Yoshida’s team to release a highly polished, finished version of Final Fantasy 16 without any delays to its release date, and Square Enix’s extensive promotion of the game in recent months — including the release of a very warmly received demo last week — has spoken of its confidence in the title. In this context, the patch is the smallest of setbacks.
Final Fantasy 16 launches June 22, exclusively for PlayStation 5.