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How Final Fantasy XV Mastered Mobile
FINALFANTASY XV POCKET EDITION
The Greatest RPG on Mobile
For over 30 years, Final Fantasy has challenged what’s possible in role-playing games, pushing visuals, storytelling, and sheer scale to the limit. Which is why Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition is so remarkable. Developed alongside the console edition, it preserves that version’s storytelling and themes—but evolves for play on iPhone or iPad.
Hajime Tabata, director of Final Fantasy XV when the game was released, says Square Enix has wanted to bring the title to mobile for years. The main reason? “The iPhone is the hardware that I use most throughout the day.”
The end result is a beat-by-beat re-creation of the full console game. But if its big brother is an epic novel, Pocket Edition is a refined short story. That transition required a thorough rethinking. “The first thing I asked the development team was to make the gameplay as stress-free as possible,” says Tabata. “If you try doing everything the original did but on iPhone, it doesn’t necessarily translate to a fun experience.”
Tabata and crew debated which elements to keep and which to alter. Battles in Pocket Edition, for example, can be set to auto or manual based on player preference. “In Final Fantasy XV, each battle becomes a memory of your journey. As long as we can accomplish that within the [mobile] game, we thought automating the battles would not be a problem.”
His team also reconsidered the visuals.
“We actually tested the game using a low-polygon art style, similar to Final Fantasy VII,” says Tabata. “That might satisfy existing Final Fantasy fans, but we weren’t sure if it would be received well among new players.” So the team created a new look it thought younger audiences would like.
After testing both styles with various demographics, the studio found players in their teens and twenties preferred the version you see in the game today.
Likewise, Square Enix intentionally built the development team around younger creators who were skilled at simplifying complex mechanics. “In console gaming, we tend to keep adding game mechanics,” says Tabata. Mobile developers, however, “tend to design by distilling the experience.”
The young creators of Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition have produced something remarkable: a game with the scale and ambition of the console version that also works beautifully on the go.