Final Fantasy XVI PC will require an SSD as “a must,” Yoshida says

Naoki Yoshida says Final Fantasy 16 players will want to use an SSD, not an HDD, to play the game on PC when it finally comes out soon.

Final Fantasy 16 SSD: a man with brown gelled hair, a short beard, and a black collared shirt on
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Final Fantasy XVI 

I’ve just beaten Final Fantasy XVI on PS5, so my excitement for the finally confirmed PC version of Clive’s adventure is through the roof. While we’ve got the FF16 DLC to tide us all over, producer Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida has detailed some recommended specs, and you’ll want an SSD over a hard drive, for starters.

While we at PCGamesN have our own Final Fantasy 16 release date estimate, Square Enix is still waiting to give us concrete details on the port of the fantasy game. I want nothing more than to see Torgal on my PC screen in all of his high-rendered glory, but it looks like Final Fantasy 16 is making us wait.

In the meantime, Yoshida tells players that you’ll want to install FF16 on an SSD over a hard drive.

“Details will be announced in due course. However, I would like you to prepare an SSD,” Yoshida tells Famitsu in a machine-translated and PCGN-edited interview. “Even if we did our best to adjust the GPU, in Final Fantasy XVI, a game where loading speed is critical, the HDD would be a pain.

“Of course, we will do our best to optimize as much as possible, but we cannot overcome the hardware barrier alone, so please consider that an SSD is a must. We will announce the exact recommended specifications on another occasion.”

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While it’s not the end of the world for smaller, less demanding PC games, you’ll always want to use an SSD (solid-state drive) over an HDD (hard disk drive). The long and short of it is that SSDs run and load games faster, by reading data digitally, and the best SSDs for gaming can help run those big releases.

I’ve just beaten FF16 myself, and while I’m not a fantasy guy, the sheer brilliance of the storytelling, performances, and combat drew me right in. If you’ve not played the game I won’t spoil much, but it leans on character relationships to pull you in while sprinkling the wider political landscape throughout the story. It uses combat to a very good effect too. Final Fantasy XVI is great, and it can’t come to PC soon enough.

If you’re looking for more hardware we’ve collated all the best gaming PCs currently on the market, which you can then use to play all of the best Final Fantasy PC games you want. I can easily recommend the MMO Final Fantasy 14, it’s amazing too.

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A former writer for NME Gaming and a Journalism Masters graduate, Will is a news writer for PCGamesN. He's also written for Eurogamer, VG247, and GamingBible. He's kept busy between news, features, and review writing, like that of Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. With experience in the biggest games released like Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield, Will still feels most at home with a good roguelike game in his hands. He's also very happy to admit that Dead Cells is the best roguelike game of the genre, even if the competition is incredibly stiff and great games keep coming out almost constantly.