Gamers rejoice as Final Fantasy XVI PC release date confirmed for September

The PC release date for Final Fantasy XVI has finally been revealed, more than a year after the game came out for PlayStation 5.

PC gamers will be able to play Final Fantasy XVI on September 17, 453 days from its initial console release.

This PC version of the role-playing epic was announced roughly a year ago by producer Naoki Yoshida,m at the PAX West game conference, on September 4, 2023.

The game will be available on Steam and Epic Games, and there’s a demo you can try out beforehand. It’s available now and has “over two hours” of content according to publisher Square Enix.

Any progress you make in the demo will be carried into the full game come September, and it includes an Eikonic Challenge mode exclusive to the demo.

PC players are already complaining about the demo on Steam, though, leading to it getting a “Mixed” review score. Recurring gripes include that cutscenes are locked to 30fps, that Final Fantasy XVI does not have ultra-wide monitor support (yet) and the graphical presentation appears blurry.

This may change by the time the full game releases, but it is worth checking out if your PC is up to the job.

Minimum specs for the Final Fantasy XVI demo include an Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 6 1500 CPU, 16GB RAM and either an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card. And that’s for 30 frames per second at 720p resolution.

This is bad news for Nvidia GTX 1060 owners. It is still among the top 10 most popular cards among Steam users according to the July 2024 Steam Hardware Survey.

Final Fantasy XVI for PC costs £44.99, while the Complete Edition costs £64.99. This includes the Echoes of the Fallen and The Rising Tide DLC expansions, each of which adds a small handful of hours of content to the game.

Not up with Final Fantasy XVI? Real-time combat is its big change to the classic Final Fantasy formula. This shift was generally considered well-handled, but the game was also criticised for its padding — one to bear in mind if you tend to try to tackle every side quest and piece of content in a game.

Waiting for the PC release of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth instead? Square Enix is yet to announce when that will happen. It took Final Fantasy VII Remake around 20 months to hit the PC, suggesting we’ll have to wait until well in 2025, at the least, for the PC version of Rebirth.