Final Fantasy 16’s Cutscenes May Have Set an Unbeatable Record

So, if you choose to include those sequences, Final Fantasy 16‘s total cutscene time shoots up dramatically. If it takes the average player 35-40 hours to beat Final Fantasy 16 (which seems to be the most popular estimate so far), then roughly half of that time (if not more) will be spent viewing non-interactive story sequences.

That will obviously be a major turn-off for some, but I’m far more fascinated by the pure numbers at the moment. In fact, so far as I can tell, Final Fantasy 16 may have just set the record for the longest total cutscene time in video game history.

Mind you, that’s not exactly a metric people tend to keep solid records of. For instance, Metal Gear Solid 4 holds the record for the longest individual cutscene in a game (71 minutes), but there are “only” about 9 total hours of cutscenes in that game. Final Fantasy 16‘s individual non-interactive cutscenes are significantly shorter, but there are a ton of them that add up to a much longer overall runtime.

So how do other cutscene-heavy games compare? Well, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, clocks in at about 16 hours of non-interactive story sequences. Death Stranding features about 11-12 hours of such cutscenes. Even Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix (a popular candidate for the “most cutscenes” record), only features about 13 hours of such sequences. Red Dead Redemption 2 features a lot of story-focused scenes, but if you exclude the sections of the game that afford you some degree of control (such as riding on horses and stagecoaches), then you’re really looking at about 12 total hours of comparable sequences.

Again, any discussions regarding this potential record are complicated by how we define cutscenes vs. other kinds of non-interactive sequences. If we follow Yoshida’s definition of the phrase, then Final Fantasy 16 probably does come closer to that 11-12 hour estimate. However, if you extend that definition to include all main story-relevant, non-interactive, cinematically presented sequences, then you should know that Final Fantasy 16 will essentially take the controller out of your hands for nearly 20 hours of its runtime.

Try as I might, I can’t find another game that beats that number and only a few games come close to even challenging it. So while that might be a dubious record in the minds of those opposed to such sequences (or at least that many of them), it really does seem to be a record that may not be beaten for a very long time (if ever).