Today at Asia Pacific Games Summit, Shinji Hashimoto presented a brief talk about the history of the Final Fantasy series, ahead of the release of the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI.

One of the big takeaways from this talk was that many of the series’ most defining traits were actually absent form the start of the series, only coming in its later additions.

One of the biggest examples of these is the Summons system, whereby player characters can call down powerful beings like Shiva and Ifrit to do powerful attacks.

Despite a storied roster of recurring summons across the game’s history, Hashimoto explained the feature didn’t make an appearance until Final Fantasy III.

Still, they’ve endured to become a defining mechanic of the series since their inclusion.

“These summons established themselves as one way to give a sense of theatrics to battles throughout the series, changing up the summon types and their attack styles for each title”, Hashimoto says.

Similarly, while recent entries like VII Remake and XIII sport fully-proportioned characters even in the overworld, that wasn’t the case until VIII, which had adopted a less deformed art style compared to the original VII, and a complete departure from the more Chibi sprites of previous entries.

While he spent a lot of time talking about the history of Final Fantasy, he wasn’t completely coy about fan anticipation for Final Fantasy XVI. Despite that, Square Enix had no new information regarding the mega franchise’s sixteenth mainline entry, urging fans instead to stay tuned for future announcements.

Shinji Hashimoto is the Brand Manager of Final Fantasy at Square Enix, having been with the company since 1995.