Square Enix President and CEO Yoichi Wada has been talking to Edge about his plans for the company and they include waving goodbye to Final Fantasy in its current form.
“I believe Final Fantasy XIII is going be something special,” he said, “And that it’s going to be well received by the audience. But whether we are going to continue to internally create this type of game remains to be seen, because I actually feel that the team that was involved with Final Fantasy XIII should next move on to create and generate some ‘next generation’ forms of play. Internally and externally I feel there’s an expectation of Square Enix to offer something new, and I really think that the Final Fantasy team could create something completely different, but at the moment they’re strictly catering to the particular audience they have now.”
Have a stiff drink and a sit down whilst you assimilate that news. The boss of Square Enix wants to move the Final Fantasy team on to new projects. Before you start hugging your limited edition Tifa statuettes and crying like babies there is one small glimmer of hope. When asked if western developers could take over an existing Sqaure Enix franchise, Wada said,
“That is one of the possible paths, but it’s not something that we would shift completely over to. But there are many combinations of ways to handle an IP. We’re not considering it at the moment, but there is always the possibility that in the future a Final Fantasy could be produced with the input of our western developers, overseen by our Japanese developers.”
