FFXIII devs confused by Wada comment
Offer their thoughts on series future.
Motomu Toriyama and Yoshinori Kitase have admitted they aren't sure what Square Enix president Yoichi Wada meant when he said Final Fantasy XIII might be the last game of its kind from the veteran RPG publisher.
"Whether we are going to continue to internally create this type of game remains to be seen," Wada told Edge recently, "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."
"We don't know exactly what he meant by that," producer Kitase and director Toriyama told the European PlayStation blog through a translator.
"We don't really know what he meant by this style of game. If you consider that during Final Fantasy XIII's development, at peak time the team consisted of over 300 people. It was a huge team, plus it took a several long years to get the game finished.
"So, if Mr Wada meant that we would never make another Final Fantasy title with the similar number of people, taking as long as FFXIII did, we would agree."
The development duo said that in future they want to be "much more efficient".
"Having worked on XIII, we feel that we have got much better at making good games for high definition consoles. In the future our teams will be smaller and more effectively run. We suspect that is what Mr Wada meant by his statement."
Final Fantasy XIII - due out in Europe for PS3 and Xbox 360 on 9th March - is a vast undertaking, lasting as long as 50-60 hours for the main story according to the developers, although it's also more conservative than its PS2 predecessor judging by our impressions of the Japanese PS3 retail version.