A Final Fantasy with a Strange GRIN

After a spectacular series of releases in just 12 months, Swedish game developer GRIN slums over its unborn favorite child. Bionic Commando Rearmed, Wanted: Weapons of Fate, and Terminator Salvation were the titles that the company hurried and released in an attempt to save the company, after an almost disastrous financial problem. But it seems that, in order to save itself, GRIN gave up quality for quantity and stated that its "unreleased masterpiece that we weren't allowed to finish." might just never surface from its studios.

This masterpiece would seem to be tied in to Square Enix's Final Fantasy franchise and was purchased under the Fortress code name, during the first half of 2008. But GRIN seems to have lacked the competence and Square Enix cut ties with the Swedish team after just six months, during which time the game quality seemed to have been found unsatisfying.

The game developer suffered a huge financial crash soon after, as Swedish companies incur substantial fines if operating under a debt load, and since it had no other project in development at that time, it had no choice but to shut down activity. The official statement released at the time was that they suffered from “ an unbearable cash flow situation...as too many publishers have been delaying their payments."

This seems to be pretty genuine, as Square Enix has made a real push towards the Western gaming market. With the acquisition of British publisher Edios and the handing over of several internal games to outside companies for development, the unfruitful collaboration with GRIN looks pretty solid. So at least we can safely assume that a new Final Fantasy is or will soon be in development. Even if Square Enix refused to comment on the matter it would seem highly unlikely that it would trash a project from just one failed attempt.