Motion Controllers Would Have Been 'Too Exhausting' for Final Fantasy XIII

Motion controllers are the brand-new rave, the gimmick that every game needs to support so that people will see it as the title that's coming from tomorrow, which has that glossy shine of the new. However, some developers tend to be either a bit skeptic about the new input method or simply not impressed by it, because there are a lot of big titles that didn't jump at the opportunity to introduce wrist-flicking as a gameplay mechanic. One of these developers is Square Enix, and while the "motion controller" subject did become part of the conversation at one point during development, the studio decided that it was better to let this be the one that got away.

Yoshinori Kitase, the producer of Final Fantasy XIII, told CVG that he didn't think that the motion controller would have worked out all that well with the JRPG. "This new type of controllers are very interesting, but we're not sure that people would like to spend up to 100 hours playing a conventional Final Fantasy title with this type of controllers," Kitase said. "It could be too exhausting if you were always swinging a sword around for battles. So we will have to see what the future holds."

And while exhausting worked out great for Wii Fit, maybe Square just didn't want to market its game as an aerobic exercise. Besides, some of those Super-Sayan-fast attacks would have to work pretty hard to replicate our puny, human arms. Some games are meant to have dedicated controllers, like the Guitar Hero and Rock Band rhythm titles, where the guitar controllers really enriched the experience and made it a far, far more enjoyable gameplay.

In the same way, motion controllers worked really well for the Wii Sports series, since the two concepts were intertwined, and once again its realism was consolidated by proper input support. But for things as abstract as navigating a menu, realism doesn't really fit in all that well, since there is no direct correlation with a real-life activity. For these types of games, a controller works best, because it's the way we got used to doing it, and this repetition has become the proxy and medium that translates the action into a previously experienced and familiar sensation.