14 DAY TRIAL // Since Final Fantasy XIII started out as a PlayStation 2 game, it's no surprise that it ended up staying in development for over five years, for it was eventually carried over to the PS3. And it seems like, while everybody at Square Enix is overjoyed with how well the title was received in Japan, as far as critics as well as sales went, the boss of the company said that it was time for the developer to move past Final Fantasy.
Speaking to Edge just as 2010 started, Yoichi Wada, Square's president, said that, "[...] 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." At the time, we couldn't really understand what he meant by "'next generation' forms of play," and it looks that now, a month later, the main people responsible for the Final Fantasy series are just as confused as we are.
FF Producer Yoshinori Kitase and Director Motomu Toriyama shared a few words with Sony over the European PlayStation blog recently, and, when Wada's statement came up, they said that, "We don’t know exactly what he meant by that. 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."
They further added that, "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. Obviously in the future we 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."