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SquareEnix Confirm Final Fantasy XII, Sales Figures
Thanks to the Gaming-Age messageboard conglomerate for pointing out a new investor relations press conference (Japanese text only) held today in Japan by SquareEnix. They announced that Final Fantasy XII is intended to ship within the fiscal year in Japan - still no screenshots or details, though. Kingdom Hearts 2 is still having its license negotiated, so won't be out soon. But 9 titles should ship in the US from SquareEnix this fiscal year, including Final Fantasy X-2, which has already sold almost 2 million copies in Japan, and a mystery, solitary Playstation 1 title (another Final Fantasy remake?) The company also gave sales figures for their online title, Final Fantasy XI, which has sold 340,000 copies, and currently has 250,000 subscribers, even ahead of its Western release.
Why change FF7? FF7 was perfect the way it was. It was a very creative approach to a relatively slow console for 3d rendering (the drawbacks of speed bonusses most psx 3d rendering engines take are glitchy zorders and texture mapping problems.) by only texturing large polygons (usually part of the scenery,) to me, gave the game a very unique feel. To change that feel by texturing them or improving other graphical aspects of the game would be a crime to me.
(You may also take notice that FF7 for Windows did not have any such graphical improvements even though they would have been extremely simple to add.)
I don't see that happening. While Japan will buy anything so long as it has "Final Fantasy" written on it (think of the people you know that have to have every version ever released of the original Star Wars trilogy), selling a remake of an old game that makes it essentially just an SNES game playable on the PSX won't fly here in North America. There are only two ways I can think of that Square would sell FFIII in the US for the PSX.
- Package it with something else (like they did with FFIV). The problem here is finding what game or games to bundle it with. With Chrono Trigger out of the way, there are no more big Square titles to bundle it with. The Romancing SaGa trilogy may be an idea, but may not work considering the lukewarm reception SaGa Frontiers gets in North America. Seiken Densetsu 3 has a similar problem. Now that they're "Square-Enix," there is also the option of including Dragon Warrior games (5 and 6 come to mind), but I don't think the world is ready yet for Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy in the same jewel case.
- A complete overhaul. If Final Fantasy III is going to stand on its own two feet in the US, it will have to be quite a bit better than somewhat flashier graphics and sound. They'd have to give it the treatment that Enix gave Dragon Quest IV, turning it into a 3D game, or at the very least give it the same treatment they're currently giving Seiken Densetsu. However, how many people would they have available to devote to such a project? And wouldn't that slight the other games that didn't get the same treatment?
It might be easier to port it to the Game Boy Advance (still the home of 2-D gaming), but considering that every other Final Fantasy game from I to IX is playabe on the PSX, I don't see them releasing III for any other system, for the sake of consistency if nothing else.Lets hope FFXII gets away from the whole play for 2 minutes, watch a 15 minute cut scene, play for 2 more minutes.. etc.
If you guys are wondering about Square Enix's other big software title, Dragon Quest VIII, this IGN article explains their commitment to the series in North America and now Europe. They are planning to market the Dragon Quest/Warrior series towards Dragon Ball Z and Akira Toriyama fans.