Final Fantasy Gets Creator, FFVII, Clock Spinoffs

Thanks to 1UP for noting that Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has founded his own independent development company, according to Japanese magazine Famitsu Weekly. The company will be using "a small group of elite creators", planned to include "artists Yoshitaka Amano and Takehiko Inoue" - the article author also mentions: "Sakaguchi was ousted from any position of significant responsibility at Square after the multi-million-dollar boondoggle that was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within." Elsewhere, RPGFan mentions a third Final Fantasy VII spin-off has been announced, following the CG movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and the mobile phone-based Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, but "no release date or platform information has been given so far" for this new title. Finally, Warcry reveals the Final Fantasy XI clock, due out Fall 2004 in the U.S., and featuring "the time, day of the week, date and year in both [Final Fantasy XI's game world] Vana'diel and also here on Earth."

Comments

Re:AERIS WILL NOT BE RESURRECTED!

[GregChant]

From Coming to America: The making of Final Fantasy VII and how Squaresoft conquered the RPG market (Section Title: Let's just kill Aeris... Drama is everything):

Still, players hoped for a "better" ending, and for quite a while a rumor circulated online that Aeris could be resurrected. It all started with a post on a newsgroup by an American player who played the Japanese game and completely misunderstood a scene at the end of the second disk to mean a failed resurrection of Aeris. Then somebody who went by the name of "Ben Lansing" saw the post and decided to post on the newsgroups claiming that he was a translator at Square USA during the production of the game, and had inside knowledge on how Aeris could be revived. He supported his claims with the supposed changes made to the US version of the game, such as the Underwater materia and the new FMV sequence which he said was that of Aeris' resurrection (it was actually for the Diamond Weapon monster). He also pointed to many places in the game where the relevance to the story was unclear (such as the sick man in Midgar) which he wove into his elaborate instructions for the revival process. The whole story was too complicated to describe in detail here, but the release of the American version finally revealed many of his claims to be false. Despite many inconsistencies in his claims, many people believed him, and there were even staunch supporters who claimed to have successfully revived Aeris using his instructions. Anyway, "Ben Lansing" eventually posted that the whole thing was just a hoax, and laughed at the general stupidity of American players.

Joke's on you, buddy.