The Lost Final Fantasy

Lost Levels has a great piece looking at the never-released Final Fantasy title. Really nothing more than a tech demo from the N64 days, it's an interesting bit of videogame history nonetheless. From the article: "Other gaming magazines, including Nintendo Power, also ran articles on the demo with different information, helping to fuel the rumors of an upcoming Nintendo 64 Final Fantasy title. When no further information about the game appeared and Square subsequently announced that a game titled Final Fantasy VII would be released on the Sony PlayStation, fans cried foul and accused Square of betraying Nintendo ... Most of these claims were nothing more than rumors that were spawned as the result of some shoddy journalism; however, many people accepted these rumors as fact, and these faux facts were perpetuated as being truths. But many rumors are based in fact, and the rumors surrounding Final Fantasy 64 are no exception. The images of the demo that were shown in GameFan, Nintendo Power, and other magazines were real, which meant that the demo itself was real. So what exactly was the demo, and where had the information in the magazines come from? "

Comments

The Scoop in a Nut Shell

[SScorpio]

Back before the PSX and N64 came out Squaresoft (they hadn't merged with Enix until 2005) was researching the capabilities of the consoles and creating demos on them. This "Lost Final Fantasy" was nothing more than a demo of a battle engine to show off what could be done on the system. Ultimately Squaresoft went with the PSX due to their desire to incorporate full motion video in their games, and the N64s inability to handle this due to it using cartridges.

The video is kind of neat to see what Squaresoft could have done on the N64, but it's unpolished due to it being just a demo. The only real issue is that this news is from several years ago as the job I was working at the time I remember first reading about this was from 2003 at the earliest. Oh well, the real lost Final Fantasies were the translated versions of FF2 and FF3 for the NES that were never released. FF2 from my understanding was completed; however, I'm not sure how far FF3 got. And before you say they were released FF2 and FF3 on the SNES were just renames of FF4 and FF6.

Re:The Scoop in a Nut Shell

[voice_of_all_reason]

Not sure what you mean by "completed," since FF2 and FF3 have had fan-translations for a long time now.

I have very fond memories of playing FF3 over the course of many years -- finding a new translation group had picked up the task, playing up until the point where they stopped, and waiting until a few months down the road when I happened upon a better patch.

Re:Question

[b1t r0t]

Yeah, I know, it's silly. The first one was supposed to be final, but they kind of screwed that up. It was too successful, it got a sequel, and it kind of went on from there.

From Wikipedia:

Square Co., Ltd. first entered the Japanese video game industry in the mid 1980s, developing a variety of simple RPGs for Nintendo's Famicom Disk System (FDS), a disk-based peripheral for the Family Computer (also known as the "Famicom," and known internationally as the Nintendo Entertainment System). By 1987, declining interest in the FDS had placed Square on the verge of bankruptcy. At approximately the same time, Square designer Hironobu Sakaguchi began work on an ambitious new fantasy role playing game for the cartridge-based Famicom, inspired in part by Enix's popular Dragon Quest (known in the United States as Dragon Warrior). Sakaguchi had plans to retire after the completion of the project so he named it Final Fantasy because it was his final game, although it was also going to be Square's final game. In fact, it's commonly believed that the game was named Final Fantasy because of Square and not Sakaguchi, although Sakaguchi himself has confirmed it was named because of his plans for retirement. Either way, Final Fantasy turned out to be far from being Square's or Sakaguchi's last game. Final Fantasy reversed Square's lagging fortunes, and became their flagship franchise.

Re:Too bad they went with Sony...

[antime]

But the demo was running on Silicon Graphics workstations, not Nintendo hardware. It's impossible to tell from those shots what a game would have looked like on the N64.