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.