Final Fantasy XIII Still PS3 Only

Square Enix recently announced some of the games to be showcased at their "private party" in August. Looking at the games listed we see that Final Fantasy XIII seems to still be PS3 only and the rumors that Final Fantasy Agito XIII was canned seem to be highly overrated.

Comments

FF

[Speare]

Final Fantasy has always been focused on one platform. They push the hell out of every polygon budget, every memory limit, that they can get out of the hardware. Even if the core libraries are easily portable, I can imagine they don't relish the thought of porting or dual-targeting the title, because the game will not look as good on one of the platforms. For a title that is all about visuals, that's hard to take.

Utter bullshit.

[SilentBob0727]

The Final Fantasy series is a console mover.

FFI came out for the NES in 1990. I loved it so much I had to beg my parents to buy me a SNES for FFII/IV.
Then FFVII came out for the Playstation. Fortunately, it did so well that they ported it to the PC. Then FFVIII tanked on the PC and FFIX released only on the playstation, so I went out and bought one, allowing me to scoop up Anthology, Chronicles, and Origins in the crossfire.

Then FFX came out for the PS2. I loved FFVII and FFIX so much I had to buy myself a PS2 to play FFX.

Then the original FFII and FFIII came out on the WonderSwan Color. In Japan only.

Then the original FFIII came out for the Nintendo DS. Guess who went out and bought one.

Unfortunately for Square-Enix, I did not love FFXII so much that I will be buying a PS3 to play FFXIII. The spell is finally broken. Or I'm getting older.

Re:Utter bullshit.

[Darkness404]

Somehow I think that FFXIII will be PS3 only.... Then a FFXIII: Wii Edition will be released on the Wii, and lastly a FFXIII DX version will be released on the 360. Its only a matter of time, though I think a port to the Wii would be more likely then the 360 (with SE seeing FFCC:MLaaK a $15 downloadable game is selling extremely fast...)

Re:Utter bullshit.

[Forkenhoppen]

FFXII was set in a world created for the earlier game Final Fantasy Tactics, and the team was lead by the folks behind that game. As far as I know, all previous games have had a completely new world, with the possible exception of FFIX.

I am a touch concerned, though, as you are, about the upcoming Final Fantasy games. This recent approach by Square-Enix to make the Final Fantasy series into multiple-game affairs spread across everything from portables and cellphones up to the latest cutting-edge home console is causing them to over-think and over-engineer the worlds in which their characters reside. The games, or to be more specific the stories, are losing their focus and suffering for it.

On the upside, at least they're re-releasing Final Fantasy IV on the DS with updated visuals. (That's FFII from the SNES) It'll be nice to take that trip back in time to when the worlds were self-contained and focused on the premise rather than providing fodder for all the requisite/inevitable spin-offs.

Great disturbance in the Force

[denzacar]

As if millions of voices suddenly cried out "DUH!" and then were silenced.

Re:uh..

[Anonymous Coward]

When the PS3 was absolutely tanking and the Xbox 360 was dominant, Square Enix announced that they were considering porting FFXIII to the Xbox 360.

Later, Square Enix announced that they've licensed the Unreal 3 engine.

So there was a lot of speculation that they were planning on bringing FFXIII out on the Xbox 360.

Since then, the PS3 has moved from absolutely pathetic to just plain luke-warm, and the Xbox 360 has completely failed in Japan. So it makes less sense now then it did some two freaking years ago when they first started leaking screenshots.

Not that surprising

[Sycraft-fu]

Given Square's obsession lately with cutscenes. They seem to love having lots of prerendered cutscenes in the game, rather than using the game engine. Well, that is the one area that a Blu-Ray drive will be advantageous in gaming. While you don't really need the space for game assets, you certainly could if you want to have an hours of HD cutscenes.

Personally, I'm not a real fan of the whole cutscene thing. I'd rather you use the engine all the time, more immersive to me, and game graphics these days are good enough that it isn't as though you need a cutscene just to express detail the engine can't.

Re:uh..

[CastrTroy]

Sadly, I don't think that even Final Fantasy could make the Japanese want to buy an XBox. It would just alienate the fans. Considering the popularity of the systems, and the fact that FF doesn't require amazing graphics, I'm surprised they don't put it out on the Wii.

Re:uh..

[NothingMore]

Outside of quality control issues for the console itself (the RROD) i dont really understand how you could call it the xbotch 360. The controller the 360 comes with is arguably one of the best controllers ever made and there is a very large amount of quality games on the console.

Re:uh..

[bigstrat2003]

Eh, the controller is OK. It's adequate, I wouldn't call it special. Now the GameCube controller, that was damn near perfection. Never before had I held a controller that fit my hands as if it were custom-made for them. Damn, that was controller nirvana.

Re:Odd Decision

[KDR_11k]

Too bad the back compat versions are no longer sold. Well, at least you can just keep your PS2 around...

Is it just me or does the 360 seem to get the most RPGs out of the three current consoles? I don't have one but I see more stories announcing RPGs for that thing than for the PS3 and Wii combined.

SPOILER WARNING

[tepples]

So assuming everything being equivalent between the two, codecs and all, it would fit on 3 DVD-9's anyway. That's plenty of assumption. Xbox 360 games have a session with error messages for both DVD players and original Xbox consoles. But more importantly, how much disc swapping would you expect to do? FF7 duplicated the game engine on all three discs, and it was criticized for having gameplay linear enough that most of the data that pertains to a particular part of the game (before Aeris dies, after Aeris dies, final battle and ending) could be kept on a single disc.

Re:SPOILER WARNING

[tlhIngan]

I suppose you could argue that the game could actually be installed if the user had the large Xbox360 hard drive (120gb). However I think that would be an excessive requirement for a single game.

A lot of the later PS3 games require installation. I believe Grand Theft Auto needs ~4GB of hard drive space (it's printed on the back of the game). And from my PS3 experience (I own one), installing games can be one way to do it. Download a game from PSN, and it comes in a "capsule" that you click and install (why?!?! It's not like you can copy it off to a memory card...). Then after waiting for it to be installed, you click the new version and the game launches.

Not sure if the PS3 discs do that (probably just start up and ask to install).

About the only real thing one notices about the PS3 is that doing almost anything involves reading an EULA before you can do anything. (Besides the initial set up - installing games often pops up another EULA, as do software updates). So the "installation experience" is already here...

Re:uh..

[The Aethereal]

I'm not sure if it is the biggest selling point, but Final Fantasy games always have above average, if not almost revolutionary graphics at their release.

Re:Remember the PS1

[CastrTroy]

The storage space was more about full motion video than it was/is about good graphics. You can't put FMV and CD Quality sound on a cartridge. This time around Nintendo put DVD on the Wii, and it has just as much storage as the XBox. The PS3 has blu-ray, which adds a ton of storage, but I've never seen FF shy away from using multiple discs. The N64 had more than enough power to display all the graphics that FF and any other RPG of it's time had. It was actually better at actual graphics than the PS1. The PS1 just had a lot more storage space. For a quick comparison. Zelda: Ocarina of Time was under 30 MB. FF VII, I believed, filled up 4 CDs.