Square-Enix president & CEO Yoichi Wada, in a recent interview with Edge Magazine, confessed that he felt the Final Fantasy team moving on to new ideas in the coming years.
“I believe Final Fantasy XIII is going to be something special, and that it’s going to be well received by the audience,” Wada said. “But whether we are going to continue to internally create this type of game remains to be seen, because I actually feel that the team was involved with Final Fantasy XIII should move on to create and generate some ‘next generation forms of play.”
It’s all but an outright admission that even for Square, the venerable series’ formula is getting a little long in the tooth.
This comes right after another surprising admission, that the Japanese publisher and developer is considering outsourcing the development of its flagship series to other teams outside of its home turf. Not even just Final Fantasy, but a number of Square-Enix’s other properties might be game for Western development.
Of course, this is not to say that Square-Enix is giving up on Japan. According to Wada, it is “one of the possible paths, but it’s not something that we would shift completely over to.”
However, with the recent firing of 10% of their workforce, placing more and more games on multiple platforms including the not-as-big-in-Japan Xbox 360, and their acquisition of Eidos, it seems more and more like diversification is quickly becoming the name of the game.
