Wada’s FF XIII statements confuses his own developers

A few weeks ago, we told you about how Square Enix president Yoichi Wada claimed that Final Fantasy XIII may be the “last of this type of game.” We weren’t entirely sure what we meant by that, and it seems that we’re not the only ones. Even high ranking Square Enix developers, like producer Yoshinori Kitase, and director Motomu Toriyama, are befuddled. 

“We don’t know exactly what he meant by that,” answers the pair on the official PlayStation Blog. “We don’t really know what he meant by this style of game. If you consider that during Final Fantasy XIII’s development, at peak time the team consisted of over 300 people. It was a huge team, plus it took a several long years to get the game finished. So, if Mr Wada meant that we would never make another Final Fantasy title with the similar number of people, taking as long as FF XIII did, we would agree.

“Obviously in the future we want to be much more efficient. Having worked on XIII, we feel that we have got much better at making good games for high definition consoles. In the future our teams will be smaller and more effectively run. We suspect that is what Mr Wada meant by his statement.”

That’s certainly a crowd-pleasing answer, but it’s certainly not what I think of when someone says “style of game.” That would imply the way the game plays, looks and feels, as opposed to the way it was developed. I like a good JRPG, so I hope Kitase and Toriyama are correct. It would certainly be nice for Wada to clarify his statements though, especially if his own staff are confused.

An Interview With Final Fantasy XIII’s Kitase And Toriyama [PS Blog]