The decision to rename FF Versus XIII began long before last week, however.
According to an interview with Famitsu, game director Tetsuya Nomura explained why and how the game went through such a strange naming sequence.
So, it seems that the title change was due, in part, from pressure to advance the franchise the same way that gaming consoles were evolving. But why wait until this year’s E3 to drop the news?
So just like the name changing itself, to the decision to tell the public about this rebranding was more a move meant to mirror the progression of the industry than anything else. Fair enough.
A New Name, A New System, A New Start
On top of changing the name of the game, the former PS3 exclusive will not only now be bumped up to a PS4 title, but, much to the great relief of Microsoft fans everywhere, will be a cross-platform release as well.
This should come as a surprise, as both FFXIII and its sequel FFXIII-2 were also cross-platform successes, but regardless Nomura expounded upon this as well.
This move almost certainly has some underlying economic rationale behind it as well, especially considering the recent financial troubles of SqEnix. With a wider audience base comes a wider profit margin. And Nomura didn’t count out the possibility of a future PC release either. Though he claimed that the high-spec engine the game runs on would take a “pretty expensive PC” to have it run properly, thus making it unprofitable to mass-produce a PC version of the game. He also alluded to the fact that “if we get a lot of people in the future who want to play it with full specs” that Square Enix would “discuss supporting that.”
A rose by any other name…
Regardless of if it had remained FF Versus XIII, the newest installment in the Final Fantasy franchise looks beautiful, polished, and exciting. Sure, there’s been some red tape they’ve had to jump through on the way to its release, and yeah, we’re all tired of waiting for it; but, won’t it just be so, so sweet once it’s finally here?!
