As Final Fantasy fans across the world wait impatiently for FFXV, let’s take some time to celebrate an important milestone. This week, Final Fantasy Versus XIII‘s announcement turned ten years old. Happy birthday, announcement!
Yep, an entire decade has passed since we first met Noctis. On 8 May 2006, Square Enix announced Versus XIII during their E3 press conference, declaring that it’d be part of an expanded universe alongside Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Agito XIII. It would star a dark-haired prince who could manipulate weapons and seemed to have magical powers.
Just to give you some context, this was the same E3 where Sony announced the price of the PS3 (“five-hundred-ninety-nine US dollars”) and Nintendo declared that Zelda: Twilight Princess would be a Wii launch game. Other games announced at that show: Metal Gear Portable Ops, Final Fantasy VI GBA, Fable II and Grand Theft Auto IV. Microsoft also debuted a little series they were calling Gears of War.
After many years of development hell (and limited manpower thanks to the FFXIII trilogy), Square rebooted the Versus project in 2012, officially changing it to Final Fantasy XV. They re-revealed the game at E3 of 2013, and since then, we’ve been waiting. Four months to go.
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4 responses to “Ten Years Ago, Square Announced Final Fantasy Versus XIII ”
Daum, years pass by fast!
Dank that game ~
It’s going to flop, not because of its combat, but because squeenix cant write stories or good characters anymore. Evidence of this is the last 3 final fantasy games and every single jrpg they made on last gen consoles – star ocean tlh, infinite undiscovery etc.
Not only because of that, but also because so much is weighted on this one game and it simply cannot be good enough to pull off all that it needs to.
I was originally going to chew you out, but I thought about it and I’ve honestly come to the same conclusion. I enjoyed playing Infinite up until they kill of a certain character and then slowly I just stopped playing, it just wasn’t compelling to play once they took out my favourite “cool-guy”.
The last really good Final Fantasy was XII, even though XIV came to be a success for the franchise after spending more than a year in it I’ve found it to be filled with horrible MMO cliches and to be par for the course if not less so for a Final Fantasy when it comes to characters and story, like you said.
Weirdly, for FFXIII I felt the only saving grace was the character’s potential. So, not even the characters themselves as they appear but moreso what they could have been. Always upsetting to think that just a little more effort could have made some really great games that would have been contenders for a Hall of Fame but we’re left with LadyCloud and her ragtag of tropes.
But also because of the combat.