Over at the European PlayStation.Blog, SCEE Social Media Manager Jem Alexander was able to get a small question and answers session with producer, Yoshinori Kitase, and director, Motomu Toriyama regarding Final Fantasy XIII. As you know we’ll be exactly a month away from the western release as soon as the clock hits midnight.
Alexander brings up some pretty good questions, but we took some of the most notable for our readers.
Final Fantasy XIII is part of Square Enix‘s Fabula Nova Crystallis series, which consists of three games. A lot of people get confused about the relation between Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Luckily, they cleared that up.
“Final Fantasy Versus XIII is part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis series, but XIII and Versus XIII only share the same basic mythology. The fal’Cie and l’Cie are just a small part of this mythology, but the story and the characters are completely different.”
Length in role-playing games should always be long, and that’s what Final Fantasy XIII is doing. According to Square, the basic playtime is about “50 to 60 hours” with about “10 hours” of cutscenes in total. There’s side-quests, which they call “missions”, as well not included in the basic playtime. Square says with that, “the total time is probably twice that or more.” That’s 100-120 hours, then.
Unfortunately, for replayists, there’s no “New Game+”, Square explaining that “there is no way to start the game again with your current character stats.”
A bit back, we posted up images of cut content from Final Fantasy XIII. Square said that the content was not content, but more like “ideas”. It’s all in the trash bin now and won’t be coming back as downloadable content or anything of the sorts.
Will we get a demo before Final Fantasy XIII releases? “We haven’t decided whether to make a demo available yet.”
Oh. The game won’t require a hard-drive installation on PlayStation 3, if you didn’t already know.
As for what Kitase and Toriyama are doing now, “At the moment we are still concentrating on finishing off and promoting the overseas version of Final Fantasy XIII, but many of the team have obviously accumulated a lot of knowledge and experience and they will be moved over to work on Versus and Agito. Personally, we don’t know what we’re going to move on to next.”
An Interview With Final Fantasy XIII’s Kitase And Toriyama [PlayStation.Blog EU]