The Games That Got Away

[NateDog]

Final Fantasy Versus XIII the thread for me. Followed the game so closely for so many years despite there being next to no information coming out about it for very long periods at a time. Absolutely loved everything we saw of it and that Nomura said about his aims for it. Characters, themes, music, map and level designs, everything was up my alley. Unfortunately its development was taking place during Square Enix's most challenging period when they struggled with the transition to HD gaming, poor reception for XIII and having to rebuild XIV almost from the ground up after its very poor launch. All of that meant that this got put on the backburner and the low staff numbers assigned to the game were regularly being pulled off it to work on other projects like XIV or Type-0.

In the end Hajime Tabata was charged with taking over the project and changed a lot of things as it transitioned to Final Fantasy XV. I can't blame him for most things given he was told to get out a working game, but I still can't bring myself to forgive him for changing Stella into Luna and giving us a shell of a character in comparison to one that looked like she could be a really interesting one. But apart from that, it's hard to blame Tabata or Nomura. Nomura was juggling this and Kingdom Hearts (a bit like with Kojima and MGS, he made attempts to have a hands off approach and let a new team do most of the work but it didn't really work out) and the project never had the dedicated staff to work on it, and Tabata did well to even finish it off and turn it into something that ended up still being a mess but has its moments. But I still regularly think about what could have been.