Recent Final Fantasy games haven’t done a great job of bringing in a new audience, Hajime Tabata admits. And I agree.
One of the goals Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata has for the upcoming RPG is to attract new players. Without them, he says:
The franchise will shrink and shrink as the years go on.
Tabata admitted this hasn’t been a strong point for the series of late.
Certainly, in recent years, getting new fans is something we haven’t done very well; we really haven’t achieved that
he told GamesRadar in a recent interview.
His attempt at ensuring Final Fantasy XV doesn’t repeat that mistake involves:
trying to go back to the roots of Final Fantasy
he also wants the RPG to offer:
themes that resonate with everyone
as he feels that recent games have:
maybe been a bit stylized, very niche, hard to get into.
Final Fantasy XV was originally planned to be part of the Final Fantasy XIII sub-series, known as Fabula Nova Crystalis. Development on it started under the name Final Fantasy XIII Versus, but the project eventually transformed into Final Fantasy XV.
While there are links to past games in the franchise such as Behemoths or the dreaded Malboro, you won’t need to have played any of the prior Final Fantasy games to fully enjoy Final Fantasy XV. This is something that Tabata himself describes as:
a big part of what I think the game should be.
Another key is not to add things to the game purely because they’ve been in a past game. As Tabata explains:
You look at all the elements of Final Fantasy that make up its identity over the generations, and obviously many of those are very useful, meaningful things, but there are some that have been used many times which may be turning off new people. We’ve really got to go through and ask, ‘Are they necessary?’ and be proactive about cutting out the ones that stop people coming into the franchise.
Tabata recently indicated that he wants Final Fantasy XV to be released on Xbox One & PlayStation 4 by 2016, however, you won’t have to wait that long to satiate your Final Fantasy hunger as, in addition to the demo already released with Final Fantasy Type-0, a livestream during GamesCom revealed there are plans for a second demo.