New information on Project Setsuna, Square Enix’s newest console role-playing game, has found its way online.
In an interview with Famitsu, the Japanese gaming culture magazine, Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda revealed that a major theme of Project Setsuna would be sadness, stemming from the Japanese word “setsunasa,” meaning sadness or sorrow.
In the interview, Matsuda described the team at Tokyo RPG Factory. The development team is compromised of a large amount of external developers, including some freelance assistance. He added that development time is expected to be short, citing a 2016 release window. Post-release, Square Enix will make the judgement on whether to grow the game into a full franchise or not after it “carefully [looks] over the results” of Project Setsuna’s sales.
“It’s important to create new IPs, but creating big IPs is difficult… Having been looking at the game industry up until now, it’s quite common to see [a video game series] take the form of a trilogy. In that sense, we need to have at least three [titles] before knowing whether it will continue growing or not,” Matsuda added.
Project Setsuna was originally announced during Square Enix’s E3 press conference last month. As previously stated, the game will be a completely new IP, not a spin off from any of the existing Square franchises (not another Final Fantasy spin off!).