LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, United States (Reuters) — Japanese company Square Enix decided to hold the unveiling of details surrounding their much anticipated console game ‘Final Fantasy XV’ at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Wednesday (March 30).
While fans – some of which dressed in cos play for the event – arrived in their thousands to the free ticketed event called ‘Uncovered: Final Fantasy XV’, many were unaware that the game’s director Hajime Tabata was watching them as they arrived.
“From the get-go, Final Fantasy has always been the underdog in our mindset, we’ve always been the challenger going for the throne if you will and in order to get that message across to our fans and the viewers watching at home at today’s event, we decided to go with Los Angeles to show that we are truly going with a global brand and reaching out globally with this title,” Tabata told Reuters earlier in the day.
The Final Fantasy series is seen as a cornerstone of video games. It has captivated audiences over the last three decades with its own lore of crystals, magic, chocobos, moogles and oversized weapons.
However, this game makes a departure from the franchise by featuring modern day cars, clothing and mobile phones.
Tabata explained this strategy by saying “So in terms of Final Fantasy and HD games, we’ve now got to a point where we can go photo-realistic in terms of depiction of the graphics and what not and we wanted to show fantasy in reality or reality in fantasy – whichever way you want to go at it and so with this game one of our main themes was to try and incorporate those fantasy elements that looked photo-realistic as if it could occur in the real world. That was one of our main objectives with this game.”
Although most of the games have been critically received, the last single-player game, Final Fantasy XIII and its spin-offs, were met with mixed reviews. The fifteenth of the series – the fourteenth was an on-line game – is reported to have been in production for 9 years.
When asked why the game had been so long in development, Tabata replied with a simile: “It’s (like) trying to make a wooden house and then try and make a huge skyscraper – the technology is totally different and to go into an HD game development we needed to get the technology up to date and that’s why it took so long.”
The game follows a prince and his three loyal followers who go on their final road trip together before his impending marriage. The choice of an all-male cast has been unusual for the Final Fantasy games, which seem to attract an equal audience of both male and female gamers.
“So in terms of Final Fantasy XV, one of the key themes is brotherhood – this tale of men and their friendship and because of that we decided to go with a male cast,” said Tabata. “And because we decided on that theme we could use our own personal experiences of having gone on trips ourselves with our friends or male staff members, so in the game you’ll see examples of our own personal experiences incorporated into the game but along those lines, Final Fantasy is a long story, it is a grand tale and many characters will appear and I can assure you there will be several important prominent female characters who appear during the game.”
For the fans that arrived at the Uncovered: ‘Final Fantasy XV’ event, there were more surprises. Florence and the Machine were announced as singing the theme tune – Ben E. King’s ‘Stand by Me’ – and the game was to receive two dramatic spin-offs. One is a CGI feature film called ‘Kingsglaive’ featuring the voices of Aaron Paul, Leda Headey and Sean Bean about the backstory of the kingdom featured in the game and the other ‘Brotherhood’ being an anime series exploring the relationships between the four lead characters.
And to finish off the event, the launch date was revealed as September 30, 2016 and while most announcements came as a surprise to the fans, that piece of information had somehow leaked onto the internet earlier in the day.
