It appears that hell has frozen over and pigs have been spotted flying because the big boss over at Square Enix, president Yoichi Wada, said during an interview that he is open to the idea of a western developer taking on the next Final Fantasy franchise video game. Considering the history of Square Enix and that Japan is a very proud country this statement during an interview with gaming website Play.tm is very shocking, to say the least. The fact that they are opening the door to such an infamous series for western developers is a huge sign of respect in the industry; a small snippet of the interview is below and stay tuned for more on this story as it develops right here at PlanetXbox360.com.
That is one of the possible paths, but it’s not something that we would shift completely over to ... there is always a possibility that Final Fantasy could be produced with the input of our Western developers, overseen by our Japanese developers. ... But whether we are going to continue to internally create this type of game remains to be seen, because I actually feel that the team that was involved with Final Fantasy XIII should next move on to create and generate some ‘next generation’ forms of play.
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Final Fantasy XIII has now shipped in Japan, selling 1.6 million units in December. It’s planned to release on March 9, 2010 in the US and Europe on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.