OrtizGames

Yesterday, during the E3 Microsoft Keynote presentation, we heard Yoichi Wada, president of Square Enix, give an announcement that broke millions of hearts.

Final Fantasy XIII no longer a PS3 exclusive. An Xbox 360 version will be released in Europe and North America on the same launch date as the PS3 version.

I think I’m justified in feeling terribly betrayed right now, since time and time again the world was assured that Final Fantasy XIII was to be a PS3 exclusive–the trailers had logos on the end that read “Exclusively for the Playstation 3 System”, the rumors were quelled time and time again, really–we all thought we could trust Square Enix. They have Sony’s back, we thought. Sony saved them when they were drowning after FFX-2 and Spirits Within. They gave them a huge chance with Kingdom Hearts–it’s the only reason they’ve been able to explode back up. And now this.

I can’t imagine the amount of money that must have exchanged hands for this to have occurred–Xbox 360 must have realized they didn’t have all that much in their 2008 lineup and called up Square Enix, begging for a slice of cake. I do, however, get the feeling Square won’t be having to merge with any other company anytime too soon.

To give some good news, Final Fantasy XIII Versus remains a PS3 exclusive, and XIII itself will of course still be released on the PS3. But Square has wounded me this time. I’ve been able to forgive and forget time and time again. But this? This is betrayal. I’ve been stabbed in the back. And not only me–I get the feeling Sony didn’t know about this announcement either. Nor any other Playstation advocate out there.

Square Enix, you’ve got to win back my respect and my approval. Both are gone for now. You have one more chance: make these two games so spectacular My eyes pop out, or become dead to me from here on out.

Let’s hope you make the right choice.

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When you think of casual games, the first thing that comes to your mind is not Final Fantasy. In fact, usually you’re nowhere near the RPG genre when you’re thinking about casual play. You might consider a shooter or a puzzle game long before you even consider the remote possibility of a casual RPG, and then when you actually stop to contemplate it for a moment, you stop, laugh, and say “Nah, that won’t happen.”

But how little informed we all are!

As a matter of fact, there’s been a few attempts at casual role-playing games in the past. One of the most noteworthy is a PC game by WildTangent (makers of Lumines and Runescape) called Fate. They declare it an “Enthusiast”game (same category as Runescape, an MMO) on their website, but in truth it’s much more a casual game in spirit than a hardcore one. You can play Fate for ten minutes or ten hours, and the result is pretty much still the same experience. And it’s just as addictive as Peggle, so you might end up working it for hours on end and somehow get no sense of accomplishment but all the sense of enjoyment.

There’s been other experiments in the casual/hardcore mix market for RPGs recently in even AAA titles–at least, what I perceive to be triple A. Not only triple A, but the very game we’d never expect to be a casual game. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (which I have to say I enjoy immensely) is very much a traditional RPG in the sense that it has a long, spanning story mode that has cutscenes and choices and menus and running around collecting lumber to build flower wagons. But Square Enix and the Kingdom Hearts team therein that was responsible for this amalgam of a game decided to put casual elements into gameplay and allow short, playable bursts of fun for two to five minutes at a time like any good portable game should, and I applaud any PSP title for achieving this standard instead of being a ported PS2 title. This effect is achieved through Missions, a mysterious menu option never before seen in any Final Fantasy game.

It works beautifully–you choose a mission from the Missions menu, complete it, and usually you’ll get another mission to do until you run out of them and need to seek out more through the regular story mode. Missions consist of running around a map and seeking a particular enemy while fighting baddies of differing skill levels (depending on the mission) and picking up treasure chests along the way. You can only access Missions while at a save point, making the transition between missions and saving seamless, quick and effective. It takes about two minutes to run one, and they’re addictive, despite their repetitiveness. There’s just something about Crisis Core‘s seamless battlesystem that makes those two minutes gloriously fun. It might be the fact that in running them, you level up and acquire enhanced items and materia that beef your character and you can use through regular story mode, making yourself vastly more powerful and advantaged. Even so, the game is still challenging, and you have Hard Mode to run through after you complete it once.

Using these kinds of elements in gameplay, Square Enix has toed in on a very different market in a very different way. Remaking Final Fantasy IV for the DS is lovely, I’ll admit, but the truth is that Final Fantasy was never meant to be a portable game. It’s always been a sit-your-ass-down-and-play-that-thing-for-hours game. Seeing a Final Fantasy that has mixes of both gameplay styles makes me content, especially since I’ve noticed from watching the industry that developers think hardcore games are waning. Both elements in a big title like Final Fantasy show that there’s rooms for both styles in the industry, and there’s no reason developers should stop trusting that the epics will sell to the mainstream audience.

In that light, give both games a try. Fate is a fairly low-hardware-specs game and Crisis Core needs only a PSP to work. They’re good fun and I’ve enjoyed both in their own right. When casual games are disguised as RPGs, some interesting things are probably on the horizon. What will Final Fantasy XIII bring? We can only guess.

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