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The long wait

April 30, 2009 by

While awaiting a final release date for Squares upcoming Final Fantasy XIII I had a look around previous Final Fantasy releases and made a list.

Now I know it’s a bit unfair to leave out Final Fantasy XI and add the delay to Final Fantasy XII but for me MMORPG variant wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and since it came out pretty soon after Final Fantasy X it’s development had probably started long before FFX was finished.

At the same time FFX-2 was only half a new Final Fantasy because it built on an existing FF world. Probably a tribute to having two Final Fantasy’s in the pipeline at the same time. This would also explain the long wait from FFX.

Game System JP Release EU Release Gap to last game Gap EU to JAP release
Final Fantasy VII PSX 31.01.1997 17.11.1997 10 months
Final Fantasy VIII PSX 11.02.1999 27.10.1999 23 months 8 months
Final Fantasy IX PSX 07.07.2000 16.02.2001 17 months 7 months
Final Fantasy X PS2 19.07.2001 29.05.2002 12 months 10 months
Final Fantasy X-2 PS2 13.03.2003 20.02.2004 32 months 11 months
Final Fantasy XII PS2 16.03.2006 23.02.2007 36 months 11 months
Final Fantasy XIII PS3 Q4, 2009 Q2, 2010 42 months 6 months

What becomes clear is that, as the visuals get increasingly elaborate so does the development time increase. At the same time it isn’t a linear growth. What remains is that the european release often trails the initial release by nearly a whole year – time will tell if Sqare Enix manages to keep the european FFXIII inside the 2nd quarter of 2010 or if all the projected dates for FFXIII are completely wrong because Squenix may want to delay the world release to get the Xbox360 version ready at the same time as the PS3 version.