I remember the day Square Enix announced that an upcoming little game called Final Fantasy 13 was slated to launch not only on PlayStation 3, but on Xbox 360 as well. It wasn’t just the simultaneous release that blindsided the fandom. It was the sheer notion of a Final Fantasy title going to Microsoft in the first place. Tempers flared (because people are exceedingly silly) and graphical debates between the pair of platforms persisted until folks had their hands on FF13… at which point the conversation tilted toward whether it was even a particularly good video game.
As it happens, all of this could have happened even earlier. As part of a recent interview, former Xbox executive Ed Fries shared a surprising lamentation: he’d tried to get earlier FFs to hop on to the original Xbox.
A Lost Odyssey
There was a relatively brief period in video game history when Xbox not only courted JRPG publishers… but succeeded in the bargaining. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s initial pair of post-Square projects, went straight to Xbox 360. Tales of Vesperia was a 360 exclusive for nearly a year in Japan, and it never went to PS3 anywhere else. (This left excellent additional content beyond non-Japanese games’ reach all the way until Definitive Edition launched a decade later.) The list goes on.
Long story short, then—Microsoft made real progress. But there’s something telling about everything I just cited. They’re all Xbox 360 games. Not one of them is from the time period that would’ve propped them up on the original console. That’s where Ed Fries’ regrets come in. Had they managed to pull that off, Final Fantasy 10, 12, and maybe even online-only 11 would have appeared on OG Xbox. Either alongside PlayStation 2, or—if the above examples are anything to go by—ideally as Halo-accompanying exclusives.
Speaking with The Expansion Pass on YouTube—appreciate the heads-up, GamesRadar!—Fries looks back on Xbox’s nascent era and its largely failed attempts to court Japanese game-makers. He frequently met with Square, but nothing ever quite stuck. He did the same with Sega, Capcom, and Konami; there was, therefore, a time when Persona, Breath of Fire (remember that one?), and Suikoden could have shared the road on Xbox or even become synonymous with the brand.
But Final Fantasy’s a crown jewel, and Fries cites the series as “really up there” in terms of what would have delighted and enthralled him. (And potentially moved more units, of course. That’s the idea.) He also makes a rather interesting claim:
“[Xbox] were able to do some deals after I left with Square, but it was always like, a tough discussion because they wanted Sony to have competition. But they couldn’t be too overt in their support of Xbox. They couldn’t make it too obvious they were supporting Xbox.”
A bit of a clandestine partnership, then, although it certainly took the JRPG-loving world by storm and kicked up quite the frenzy when FF13’s Lightning was revealed to be making the crossover to Xbox 360 right alongside the PS3. To say nothing of the fact that Sakaguchi-san himself took his business over to the House of Halo. Nowadays, this all feels rather quaint; but, even if Ed Fries couldn’t get Tidus and Yuna to Xbox, Microsoft managed quite the splash several years thereafter.
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