Final Fantasy XIII-2 producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama believe releasing a full fledged new numbered game in the Final Fantasy series is of less profit to the series than releasing direct sequels like Final Fantasy XIII-2. “We feel that there’s a lot of merit to doing a sequel rather than doing a whole other numbered game in the sense that we’re not building everything from the ground up,” Kitase told Game Informer.
“We have the engine, the environment, the characters, and the basic storyline. That’s already laid out for us so we’re able to spend more time fine-tuning the game and listening to the fans, and making changes based off the feedback. The difficulty that comes along with that it’s not completely new. The challenge is getting people excited about the same setting and the same characters all over again.
“It’s a matter of how many new elements we can incorporate into the sequel to give it that fresh new look that will get people excited. That’s the biggest challenge.”
“The biggest difference is that we set a milestone of every month or two months,” Toriyama chimed in, giving insights on how the development worked. “Between each of those two phases we meet for that milestone.
“Not only do we share our content internally, we’ve also been doing user tests and taking that feedback to make more adjustments to the gameplay. We started this process in the alpha, which is about a year earlier than we did with Final Fantasy XIII.”
Final Fantasy XIII-2 releases next year on Januart 31 in the US and February 3 in Europe for Xbox 360 and PS3.