Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy who later left Square to start MIstwalker, and work on acclaimed JRPG projects such as Lost Odyssey and The Last Battle, released Terra Battle for smartphones in Japan. When he did, he also promised that once the game hit 2 million downloads, Mistwalker would work on bringing the world of Terra Battle to consoles.
Terra Battle hit 2 million downloads. Unfortunately, it seems the console game hasn’t actually been given any thought yet.
“When we first began planning the Download Starter and setting our goals, I never thought we’d reach two million downloads,” Sakaguchi said to Famitsu (as translated by Gematsu). “Or rather, it was a far away goal. But meeting this feeling, it is expected we keep our promise of ‘starting development on a consumer version,’ but I didn’t think that day would really come. We didn’t actually have anything planned for it, so I’m starting to feel the heat now that it’s happening.”
“We really don’t have any plans right now. I’m in so much trouble now,” he laughed. “Still, however we end up doing it, I want the characters and atmosphere of the game world to be in line with what we’ve done for the smartphone game. I plan on doing a lot of experimenting to see whether we otherwise actually take the game in any new directions. Virtual reality could be an interesting direction to take, as could having some sort of connectivity with next-gen if we could pull that off.”
So, while it seems that he has committed to doing a high end console JRPG, it might be a while before we do end up seeing it. So sure, there is something from him to look forward to. It’s just that no one, not even Sakaguchi himself, quite knows what that is yet.