FFX producer developing PS3 Final Fantasy?

During E3 last month, Square Enix president Youichi Wata showed a technical demonstration of how Final Fantasy VII would look if it were remade for the PlayStation 3. He then made a disclaimer that a new version of the game isn't actually being developed for the console but assured the audience at the presentation that another Final Fantasy game will be coming to the PlayStation 3.

In the latest issue of Dengeki PlayStation, the magazine featured an interview with Final Fantasy X producer Yoshinori Kitase, who's currently working on the PlayStation 2's Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII. One of the questions raised in the interview was whether the PlayStation 3 game will be Final Fantasy XIII. As expected, Kitase declined to give an answer, saying, "I can only officially state that we are making a Final Fantasy for the PS3."

However, he also suggested that he is involved as a core staff in the game’s development, stating, "As a hint, one thing I can say is that the FFVII technical PS3 demo was supervised by me and created by Toriyama and his team staff. I'll leave it to you, but you can imagine that development [of the PS3 FF] is happening via a similar process." Motomu Toriyama was one of the directors that worked with Kitase on Final Fantasy X, and he was the main director for Final Fantasy X-2.

Kitase also revealed the Final Fantasy VII technical PS3 demo was actually a rush job, created in just a month and a half. "We created [it] right before E3. I didn't think we could do it at first, but I called Sugimoto (Koji Sugimoto, FFX’s main programmer), and we somehow made it. I believe that if we had more time, we could have made it in a higher quality. In that sense, that demo didn't really take much advantage of the PS3's hardware specs. But still, we were able to make something that looked that good."

When asked if there were any more Final Fantasy VII spin-offs planned in the future, Kitase laughed, commenting, "Well, we'll have to see. There are still characters that might be alive [from the original FFVII]."