Square Enix director Takashi Tokita recently confirmed to the gaming blog Kotaku that Final Fantasy VI will be hitting iOS and Android this winter.
Though the exec dropped hints about Final Fantasy VII being considered for mobile, he was quick to stress that no definite decision has been reached yet.
It seems now that a mobile Final Fantasy VII edition may be “years away” due to space limitations. I have the full story right after the break…
Takashi clarified in today’s interview with Shacknews that it could take years before the team tackles Final Fantasy VII for mobile, here’s the full quote:
Unfortunately, it’s not that it’s not impossible for us to develop Final Fantasy 7 for mobile. It’s that currently, space will be an issue. Phones won’t be able to contain the space it takes. It’s over a gigabyte. People are probably going to have to wait a few years.
That’s a funny remark from a company behind The World Ends With You, a video game that weighs in at a massive 2.4GB.
I’m not sure if Takashi was referring to app bundles or on-device storage/RAM. Either way, someone should tell him that graphics-intensive triple-A games on the App Store often come in at over a gigabyte.
Case in point: Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade III is a 1.5GB download.
According to Apple, iOS apps can be as large as two gigabytes.
It is possible Takashi meant RAM – the speedy random-access memory accessed by the main processor to run code – rather than the much slower flash storage (16/32/64GB on current iPhones) which holds user data, media, app bundles and other assets.
Apple’s A7/A6 chips powering the iPhone 5s/5c/5 feature 1GB of RAM – clearly enough to run a killer game such as Infinity Blade III. Therefore, there should be no constraints in terms of either RAM or storage to run a mobile Final Fantasy VII port on the current-generation iOS hardware.
Anyways, when Kotaku last week asked Takashi about the state of Final Fantasy VII on mobile, he said his company was well-aware it had “tons of VII fans”, including those sitting in its offices, and hinted Square “would like to one day be able to work” on the mobile edition of the VII provided the mobile edition of Final Fantasy VI “works out well”.
The seventh installment in the Final Fantasy series was originally published way back in 1997 for Sony’s PlayStation system. It had 3D animated characters on pre-rendered backgrounds, a first for the series (see above and below).
A year later the game hit Microsoft Windows, then in 2009 appeared as a digital download on the PlayStation Network. Last year, Final Fantasy VII was released as a digital download for PCs and earlier this year surfaced on Valve’s Steam.