It’s the year 2024 and some games companies are still a bit weird about release dates. Rockstar hung about for a year after putting out Red Dead Redemption 1 on Switch and PS4 before remembering to put it on PC (and who knows what it’s gonna do with GTA 6), and Square Enix kept dancing around the Final Fantasy 16 PC port we all knew was coming while it was still in its year-long ‘only on PS5’ phase.
The good news is we might have to put up with a bit less of that from the second of those two corporations in the near future (Rockstar is beyond help). In a chat with 4gamer, FF14 director and the most tired man in Monster Hunter Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida said (all following quotes are machine-translated): “In the future, Square Enix titles will be released simultaneously on each platform more and more.”
Kicking off this newfound spirit of openness is Fantasian: Neo Dimension, the big-screen version of the Apple Arcade game from 2021 that’s hitting Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on December 5. “We will release it simultaneously on five platforms so that as many people as possible can pick it up,” says Yoshi-P. “This number of platforms is amazing. Thanks to the hard work of the Mistwalker [Corporation] programmers.”
Yoshi-P calls out the hard work of Mistwalker a couple of times, actually. It seems like putting out Fantasian on a bunch of platforms at the same time might have caused one or two headaches for the studio. “We apologise for the trouble we caused the Mistwalkers, but the fact it’s released simultaneously on so many platforms has led to overall excitement, so we are grateful that you did a good job.”
Overall excitement, imagine that! Maybe I’m a little bitter, but I suspect Square Enix might have seen just as much—perhaps more—overall excitement if you and I hadn’t had to wait a year to get our hands on FF16. Then again, maybe it’s fair enough. I just write about games; I don’t make them. If a simultaneous release caused Mistwalker issues, it could well be the case that Square had to retool some processes and internal workflows to get things running well enough to amp up the cadence of simultaneous releases.
Or maybe the company is just weird. We may never know.