A former art director for the studio said their version was “really, really cool”
Seems like in another timeline, we could’ve seen a fairly different take on Final Fantasy XV looked like. In a new interview, a former Eidos Montreal developer says the studio worked on a version of Final Fantasy XV, before Square Enix canceled it.
In an interview with TrueAchievements, former Eidos Montreal art director Jonathan Jacque-Belletête said the studio once worked on a version of the game.
“[Eidos-Montreal] brought back Deus Ex,” he said. “I was the art director on that—Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Then [I was] the executive art director on Mankind Divided. Then we tried to do Final Fantasy XV. Then they decided to bring it back to Japan—which I think was a big mistake, but it’s still the truth. Ours was really, really cool.”
Jacque-Belletête didn’t expand further on what exactly this meant. We don’t have any specifics on how far along the game was, or what stage it reached internally before it was cut off.
It does partially reinforce a 2018 report from YouTuber SuperBunnyhop, though. The report there was that their version of the next Final Fantasy was a “space opera” RPG.
New horizons
With the gap between Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016), it certainly seems plausible. Final Fantasy XV did go through a pretty tumultuous production timeline. Whatever there was of Eidos Montreal’s Final Fantasy is lost to time now, though.
Square Enix recently parted ways with Eidos Montreal and several other of its western studios. The publisher sold Eidos Montreal, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montreal to Embracer Group for $300 million. Included in the deal were several big-name properties, including Deus Ex, as well as Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain.
Now, Eidos and Final Fantasy won’t get their chance, it seems. Given their surprising success with last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, I’d still like to see what kind of space opera RPG that crew could put together.
