Anyone who lived through the PSP era remembers the name Hajime Tabata: he directed Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII in 2007, and later The 3rd Birthday and Final Fantasy Type-0, before taking over Final Fantasy XV. On November 7, 2018, in a special presentation about the game, Square Enix confirmed that Tabata had left Luminous Productions and the Square Enix group on October 31.
The departure came as a surprise because Luminous Productions was new. The studio was created in March 2018 in Tokyo with key members of the Final Fantasy XV team, and Tabata was in charge. The goal, in the studio’s own words, was to “use technology and creativity to change the future of games and entertainment.”
Along with the news came the cuts. Of the four episodes in The Dawn of the Future pack, announced in April 2018, three were canceled: Episode Aranea, Episode Lunafreya and Episode Noctis. Only Episode Ardyn survived, the villain’s story, planned for spring 2019 in the northern hemisphere. The Comrades multiplayer mode, which had existed since November 2017, also got a standalone version on December 12, 2018. Later, Tabata explained that he left because he no longer felt motivated and did not want to get in the team’s way.
What came next
Episode Ardyn came out in March 2019, the last piece of post-release content for Final Fantasy XV. The cancelled stories became the novel Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future, published in Japan in April 2019 and in the rest of the world in June 2020. Tabata opened his own studio, JP Games, as we reported here. Luminous Productions, meanwhile, released Forspoken in January 2023 and, in May of the same year, was merged into Square Enix. A short story for a studio born with the ambition of changing the future.
Source: IGN.
Max Xavier
Zé Cartucho
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