OXM recently spoke to Final Fantasy XIII – Lightning Returns director Motomu Toriyama and gameplay director Yuji Abe about the future of the Final Fantasy series, and the Square Enix directors said that they have talked about letting Eidos work on the franchise.
"Obviously, Square Enix bought out Eidos a number of years ago, and now we have direct access to American development teams," Abe said. "That's certainly been discussed within the company, the possibility of say, Eidos or maybe someone else to look after or maybe take on the Final Fantasy series.
"And we obviously haven't decided anything concrete, but if we find the right team of developers, the right people who really wanted to do it, and we had the right game, then yes, certainly we'd think about it."
"The whole thing about the Final Fantasy series is that for every iteration, for every game we do, we have a very different game," Toriyama added. "So the development team is also different very time, so that there's different ideas and different concepts driving it.
"So obviously within that framework, having a very different type of team could work. So if we got the right team of people, it could produce something very interesting in the end."
Square Enix has said recently that they want to move away from developing games in house, so Eidos could be a good fit for them. However, that would seem like a crazy break away from tradition in that Final Fantasy wouldn't exactly be a JRPG anymore.
