Were ninety-percent certain that these characters all started as completely unsolicited sketches. Tetsuya Nomura drew up a character, and went, Yeah, heres a character, and gave it to his assistant. His assistant took the sketch to the character modelers. Who is this? the 3D artist asked. Whats his job? Whats his motivation? How tall is he, about? Do we have a drawing of what the back of his outfit looks like? Does he have a name? The assistant delivered these questions to Mr. Nomura, who was in the middle of ironing his favorite (and only) T-shirt (the one with a gothic crucifix and maybe fourteen-thousand words of gibberish script all over it (oh god, someone make him a T-shirt out of the text of this review!)), and thus buck-naked from the waist up. Covering his man-boobies in shame, he heard the question and then promptly fired his assistant and hired another random member from his fan community on Mixi. Maybe a week later, he told his new assistant, Oh, yeah, this guy isnt one of the heroes; hes just, like a guy. This guy, though, the missive continued, four days later, he might be a main character.
A recent story on Kotaku.com supports our hypothesis. You dont have to click: well explain it. A producer of Final Fantasy XIII explains that there was enough discarded content from Final Fantasy XIII to make a whole other game. The content in question is mainly levels game-play areas. Thats a real, huge red flag, right there. Seeing as the levels or areas in Final Fantasy XIII are first and foremost venues for monsters to appear, and seeing as how monsters are selected for how niftily they clash against the background graphics seeing as how the majority of the minor in-game cut-scene dialogue consists of main characters discussing things no more detailed than What are we going to do? We have to survive. We have to fight. We have to fight . . . them. its quite pitifully obvious that none of the scripted dialogue or level events had anything to do with the player characters current location.
This is the kind of thing that we, as a marketing / PR person, always tell game companies to never, ever, ever say in interviews. Like, theres enough levels to make another game? That means that they spent huge amounts of time making levels that they werent going to use. Thats because (believe us on this one) the overall arc / scope of the story wasnt fixed early enough in the development: the areas that were eventually actualized as levels by artists (judging by our complete playthrough of the game, were going to say there werent actually any level designers) were originally conceived by checklists drawn up during regularly scheduled brainstorming meetings. Fire level, Ice level, et cetera.
Seeing as most of the levels in the finished game lack any kind of sense of common sense, or even one-word-summaryable background art gimmicks, we can surmise that the artists themselves were in charge of thinking of the themes for the backgrounds, and then actualizing them via a series of rough drafts and object asset requests.
In short: they had no idea what the game was about. Tetsuya Nomura designed characters, some other artists designed some other characters, some other artists still designed huge amounts of enemy-like robot-ish machine-things, some other artists flung together lavish architecture inspired by lifetimes of playing Final Fantasy VII and longing desperately to work on a Final Fantasy game though, of course, if they did, theyd do something kind of different. Then someone came in and was like btw dudes, the game is about this. Then someone was like, Oh, i guess we dont need that dinosaur island part, or that part on the moon. Owning up to enough cut-out levels to make another game is pretty much admitting yeah, we lacked focus from the very start; we had close to no idea what we were doing.
