God she makes me sick, but she makes me want her oh, oh so badly.

Will we see a late 2008 release of Final Fantasy XIII? Yes? Maybe? Please, pretty please?

The Final Fantasy XIII Fabula Nova Crystallis project has been in development for over at least two years as it was announced early in 2006 E3. One would assume that it was in development at least a year even before that. Since then, they have given us four trailers for the two games, both expanded from the first, and the occasional tease in the form of enigmatic and vague discussion of the game worlds and changing of the name of the engine to 'Crystal Tools' (woohoo *twirls finger around in the air*).

Square used to be able to routinely put out a solid final fantasy game every year or two, along with other projects (yes, I'm talking about the glorious PSONE days, Vagrant Story, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, etc.). In the case of Final Fantasy X, from first unveiling the trailer in 2000, it took them only about a year to release the game. Since then, development time and the amount of quality titles being released has dropped off significantly. Are the games really that much better since FFX to justify such long development times? I mean, christ, it took them five years to develop FFXII.

It seems that their trend toward recycling old games in the form of spinoffs (FFVII and DS titles) and their lack of interesting individual projects started abruptly when Square merged with Enix due to the disastrous flunk of Sakaguchi's "Final Fantasy: Spirits Within" (which I actually enjoyed). Is this the case? If so, why? One would think that merging with a larger company such as Enix would increase their capital and means of production, thereby increasing productivity, but the opposite seems true. So who's to blame? Higher production costs? Lack of Ingenuity? Corporate greed? Or are we all just expecting too much from a series that has run for over two decades?