I’ve always viewedFinal Fantasyas aPlayStationproperty. To some, this is sacrilegious, as they grew up with the original six entries on Nintendo platforms before SquareSoft decided to betray Nintendo and embrace the third-dimension. TheNintendo 64simply wasn’t capable of the worlds, characters, and mechanics the developer had in mind for the future, so it made a deal with Sony that would change the series’ trajectory forever.
But it wasn’t until adulthood that I saw the narrative from this perspective. My first experience of the series was withFinal Fantasy 7on the original PlayStation, watching my older siblings run through the opening reactor sequence as my jaw dropped in equal parts awe and untold fascination as I watched what felt like a living, breathing world unfold before me.
This happened again and again in the years that followed with Final Fantasy 8, 9, 10, and 12. It wasn’t until Final Fantasy 13 that the series would once again go multiplatform, not counting the occasional PC ports that next to nobody cared about. Final Fantasy, from a cultural perspective,frommyperspective, was inseparable from PlayStation. This makes its absence from Astro Bot all the more hard to swallow.
You will have noticed Cloud Strife’s sword appears briefly inAstro’s Playroom, and to most of us, that felt like a casual admission from Team Asobi that, whatever came next for Astro, that Final Fantasy would play a significant role. Unfortunately, because Square Enix either didn’t want its IP in the hands of Sony or forgot to answer its emails, that never happened.
Team Asobi acknowledged the glaring absence in a recent interview withGame File, with studio head Nicolas Doucet saying that FF not turning up was “difficult to comment on.”
“I was thinking, ‘Well, maybe half of the ones we’re wishing for will make it,” he says. “In the end, in fact, almost 100 percent are in, because these partners just raised their hand and said, ‘Absolutely.’”
Doucet goes on to talk about deliberate exemptions from Astro Bot too, such as Sweet Tooth from Twisted Metal, who was apparently avoided because Sony didn’t want parents having to explain who this clown was and what they did in the middle of a level. A weird excuse to make when you consider some of the other cameo bots featured in the game. Either way, it seems conversations about what PlayStation properties to include and which to avoid were had throughout development, and Asobi was consistently reaching out to partners to try and hammer home as much representation as possible.
Final Fantasymusthave been one of the earliest touchstones considered, because for an entire generation of players, characters like Cloud, Squall, Zidane, and Tidus would be on the tip of their tongues. I can already imagine countless cute animations and items we may have seen unfold in the hub area, or optional costumes Astro could have ended up donning. The potential is endless, and Final Fantasy could have feasibly taken up a quarter of Astro’s 300+ selection of bosses if Team Asobi wanted to go especially hard. Heck, Final Fantasy is enough of an icon to have its own Astro Bot expansion and feel entirely justified.
Astro Bot has themed levels based on the likes of Uncharted, LocoRoco, and Ape Escape. I could easily see the titular robot making his way through the Final Fantasy 7 opening reactor as he saves the main cast and takes part in iconic set pieces before culminating with an epic boss battle between the player and the Scorpion Guard. Maybe our fellow bots could be helping out with reenacting limit breaks. It’s a game that doesn’t quite make itself, but it only takes a casual fan of Final Fantasy to have the imagination run wild with ideas.
Most of all though, Final Fantasy’s lack of representation in Astro Bot is a sad reminder that in order to celebrate the legacy of a company like PlayStation, we need to cross obnoxious legal lines and get permission from countless parties to make it a reality. The majority of big developers and publishers said yes without a second thought, acknowledging that Astro Bot is a celebration of the medium and needn’t be hindered by pointless obstacles. But some did not, and that’s all it takes to feel like something is missing.
Square Enix might have simply forgotten to engage in productive dialogue, or it made the conscious decision not to give Astro Bot the time of day despite the pride of place that Final Fantasy would have received. It’s an omission that is impossible to ignore, and Astro Bot is weaker as a consequence.
