I remember the day Square Enix announced that an upcoming little game called Final Fantasy 13 was slated to launch not only on PlayStation 3, but on Xbox 360 as well. It wasn't just the simultaneous release that blindsided the fandom. It was the sheer notion of a Final Fantasy title going to Microsoft in the first place. Tempers flared (because people are exceedingly silly) and graphical debates between the pair of platforms persisted until folks had their hands on FF13... at which point the conversation tilted toward whether it was even a particularly good video game.
As it happens, all of this could have happened even earlier. As part of a recent interview, former Xbox executive Ed Fries shared a surprising lamentation: he'd tried to get earlier FFs to hop on to the original Xbox.
There was a relatively brief period in video game history when Xbox not only courted JRPG publishers... but succeeded in the bargaining. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's initial pair of post-Square projects, went straight to Xbox 360. Tales of Vesperia was a 360 exclusive for nearly a year in Japan, and it never went to PS3 anywhere else....
