Update: DO get excited about the remaster – Square Enix announced it today with a trailer. More through here.
A little earlier today a user on Reddit supposedly leaked Final Fantasy XII HD Remaster for PS4 over on Reddit. The user in question claims to be an employee of Square Enix and has posted a dubious image to the Reddit Final Fantasy page.
The image, which you can see below, looks to be pretty authentic at first glance and it even comes with a post from the supposed employee. Excuse the lack of capitlisation…
“hello final fantasy fans
i am a staff member of an european based team working for Square Enix which mostly handles localisation items. i can’t say too much but i am currently part of the remastering project for Final Fantasy XII… which is currently already going through localisation and is making decent progress
many fans are disappointed there is still no info about this remaster, so i can at least give you people some information today
the reason you have not heard any information regarding XII is because square enix has been putting almost all of its resources into XV. marketing-wise, this means most focus has been put on that title
Work on the XII remaster has however not been slowed down, we are still working intensively on it and both the japanese and localised version should release either simultaneously or with a small delay according to the most recent info we have, this has not been set in stone yet though. At one point, we actually heard from Japan that the announcement would have been made live somewhere around march/february this year. While the reasoning is still a bit off, we heard the executives changed plans and delayed our reveal to put more focus on XV, which is now the company’s biggest priority.
according to the most recent info from the japan team, the new reveal will most likely happen during E3, Sony’s press conference being the choice as of now. the idea here is to present a similar surprise to VII from last year. staff members know it won’t be the same as the VII remake but the XII remaster will include some nice surprises and they will be shown in the reveal trailer, too.
Localization is going very well, the game is realistically expect to launchlate 2016 or early 2017. i do not want to give people false hope so i will say 2017 looks more realistic because they don’t want much other games releasing alongside XV.”
So, the image has been taken off-screen and at a dodgy angle so that we can’t see the game’s icon. Suspicious, no? Of course it’s suspicious, why not take an actual picture of the game running – or better yet – a video?! What does lend the leaker an ounce of credibility is that Hitman’s second episode, Sapienza, is also shown to be installed on the system. If you’re wondering why that’s relevant, it’s because Sapienza doesn’t release until April 26th. So if this so-called employee is an actual employee, we imagine that it’s well within the realm of possibility that they’d have the second Hitman episode installed.
Yet, for this small ounce of credibility, there’s another “but” standing in the way. Look at the install date of the last thing on the PS4. It’s Final Fantasy’s Platinum Demo which was released on March 31st. The next thing installed, or apparently installed, was this “leaked” remaster. It doesn’t say the date, but we should probably note that April 1st is the day after March 31st. Just saying. Also, the picture looks like the TV is in somebody’s bedroom, not the brightly lit workspace of an employee at Square Enix. Again, just saying.
Now, it’s almost a certainty that Final Fantasy XII will get a remaster at some point, but it’s highly unlikely that anyone on the publisher’s staff types in such a horrid fashion and chooses a relatively minor sub-reddit to leak such a massive thing, especially with such a large question mark over their status within reddit. The grammatical errors aside, there’s not really any solid information that can be backed up, just dates that anyone would realistically propose for a major release. It’s all a bit amateur really. It’s easy enough to fake an image on a computer and then put that image onto the PS4 with a thumb stick, so it’s not hard to imagine that that’s exactly what’s happened here.
So, what’s the takeaway from this: the leak is as credible as Hitler’s latest tweet on how the Wolfenstein games are awful. Then again, some say Hitler never died…
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