The publication Dengeki PS3 recently had a chance to interview Square Enix's Motomu Toriyama and Tetsuya Nomura, both of whom are hard at work on the next installment in the Final Fantasy series.
As many of you may know, FFXIII originally began being developed as a Playstation 2 title. The project was abandoned in May 2005 and moved to the PS3. As it turns out, very little of the work put into the game was kept: the characters, mythology, and Fabula Nova Cyrstalis world were retained, but everything else that had been created--the graphical elements, the battle and gameplay systems--were all scrapped.
The Final Fantasy XIII staff has grown since the PS2 days, and is now working under the game's producer, Yoshinori Kitase. However, they are not yet fully focused on developing XIII. The staff is, instead, still working on perfecting the White Engine, Square Enix's multipurpose engine that will be utilized in many upcoming PS3 titles, and not just FFXIII, as Nomura explained: "It's sort of like FFXIII is there as a target. FF Versus XIII will also use the White Engine, and it will be tuned for FF Versus XIII."
So, the bad news is that we won't be seeing any Playstation 3 Final Fantasy titles for quite some time. After all, development on the engine hasn't yet been fully completed. Thankfully, with so much work going into the engine and Square Enix's devotion to tapping the system's potential, there's no question their future projects will be unmistakably next-gen quality.
[Source: IGN]
EoFF on Twitter