The Final Fantasy XV event held yesterday in Tokyo by the magazine Dengeki PlayStation included the reveal of several new pieces of artwork related to the game.
You can check them out in the gallery below alongside a few more goodies like the Ultimate Collector's Edition and more, courtesy of Twitter users いけ, 九尾, ゆーゆーじてき, 零斗, kagome5, 紅蓮, ムカミクロん , nise8, _Hondá, らさ, ミロク, 便宜上T.a.K.A and Mana.
In particular the concept art for Aranea Highwind and Ardyn caught the attention of its author, Character Designer Roberto Ferrari, well known for his work for Square Enix and other Japanese companies, like Namco and Tatsunoko.
The artist expressed his frustration on Facebook about the fact that other characters he created for the game were removed due to the changes made to the story among the passage between Final Fantasy Versus XIII and Final Fantasy XV.
The message was posted in Italian (which is Ferrari's native language), and I took the liberty to translate it, while also including the original below:
Finalmente qualcuno ha deciso di pubblicare i miei disegni^^
Ogni volta che troverete sui disegni questo marchio rosso con la scritta フェラーリ (Ferrari) considerate che sono personaggi che ho creato io.
Aranea l'ho realizzata alla fine di giugno del 2010 mentre Ardyn e` di dicembre dello stesso anno (anche se poi l'ho Brush-Uppato nel gennaio 2011).
6 anni -dico- 6 anni per trovare la luce!
E tutti quei personaggi (purtroppo ce ne sono anche di migliori!) che sono stati sacrificati a causa del cambiamento della storia, che fine faranno?
In principio sul copione erano presenti diversi Stage, omessi in seguito nonostante fossero stati gia`realizzati sia i personaggi che le scenografie.
Tutto lavoro sprecato e, soprattutto, e` frustrante pensare che non si possa pubblicare niente di tutto cio`(o almeno io non posso farlo).
Tristemente senza parole.
At last someone decided to publish my designs^^
Every time you'll find on the drawings this red mark with フェラーリ (Ferrari), please consider that they're characters created by me.
I drew Aranea at the end of June 2010, while Ardyn is from December of the same year (even if I gave him a Brush-up in January 2011).
Six year - I say - six years to see the light!
And all those characters (unfortunately there are even better than these!) that have been sacrificed due to the change in story, what will happen to them?
At the beginning, on the script there were several stages, removed afterwards even if both the characters and the environments were already finished.
That's all wasted work, and especially, it's frustrating to think that nothing of that can be published (or at least, I can't do it).
Sadly without words.
It's always sad when one's hard work and art can't see the light. Yet, unfortunately, cutting content during development is a quite normal occurrence in game development, which is a constantly flowing process where things change over time, and things that appear to make sense for a game today, might not fit as well months from now.
Hopefully we'll be able to see Ferrari's missing characters and artwork sooner or later. Square Enix has been quite open with the development process of Final Fantasy XV, and hopefully once things are said and done, we'll get to see some sort of post-mortem showing what did not make it into the game.