A few days ago, Final Fantasy Creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and Bravely Default developer Silicon Studio jointly announced a collaboration for a new game. Yet, the announcement included an interesting mystery.
The press release for the announcement included the artwork (simply labeled "image illustration") that you can see below. It's a quite beautiful piece by Mistwalker Artist Kimihiko Fujisaka, but it's not new.
It looked familiar, but I didn't immediately make the connection until I went back to dig on it. Fujisaka-san's artwork actually appeared in Mistwalker's gallery (which isn't online anymore) almost seven years ago, as mentioned in this article on Siliconera from back then.
Before the release of The Last Story, the artwork was initially thought by some to be for Mistwalker's next game, and in fact some still believe that it's from The Last Story, but it was actually just a stand-alone illustration by Fujisaka-san, as he explained on his athor's page on Mistwalker's website. There he also mentioned a canceled project, which is possibly Cry On, but that was never confirmed, and it's relation to the illustration was not clarified, or even hinted at.
Incidentally, the sword held by the character in the game was used as Two's sword in Drakengard 3, as you can see below. While Fujisaka-san is still employed at Mistwalker, he worked with Square Enix as Character Designer for Taro Yoko's latest JRPG.
Yet the plot thickens further, as the same artwork has been used by Mistwalker to publicize Terra Battle's home console version Terra Battle World on its Download Starter page, as you can see below.
Terra Battle World is supposed to be a quite different game from its successful mobile counterpart. According to previous mentions by Sakaguchi-san himself, it's going to be a MMORPG set in the same universe, with a similar accent on formation gameplay.
Its Download Starter goal was reached several months ago, so it makes sense for it to be the new game in collaboration with Silicon Studio. The press release mentions that the title will make use of Silicon's technology, and with their Orochi game engine and Mizuchi rendering engine (which I saw myself running smoothly on PS4), they're perfectly equipped to support development on current generation home consoles.
Kimihiko Fujisaka also works as the main character designer for Terra Battle, so it makes perfect sense that one of his illustration would be used to announce the new game of the franchise.
Of course, we can't be sure for the moment, and there's no way to know why Mistwalker used such an old illustration. Yet, I can't say I'm not excited to hear more.
Incidentally, we reached out to Mistwalker asking about the nature of the illustration, and we'll update this post if we hear anything relevant about it.