Astro Bot is one of the biggest releases of 2024, already boasting a 94 MetaCritic. The big that has driven fans wild is its use of legacy PlayStation IP. Astro goes out to meet bot versions of Sony’s most popular characters, including newer characters like Aloy and legacy characters like Kratos.
Even Crash Bandicoot, now owned by Microsoft Gaming, got to be in the game. This interview in Japan apparently confirmed that Microsoft themselves approved this cameo. But one of the glaring omissions is the lack of Square Enix characters. Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy, Crono from Chrono Trigger, not even Frey from Forspoken or any of the characters from Foamstars made it to Astro Bot.
Team Asobi’s lead developer Nicolas Doucet was asked about this upfront in a new interview with Game File. As reported by GamesRadar, Doucet had this short reply:
“It’s difficult to comment on that. We really respect the choice of each publisher.”
That’s a lot that has been said without saying directly. Without saying it outright, Doucet suggests here that it wasn’t that Team Asobi didn’t try to make it happen. It was Square Enix who denied their request to add them in.
Now, we know have no choice but to speculate on the reason for their decision, but that seems easy to intuit as well. Square Enix officially revealed the some sales updates that were leaked earlier this year. And that news was that Foamstars, Final Fantasy XVI, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, all PlayStation 5 exclusives at launch, all sold under expectations.
In the fallout of this news, Square Enix announced plans to make less games, and bring the ones they do make, to more platforms. With that in mind, having Square Enix characters appear in PlayStation exclusive title Astro Bot would have undermined that new strategy.
Square Enix definitely understands how their fans are thinking, and they understand what expectations and culture they have created with their fans, who play on PlayStation. They no longer want to signal that PlayStation is Square Enix’s ‘home’ anymore. At the very least, it is not their only home.
On the flip side of this, Microsoft just launched Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters on Xbox Series X|S. No less than Naoki Yoshida talked about building a starting point for more Square Enix games coming to Xbox. That was not just cheap talk. Final Fantasy and other Square Enix games coming to Xbox, PC, and Nintendo, alongside PlayStation, all at the same time, this is Square Enix’s future.
