I can't believe it's taken this long, but a live-action Final Fantasy TV series is in the works. The hit SquareEnix role playing game is currently on its fifteenth installment, not including mobile spinoffs, while a remake of the franchise's most popular game, Final Fantasy 7, is due to be released next year. Sounds like a perfect time to bring that world to the small screen so we can see Chocobos and Moogles hang out for real.
The series comes from Sony and Hivemind, who have decided that Final Fantasy 14 is somehow the best game to adapt. Say what now?? It's a pretty awful game by the series' standards, getting shutdown shortly after its 2010 release because players hated its MMORPG world so much. The show will tell an original story exploring “the struggle between magic and technology in a quest to bring peace to a land in conflict.”
Sony Pictures Television co-President Chris Parnell adds, “This show is about embracing and embodying all of the elements that have made the mythos such an endlessly captivating phenomenon, and it’s an immense honor to be bringing all of Eorzea’s iconic characters, settings, and concepts – including fan-favorites like Cid and, of course, the chocobos – to life for a television audience.”
Cid is the grizzled airship captain who has made appearances in virtually every Final Fantasy game, and seeing him will actually be pretty cool.
To be fair, Final Fantasy 14 made one Hell of a comeback in 2013 with A Realm Reborn, which seriously overhauled the game and its mechanics. The online user community has been large and faithful ever since, with expansions to the game as recently as this year.
On the other hand, Final Fantasy adaptations have been pretty mixed. In 2001 a CGI movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a very high-profile flop that basically killed Square's multimedia aspirations. Final Fantasy 7 got a downright amazing CGI sequel titled Advent Children, while Final Fantasy 15 was preceded by a dreadful prequel, Kingsglaive, that I still get hate mail over my review.
Hopefully we'll hear more about Final Fantasy soon because this has potential to be amazing depending on the showrunners and network it lands on.
