Stella Scrapped from “Final Fantasy XV”

A Lot Has Changed Since Versus XIII Was Revealed

By Bryan Smith on June 5, 2015 at 2:40pm

It's been almost 10 years since "Final Fantasy Versus XIII," now "Final Fantasy XV," was revealed. A lot has changed since then, and even more has been altered thanks to the most recent "Final Fantasy XV" Active Talk.

The most notable change that has been made is that Stella, one of the main characters, has been scrapped. Director Hajime Tabata stated that the goal for "Final Fantasy XV" was to "have a complete, coherent story in one game." That meant decisions had to be made with "which elements from 'Versus' we could carry over and which would not fit into the new structure as 'XV.'"

Stella, unfortunately, didn't fit in the team's vision.

Stella was presented as the heroine to play opposite Noctis in Versus XIII. We wanted to keep her as a heroine in FFXV’s story, and pursued ways to tie her in to FFXV’s design as well, but we found it increasingly difficult to make sense of Stella’s character and role within FFXV. So then we thought, do we want to recreate Stella with a different role and image, or do we want to start over with a new heroine? And after a lot of consideration, we decided not to include Stella in FFXV. Instead, we have a new heroine named Luna, who has a different role within the story. So we will be talking more about her in the future. Hajime Tabata

Along with Stella, sequences from "Versus" were also removed, such as the part following the attack in Insomnia.

We decided to delete the scene of a party in Insomnia, which is a city like Shinjuku. So then we became concerned that the players who were looking forward to some gameplay in that city might worry that they would be losing that gameplay as well. So I thought I should let you know here and now that we are preparing situations that would involve gameplay in the Shinjuku-like city of Insomnia. We had previously released information on Versus saying you would begin combat right after the Niflheim army attacks the city, but the new gameplay would not fall in around the same timeline.

Tabata states, "There’s an extremely important reason behind this decision. In fact, it could be construed a spoiler, so I can’t tell you about it here."

While "Final Fantasy XV" won't be at E3 2015, the game will be featured at Gamescom with some exciting news.