I haven’t finished Final Fantasy XIII yet, but I do know that I’m absolutely in love with the game (minus a couple of small things, which I will talk about in this week’s column).  I’m very impressed witht  the story arc so far, and the cast of characters is one of the best I’ve encountered in a video game.  So the news that producer Yoshinori Kitase is interested in making a sequel makes me excited in that weird, kind of creepy way.

Harry Hol over at WriteAboutGames.com managed to snag an interview with Kitase at a recent FFXIII launch event, and here’s what he had to say about a sequel:

“In the past three years we worked both on the world and on the various systems. Creating these systems isn’t very glamourous and can frankly be a bit boring. If we could do a XIII-2, we could direct all our attention to the story and refine what we have already built.

We do not know if there will be a XV. This depends a lot on the success of XIII. Also, it is difficult to pinpoint elements that are typical Final Fantasy. They are mostly invisible: part of the DNA of the game, that everyone recognizes as typical Final Fantasy. But if there is a XV, I hope the way we wrote our characters carries over. We strived to create believable people of flesh and blood. They are not robots. And they are not super heroes. I hope this humanity is something we will see again.”

I absolutely agree.  With XIV nearly in its beta phase and prepping for launch, Square Enix may be in a position to start work on XIII-2.  If the game sold well here in the States (and I think it’s doing alright), they should probably strike while the iron is still hot.

Oh, and this time around maybe they can clean up the issues with the 360 version.