Toriyama: Next story-driven Final Fantasy will be more open than FFXIII

Motomu Toriyama has said the next story-driven Final Fantasy game will be more open-world then Final Fantasy XIII's mostly linear approach.

Speaking with Gama, however, the FFXIII writer stressed how hard it was to try to get free-roaming stuff and towns into a game with the HD consoles.

"Personally, the Final Fantasies that I have worked on have been very story-driven, so in terms of the development I wanted to, of course, use my personal strengths which where those," Toriyama said.

"I call it a bento box system, where you have all of the different little things in there. So we had minigames or towns were you were able to talk to all of the townspeople. But with the HD console you're not really able to do that because it takes so long to develop.

"Now that we have that base technology... The next time you see a Final Fantasy, we might be able to pack in more of those elements that existed in the past.

"And I also think that a game doesn't need to have all of those items in the future. We can create additional downloadable content for people to add, too. It doesn't have to come with that game itself."

Final Fantasy XIII launched in the west on Tuesday for PS3 and 360. Square Enix announced yesterday it had shipped over 5 million units of the game worldwide.

Toriyama will be giving a speech at GDC later today.