#{but for me and my own canon for Basch... it's so symbolically perfect that I can't even deal}

[tarnishedxknight]

Fortress: A Little Directory for the Final Fantasy Game That Never Happened

{out of dalmasca} I don’t know how I missed all of this information, given how much I’ve searched for information about Basch over the years, but I recently found this set of sites discussing Fortress, the canceled sequel to Final Fantasy XII for which Basch would have been the main protagonist. They explained a lot more about the game than I ever knew before, so I thought I would pass them along to other fans who may not have seen them either.

Not much is known about it, as it never got out of the early stages of development before the project was canceled. It was abandoned after its now-defunct production studio, Grin, and Square Enix, the makers of FFXII, had some serious creative differences about everything from the climate and type of terrain to use, to story pacing and the levels of involvement of returning characters.

Fortress was supposed to have centered mainly around a titular, highly magical fortress in northern Ivalice that would have seen Basch (as Judge Magister Gabranth), Queen Ashelia, Emperor Larsa, and others from FFXII charged with defending it from various threats, the most formidable of which was a new villain, Loemund, the King of the Sea. Unfortunately, Grin pushed for the use of a recycled world design from another previously scrapped game, including terrain and climate biomes that didn’t match with that of Ivalice in FFXII:

This was just the start of some of the catastrophic creative differences between Grin and Square Enix that, along with Grin’s studio ultimately closing, sealed Fortress’ fate before it ever had a chance.

Below are links to a three-part article (the first link is the hub and the next three are the parts of the article) that explains a great deal of information about Fortress, including clothing and enemy design, setting, gameplay, and storyboards. The last link outlines the entire story of the game, so don’t read it unless you want spoilers, although since this game is unlikely ever to be picked up by another studio, I doubt that matters very much. If you are a fan specifically of Basch, Ashelia, Larsa, or even Zargabaath, you’ll want to read the story. It... is not at all what I expected and has some twists and turns that have definitely left me... feeling some things.

If I find more information about this game in my travels, I will add to this directory, but for now, I’ll leave these here for anyone who is interested and to save them for my own reference:

Everything We Know About Fortress, the Canceled Final Fantasy XII Sequel

The Story Behind Fortress, the Final Fantasy Game That Never Was

The Canceled Final Fantasy XII Sequel: Narrative and Gameplay Revealed

The Story of Fortress, the Canceled Final Fantasy XII Sequel

Feel free to reply to this post with your comments on the story if you do read it. I would love to know what other fans of FFXII think of it.