Fortress not dead in the water after all?

Since Swedish developer GRIN kicked the bucket, a flood of development artwork has surfaced on the Linkedin profiles of the developers associated with the project. However, the game codenamed Fortress, has been picked up again by Square-Enix. This was actually done roughly six months in the past as GamesIndustry.biz reports. Square-Enix had some concerns about the quality of the project, and financial woes finally caught up with GRIN due to Swedish legislation that imposes penalties on companies "that go into debt", which I take for a bankruptcy.

So it looks like behind closed doors at Square-Enix, Fortress is still alive. However there are still many questions left unanswered. Will Square-Enix still have a western developer work on this project? Will newly acquired Eidos be a good candidate for such a title? Will it still have the same themes we have seen in the artwork?

SOURCES: GamesIndustry.biz, Thanks SuperEclipse for the heads up.

Western dev'd Final Fantasy project scrapped

As of late, artwork and other materials have been floating onto the internet from now defunct GRIN studio. This artwork reveals that Square-Enix had contacted them to make a game, and they started to develop what was going to become a purely western Final Fantasy action game. However, since GRIN has now gone bankrupt, the project has been unfortunately scrapped. And since the project has no longer been in development, the artists involved have been posting their work on their Linkedin portfolios.

You can view most of the artwork in this thread at Kingdom Hearts Insider here. There are quite a few pieces to post at once, so browse at your leisure.

I think a western take on Final Fantasy would be an excellent venture and I am also very excited that Square-Enix is allowing western developers to take a crack at one of their babies. I think it's a good sign of what's to come, AND, I hope that another western developer can pick up Fortress. I would play the shit out of that game.