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Let’s be honest, with a history as tumultuous as Final Fantasy XV‘s, nobody was ever going to expect that the game would transition smoothly from its original incarnation to the visual tour de force we can currently see today in the Episode Duscae ‘demo’. Beginning life as Final Fantasy Versus XIII – a spinoff of those titles, set far in the future – numerous development changes and delays led to the game being re-jigged to become the fifteenth main entry in the stalwart JRPG franchise.

Now though, it seems even established characters are getting left on the cutting room floor in the ongoing transitional process. Stella, the character you can see pictured above, was supposed to be the female counterpart to protagonist Noctis in Final Fantasy XV, essentially being the heroine of the title. Speaking about the decision, FFXV’s director, Hajime Tabata explained his reasons for the decision.

We wanted to keep her as a heroine in Final Fantasy XV’s story, and persued 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.

Rest in piece Stella; we hardly knew you.

If you’ve been following the development process of Final Fantasy XV since its inception as Versus XIII, what’s your reaction to this news? Let us know in the comments below.

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