Apparently, enough content was cut from FFXIII to make a game out of it, but Square Enix has said they will not be using content cut from FFXIII in the upcoming sequel FFXIII-2. The director Yohinori Kitase was asked about cuts by the magazine Xbox World 360, and he said that the amount of content removed from FFXIII was misinterpreted.
“I think those comments have been really badly misinterpreted. The fact is that when making any game you need to come up with lots of different ideas and designs that you weigh up against each other before picking the best one. Obviously in that process a lot of ideas and designs have to be discarded.” is what Kitase had said regarding it, following up with “We have never knowingly picked up these kind of ideas and recycled them. That’s not what we do. It’s natural for anyone making games to throw away ideas but the scenario of FFXIII-2 is completely newly written and has no connection to anything we didn’t use for FFXIII”
This means that the content removed from FF13, which was panned quite heavily by more than a handful of critics for its uninspired designs and rather lackluster storyline, will not be appearing in its sequel. It’s not uncommon for material cut from one project to be reused in a future one due to restrictions including time, budget, and setting. Some gamers remain skeptical about FFXIII-2 because of Square’s dwindling performance with Final Fantasy XII and XIII being not as well accepted as the previous entries, along with their abysmal release of the Final Fantasy XIV MMO which was plagued with several issues.
Hopefully they can make a comeback and reinstate themselves as a producer of excellent games, they really have been lacking in my opinion.