The Last Remnant, Square Enix's new 'RPG for the world' was announced as a timed exclusive for Xbox 360 owners at a recent Microsoft event. Wondering why that was? In a recent interview with the development team, teamxbox asked the question, and got an answer:

The big announcement today was that the game will be coming out first on the Xbox 360. Is this just a marketing decision or was there difficulty making the PS3 version? We’ve heard that there are a lot of problems with developers making cross-platform games on the PS3.

Square Enix: It’s mainly for development reasons, because we’re using the middleware called Unreal Engine, and the Unreal Engine has kind of a slow development tool for the PS3 side. It only became really workable after Unreal Tournament had been published, so it’s mainly a development decision.

Do you worry about alienating Japanese audiences by releasing it first on the Xbox 360?

Square Enix: If we just look at the user composition, we must admit that the Xbox 360 user base is not high in Japan, but from a creative point of view, we did advise Japanese fans. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have recorded exclusive Japanese voice for this product. If you look at it from a marketing point of view, we may be…who’s to say that we’re alienating the Japanese audience? From the outside, we don’t really do that…yeah, we really value the Japanese customers and making the games that are enjoyable for Japanese customers.

So how long will PlayStation 3 owners have to wait to get it?

Square Enix: [the whole team laughs] Oh, we can’t really answer that right now.

And there you have it. For more of this interview, and how the Last Remnant is coming along, click here!