^^That is true, FF games do love the cut scenes.

Does Sony still have a decent bit of control of S-E via stock? I know they did at one time.

At any rate, the question would be how much cash would S-E want for FFXIII on X360. When would Microsoft asked? FFXIII has a lot of cash going into it, and I would think the costs of re-working the White Engine/Crystal Tools (if thats the name of it), and porting XIII to the 360 would be immense - maybe beyond the $100m range.

In the best-case scenario, MS could of got XIII ported to 360 (which is still a possibility), but what good is XIII going to do as a MP for the 360? Very little. DMC4, SM5 and other multi-plats have helped the 360 out, certainly, but would it of really been worth it?

MS would of had to pay more cash for XIII than any other game to get it exclusive, if it was even possible. Would $125m be worth it to MS for 1 lousy game? Microsoft has probably bought & paid for the development of 5-6 titles for the same price.

And we're seeing that since MS failed (or atleast we assume) to acquire XIII, we're getting SO4, and ToV exclusive. Is that really a bad deal for X360 fans?

 thye could of make it on more then one disk

After all the games that have been released that were supposed to tip the scales in favour of the HD consoles and didn't, don't you think it is a little foolish to focus so much effort on buying games in an attempt to increase your system's sales?

Suppose for a moment that Microsoft could have bought exclusivity for Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto 4 and Final Fantasy XIII for $500 Million would it have been worth it? Consider that you would have to sell 50 Million copies of these games to break even on the initial expense (without considering opportunity loss), and that you could take this money and publish 10 to 25 very large budget games and if they averaged 500,000 to 1 Million units sold each you would turn a healthy profit, gain the rights to very valueable IPs, and build a relationship with quality developers.

Meh, they probably saw that FF is going down in popularity and quality and looks like they're trying to make new SE franchises on it.

Honorable? They are about money like any other company. Yamauchi and Nintendo published the original Final Fantasy. The game that saved Square. If they were all about honor they wouldn't have ditched Nintendo for Sony now would they.

Nomura specifically said that they wanted to take advantage of the PS3's hardware capabilities and that is why it is only on the PS3 and it will most likely stay that way. S-E are the ones that determine what system(s) FFXIII, or any of their games for that matter, are developed for, not Microsoft, Nintendo, or Sony

FF is not losing popularity.  It just looks like that since SO, Tales, and to a lesser extent, SMT  are gaining more popularity.