It’s one of the most storied series in all of gaming, yet Square Enix’s flagship franchise has fallen on fairly tough times of late. FFXIII veered away from traditional structure and mechanics and split the fan base right down the middle in the process, while mobiles have been flooded with expensive ports and cynical cash grab spin-offs that do nothing but sully the series’ good name. But with the majority of Final Fantasy XIV’s teething troubles resolved within its first month and three exciting new games on the horizon, Square is in the perfect position to blast its biggest game back to the top. Play speaks with RPG design masters Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase to get the inside story on the games that will save Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy XV
The core series marches onto PlayStation 4
Perhaps the big surprise back at E3 came in the form of this bad boy, sunken treasure Final Fantasy Versus XIII reborn as a proper numbered entry in the series. It’s a flashy, all-action next-gen RPG and… well, that’s about the extent of what anyone actually knows. It’s been all quiet on that front ever since June, though we were fortunate enough to score an interview recently with someone that might know a little bit more – director and FF design legend Tetsuya Nomura.
“I must first point out that personally I do not really understand the idea of categorising games into a genre like ‘Japanese RPGs’,” he tells us, clearly sharing the same concerns over the labels applied to his games as Square colleague Yoshinori Kitase. “It is only recently that some games have come to be called ‘JRPGs’ or whatever,” Nomura continues. “I feel that nothing has really changed from before, with this moniker suddenly coming out of nowhere. I think that RPGs are simply RPGs wherever they are from.”
We can understand his frustration with this branding, but we’ve never considered it to be pigeonholing – like J-pop and J-rock, JRPG is just a subgenre of something larger and one with a specific flavour. Indeed, perhaps the reason Nomura believes this term to be a recent thing comes from the fact that Final Fantasy has only recently started to leave traditional JRPG traditions and values behind in search of new ways to impress. FFXIII marked a huge change in terms of structure, as did XIII-2, albeit in a way that tried to address player complaints about Lightning’s debut. But for FFXV, it’s open-plan action – no more random encounters, no screen-shattering ‘you are in a fight now’ effects and a much more natural flow from exploration into combat and back again. It reminded us of Kingdom Hearts in that respect, although Nomura shoots down that reference fairly promptly. “The general control scheme may be similar but the core game concept is completely different,” he explains. “For example, in KH you control just Sora on his own but FF is very much about forming a party of characters and playing all of them so that concept is quite different indeed.”
Much of the freedom comes thanks to the enhanced power of PS4, although changing platform mid-development did apparently throw something of a spanner in the works. “The game being changed to the next-gen hardware has had both advantages and disadvantages for development,” Nomura recalls. “Being next-gen, we wanted to improve the overall quality but to do that requires a much finer and more detailed level of finish which in turn ramps up the volume of development work that needs to be done. So we have been continuously discussing how to get a suitable balance while looking into what will be possible.” Oddly, though, there were nowhere near as many narrative and structural changes made as there were technical ones. “There has been no effect on the story just because the game has switched to being a numbered entry in the series. There will be no major changes but I am sure that there will be alterations to the volume of content with it becoming a finer and more detailed game,” reveals Nomura.
He goes on to explain that, while the original tech demo shown at last year’s E3 isn’t directly related to XV, it has at least informed some design decisions. “With Agni’s Philosophy, Visual Works (our internal CG department) established the Look Dev method – a tool to express the direction of a game’s visual style through video,” Nomura tells us. “I feel that it has contributed greatly to the development of FFXV.”
And in spite of the huge community backlash after XIII, Nomura explains that the team isn’t letting vitriol or outrage get in the way of the team making the game it wants to make. “For FFXV, we are simply doing what we feel we must do to get the game right,” he states, although positive reception to what has been shown so far suggests that it is at least thinking along the right lines this time in terms of appeasing Lightning’s hater brigade, even if they didn’t actively cause this change of direction. “Nothing has been altered due to user feedback to FFXIII or other games. There is no reward to game development until the game is finally released so we are still struggling hard through many trials and tribulations at the moment. I am going to give it all I have.”
The Generation Gap
With next-gen FF looming large, can current-gen tech still cut it? Kitase thinks so…
With two new consoles due before the end of the year, it’s understandable that the flashy visuals of next-gen games are everywhere. But Lightning Returns producer Yoshinori Kitase reckons you shouldn’t write off the current generation just yet. “Well of course I think that it is quite a tricky undertaking for us to compete against titles on the new high-spec hardware, especially from a graphics standpoint,” he admits. “However, this kind of challenge is something you have had across all the generations and it will take developers time to fully harness the power of the new hardware. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is the third title we have done on the current generation hardware and is the culmination of our experience and know-how working with it so I think that we have a level of quality and polish that can compete with next-gen titles.”
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
Forget twice – she’s striking for a third time
When Final Fantasy XIII was first announced, Square’s plans for the title were as impenetrable as they were ambitious. Dubbed Fabula Nova Crystallis FFXIII, the triple-pronged gamesplosion would be made up of three individual games based on similar themes and worlds. FFXIII came out to mixed reception in 2009 but the other two limbs never saw release under their original names – Agito XIII would become awesome Japan-only PSP title Type-0 while Versus XIII, it was announced earlier in the year, is now FFXV. But for all the fuss surrounding XIII’s radical change of direction at launch, most players were agreed on the fact that heroine Lightning was pretty much the best thing about it. And as Lightning Returns producer Yoshinori Kitase recalls, it was then that the plan changed.
“Around the time of the original Final Fantasy XIII first coming out on worldwide release was when we made the change of direction,” he explains. “Lightning is a character who really stands out in the Final Fantasy series for her prominent personality and we wanted to explore her further.” Which, as it turns out, is the primary reason for Lightning going it solo in this, her third and final outing. “The main intention we had was to allow the player to really get inside Lightning’s head and spend a lot of time with the character as this is the final game that she will be in and her appearance in the second one was rather short,” Kitase confirms. “So ultimately, it was not down to game system reasons that we made the player control only one character but because of what we wanted to do with that character.”
But a greater focus on Lightning isn’t all Square has taken from fan feedback following Final Fantasy firteen’s fallout (alright, XIII – it just felt wrong to interrupt such a lovely flow of Fs) and, while XIII-2 showed that the team had taken on board many of the complaints about the previous game (making new issues in the process), the Lightning Returns team has had entire forums’ worth of both games’ pros and cons to mull over. And Kitase seems to think that his team is on the right track. “We believed that by taking on board the negative opinions from fans as well as the positive ones and then reflecting that feedback in the next game after a much shorter development period, we could greatly improve the game and develop it into something that would even be accepted by those who were not so impressed the first time round,” he tells us. “Moving on from Final Fantasy XIII-2, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is the final answer to the question of whether we have managed that, and we hope that everyone out there can see it and judge for themselves.”
Either way, it’s another different direction for Final Fantasy – the third in as many games, in fact. But does this continued divergence from ATB systems and picking battle options from a menu mean we’ve seen the last of those traditions? ‘Never say never’ appears to be Kitase’s take on it. He reels off the three FF titles currently in development, describing FFX HD as “a command selection-based RPG” and Lightning Returns as “a tactical combat-focussed RPG that pushes the limits of being action game-like” before teasing with talk of FFXV’s “emotional battle system”. Oh, and the last one was an MMO, remember? “I think that all of these systems hold some potential for the future,” states an open-minded Kitase, going on to hint at some potential good news down the line for Vita-owning fans of old-school FF. “Of course, the decision of which to use will very much depend upon the device being played on. I would definitely say that menu selection-type battles still fit very well for touch screen devices, do they not?”
A fine point, but we get smacked around the face with an even finer one when the term ‘JRPG’ comes up in conversation. “Whether the term is used for better or worse, I feel that the fact that it recognises these games as being distinctly ‘Japanese’ can only be a good thing,” muses Kitase. “But I often hear the term ‘Western-style’ being used as a comparison or counterpoint to ‘Japanese-style’ but am fascinated by this comparison and would really like to ask if there is a distinct ‘British-style’ or ‘European-style’ or not?”
Without having to be asked, Kitase elaborates. And boy, can that guy elaborate. “In the world of cinema there is the Hollywood film and then as a comparison there is say British or French cinema that clearly have different personalities and unique characteristics to them. If we look at music then British rock and American rock are also quite different. It is the same for sports… for example in say, motorsport, the flavour of IndyCar is very different to F1 circuit racing. So basically for all other fields of culture, art and sport etc, even if they use that ‘Western’ term to lump everything together, it is still understood that the character of North American works and European ones are distinct. Even Japanese people get that when we look at it. However, when it comes to games, I do not feel that there is a great deal of difference between North American and European productions. I cannot help but think that everything has become confined to an American style, as shown by most FPS and TPS-style games. I personally think that for the games industry to spread and prosper as a form of art or culture then it needs to place value on diversity across different local regions. In that spirit I want to continue bringing out the unique flavour in our Japanese style of games.”
Eorzea Reborn
Why you should play the /other/ last great PS3 FF, A Realm Reborn, as well?
Yes, it came out back in August and no, we still haven’t reviewed it. MMOs simply aren’t the kind of things that can, or indeed should, be rushed. Expect a full write-up on our experiences in the revamped world of Eorzea in the near future but, for now, suffice to say it’s both a brilliant game in its own right and a great display of a developer listening to and addressing the concerns of its fans. Well, when you can actually get on the crammed servers, that is – Square Enix seems to have wildly underestimated how popular this would be. With changing class as simple as switching weapons or tools and some skills carried over between them, there’s no need for alts any more and a single character can, with enough work, be taken to the top of every profession in the game. But given that we’ll only just have hit level 50 with our first character by the time you read this, you can probably estimate just how long such a pursuit might take…
Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD
Back to protect us from Sin once more
With more ‘will they/won’t they?’ surrounding a FFVII remake than you get from an entire Friends box set, it seems a little strange that Square Enix should head back to Spira for this pair of HD remakes. Strange perhaps, but not unjustifiable – Kitase’s reasoning when pushed on the choice of games is certainly sound. “It is currently possible to play all the titles in the series up to FFIX on the current hardware generation, through the PS3 archives or on PC,” he reasons. “But for the PS2 games, it is pretty hard to play them on current hardware. So that is why we felt that FFX, our first PS2 Final Fantasy game, would be most suitable for an HD remaster.”
But while a remake offers a chance to address issues that have been raised over the years, Square instead seems to be confident that the classics can still hold up just as they were, only a little prettier. “The gameplay itself is basically faithful to the original game,” explains Kitase, although there’ll apparently still be new things to discover for most Western players. “The versions of both FFX and FFX-2 that are included here are based on the international editions released in Japan. This means that some of the major features from those versions, such as X-2’s creature creator, will be available for European and American users to play for the first time and I think that may look like quite a big change for those players.”
When we come to quiz Kitase on the main difficulty in converting a PS2 game for new hardware, he manages to find the one answer we never expected – that the PlayStation 2 was simply too good. “That would be the fact that the PS2 was such a great platform. Of course, the PS3 and PS Vita have better specs but with the Emotion Engine at its core, the PS2 really was a very high performance graphics machine. We used the graphic engine of the day at full capacity when creating the original game, and this allowed us to realise the kinds of visuals that just could not have been done with the standard methods available then. This meant that when we came to port FFX to the PS3, there was a lot of trouble because it could not be achieved simply by converting the data across to the newer format.”
The Square Enix veteran is currently juggling this remake and Lightning Returns, which he points to as a perfect example of how the studio is trying to evolve the genre and move away from its conventions and trappings. But in the same breath, he also suggests that there’s new to be found in the old. “I feel that these games have an ineffable something in them which seems to have been forgotten by a lot of modern games and so, paradoxically, they can feel fresh and different because of that,” Kitase closes. “Does it not follow that something which is intrinsically interesting will maintain its value and not get pinned down into traditional frameworks or generational trends?”
Heroes Of Legend
A bluffer’s guide to former Final Fantasy stars
Warrior Of Light (FF, 1987)
One of the four Light Warriors, each of whom carried a different elemental orb that must be restored to power. Not much of a standout character, sure, but this little guy hails from an era when games didn’t need a face.
Firion (FFII, 1988)
Having made it onto the box of this Japan-only game, Firion was arguably the franchise’s first ‘main character’ – a youth who loses his adopted family and heads out in seek of revenge. That always ends well, right?
Onion Knight (FFIII, 1990)
There wasn’t just one Onion Knight but four – it’s the starting job for each of the generic starting quartet rather than a person. But with the debut of the new Job system, none of them would stay an Onion Knight for long.
Cecil (FFIV, 1991)
Returning to locked classes for the sequel was never going to be a problem when central character Cecil was a badass Dark Knight and his eleven buddies had equally cool (and useful) professions…
Bartz (FFV, 1992)
A 20-year-old wanderer with a chocobo companion named Boco, Bartz’s look would change every time he took on a different one of the 22 Jobs on offer. None of them really looked like this, but whatever – we dig the super-cute art style.
Terra (FFVI, 1994)
Born of a human mother and an Esper father, Terra’s magical abilities land her in the servitude of the Empire when this final SNES adventure starts. But freed soon after from her slavery, her voyage of self-discovery can begin…
Cloud (FFVII, 1997)
The most iconic Final Fantasy star, if perhaps not in this super-deformed guise. His mysterious past and ongoing rivalry with Sephiroth mean that even though he speaks few words, he’s as interesting a character to explore as any the series has offered.
Squall (FFVIII, 1999)
Some heroes use swords. Others use guns. Squall enjoys both so much that he doesn’t have to decide – just ask his trusty Gunblade why. Again, there’s a rivalry here (this time with asshole Seifer) that really helps turn him from emo pioneer to awesome hero.
Zidane (FFIX, 2000)
The only character on this rundown with a tail, which has to count for something. Zidane is a bandit whose group masquerades as a travelling theatre company, for whom a kidnapping attempt predictably spirals into something much bigger.
Tidus (FFX, 2001)
While that laughing scene in FFX is almost enough to make us hate him, we then remember that he’s damn good at Blitzball and that he has an awesome sword. He just wants to go home. Is that really so much to ask?
Shantotto (FFXI, 2002)
Another odd one in that there’s no ‘main’ character in an MMO outside of the one you, the player, create and flesh out. So yeah, why not go for this cute little Tarutaru mage? She did have an expansion named after her, after all.
Vaan (FFXII, 2006)
It wasn’t just the radically overhauled mechanics that made Final Fantasy XII a love-or-hate affair – it was the characters as well. But while this aspiring sky pirate might not be your favourite FF hero, the world of Ivalice proved an undeniable joy to explore in his company.
Lightning (FFXIII, 2009)
She’s everywhere these days, so it’s hard to believe that the princess of the franchise is only four years old. Her second starring role is due early next year – Square has previously said it wanted her to be a female Cloud, and we can’t argue with that.