IV CHAPTER A New Dimension
Shinji Hashimoto One night, after work at Bandai, one of my friends invited me to drinks and karaoke. Sakaguchi happened to be there. This was some time before we worked together. I remember he was a very good singer. Everybody in the game industry knew each other at that time.
Because, while at Bandai, I had worked with Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama on Dragon Ball, when they started collaborating with Square on
Chrono Trigger, I left to join them. My job was to manage the budget and the promotion, and I was also the guy who ran between Sakaguchi, Horii and Toriyama. Things haven’t changed much: it’s the same today with
Kingdom Hearts. When I joined Square I was employee number 256. Today that’s the number of people you have in just one of Square’s 12 business divisions, which gives you an idea of how much we have grown since then. Kitase Sakaguchi was involved in Chrono Trigger right from the start, while we were still making Final Fantasy VI. The game brought together the creators of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, so it was an important project. But the project ran into lots of problems because it was being developed for lots of different platforms, some of which were experimental. The schedule had fallen behind, so I was pulled off
Final Fantasy VI to help get things back on track. Once Final Fantasy VI was finished, Sakaguchi dedicated his full attention to Chrono Trigger, leading the battle-planning team, while I worked on the scenario. Hashimoto Chrono Trigger is relevant because it was the first time that Square had really collaborated with external companies on a game. Prior to that, Sakaguchi had run everything internally. My job was to broker a lot of these collaborations with other studios and companies. A lot of games, such as
Front Mission and Treasure Hunter G, came out of this new way of doing things and it established the role that I would take on Final Fantasy VII, when the switch from 2D to 3D polygonal graphics meant that we needed to find people who were able to do that kind of work.
“My job was to broker a lot of collaborations with other companies” Shinji Hashimoto
“I wanted to conquer the US but nothing we ever tried worked” Hironobu Sakaguchi
Sakaguchi I had always wanted to sell more games to the US market. I wanted to conquer it but nothing we tried ever worked. In the pixel-art era, RPG games had an image of being over-complicated. At the time they were seen as childish – something for children’s cartoons. That all changed with Final Fantasy VII.
Approaching that era, it was clear that everything was going to move into 3D. We could see the future of videogames on the horizon, but we had no idea what a 3D RPG would look like. We created a demo of Final
Fantasy in 3D with a small team of eight people working on silicon workstations that cost millions of dollars. We took that demo to CG shows, gathering information and figuring out what we’d need, power and capacity-wise, to make an entire game in that style. It was clear, looking at the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation specification, that we’d need to move to CD-ROMs. That’s what drove the decision to switch from Nintendo to Sony.
Hashimoto At that time Sakaguchi and I would often talk about why Final
Fantasy didn’t sell more games in the west. Maybe it was the unrealistic characters? He was also thinking about the benefits of CD-ROM compared to cartridges. It wasn’t just the storage capacity that was an issue. If you needed to re-print a game that sold well, burning more discs was a lot easier and more affordable than manufacturing more cartridges.
Then, when we met with Sony, they were extremely eager to work with us. Kaz Hirai and Andrew House explained that Final Fantasy would be a key game for Sony, and they would put a lot of effort into the game’s promotion. That hugely helped. Previously we’d always done everything under our own steam.
Sakaguchi We went to Los Angeles and visited an advertising agency there about how we could market the game in the west. Sony helped arrange the meeting and booked it in this downtown restaurant near Disneyland. I remember walking in and wondering why on Earth we were there.
Hashimoto Up until then our US branch had been based in Seattle, where Nintendo was based. When the decision was made to switch to Sony, we didn’t need to be there any more, so I was quite involved in scouting out and setting up the Los Angeles office, which we still have now. Sakaguchi’s sheer motivation and drive to get things done at that time was extremely impressive. It was a lot of fun to be around for that ride.
Kitase The memory available from CD-ROM was a huge thing for us. Memory had been so limited up until that point: every byte and bit was valuable. We would endlessly compress things just to make them as small as possible to fit on the ROM. But this process would often introduce bugs in the system. Back then it wasn’t like now, where you have automated tools to tell you where the problems lay. So I remember seeing CD-ROM as representing freedom: we would finally be free of the process of compression and debugging. It was both exciting and liberating. Uematsu When we started work on Final Fantasy VII I was very happy at the start: I thought, ‘We really are free now, we can use music properly recorded in a studio.’ I did some experiments to see how it would all work. It quickly became clear, however, that the higher the quality of music, the longer the load times. That seemed to me to be a major problem for a videogame; you can’t make players wait for ages to play the game while it loads every scene. So I deliberately held back and used the internal sound generation of the PlayStation, rather than streaming recorded music.
But when I saw the finished game I realised the visuals were so deep and detailed that they had made the load times long anyway. I asked myself, “Why am I compromising when they aren’t?” That’s why, with Final Fantasy
VIII, I used an orchestra and a choir for the opening piece of music (laughs). Was it the proper decision to prioritise sound quality over gameplay like this? Well, even now I am not sure it’s right for a game company.
Kitase The way Final Fantasy VII’s story was written is interesting. We split the responsibility between myself, Nomura and Kazushige Nojima. We would each take a week at a time to do a pass on the script. So I’d write a plot and then, after a week, pass it to the next guy. They’d then change bits, add scenes and tweak it to their tastes and ideas. In this way we took it in turns to build up the story.
We wanted the way the player related to the character to change. Up until that point there had always been a one-to-one equivalence between the player and the character in Final
Fantasy. Dragon Quest games have always been like that too: the player is exactly the same person as the protagonist. We wanted to move away from that and have a side of Cloud that the player didn’t see till later: you thought he was you, but then we pulled back the curtain and players could see that he was someone else. This was a way to play with, or break, the orthodoxy of RPG design. It had never been done till then, I don’t think. Nomura I actually started designing characters on Final Fantasy VI. But
Sakaguchi was concerned that people were not aware it was me who had drawn the characters, so from Final
Fantasy VII onwards he told me that he would put my designs to the fore. That is how the characters in that game came to be widely recognised by the public. Nothing really changed for me within the studio, though. If that kind of success had led to me being highly lauded by my colleagues, then I may have felt intimidated when coming to design new characters, but that didn’t happen, so I felt just the same as before.
Sakaguchi We had a feeling that this game was going to be special. In terms of the premise, it was something that I had been holding on to for some time. I had imagined the world years before, and its core themes about the way we treat the Earth, and the idea that, when we die, we turn into energy and are assimilated into the Earth and reborn somewhere else. I knew that this was the game where we would win or lose the war; so I decided to bring the world out.
Kitase There wasn’t any debate as to whether we should kill Aerith or not. Obviously the story writing was a collaborative effort, so we all agreed we wanted to go that way. I had a personal reason for wanting Aerith to die in that way. At the time the results of a survey had been published in which they asked children whether or not they thought people could come back from the dead. More than 50 per cent of children answered in the affirmative. Why is that? It must have something to do with fairytales: the idea that the princess dies and, with a kiss from the price, is revived. Likewise, in RPGs, players are often killed off then magically revived. I started to feel self-doubt about how people were extrapolating from fiction into reality. I wanted to get across with Aerith’s death the idea of loss: the feeling you only realise the importance of people when they’re gone, and you feel the loss and sadness.
Sakaguchi Part of the reason for Aerith’s death was to answer the question, ‘How can we surprise the player, shock them and show them something they’ve never seen before?’ People see her die and expect her to be revived. The fact she isn’t is memorable. It stays with people, and makes an impression.
Kitase In games, a character dies and everyone thinks she’ll come back later, even more powerful than before. I wanted that weight of a death, and to make it feel real and proper. The reason we had Aerith die was not because I’d had experience with death; it more felt like a responsibility on our part. If children believed people came back from the dead because of our games, in some way, then we had a chance to change that perspective.
Amano With each new Final Fantasy game I am asked to create a subtle image to go behind the game’s logo. I always draw these as a full picture, as a piece of art in their own right. With
some games it’s an actual character, but with Final Fantasy VII it was a meteor. That was a hard one. (laughs) I can’t tell you how many times I had to re-draw that meteor.
Kitase Final Fantasy VII was the turning point for the series. The visual style was based on the manga style and then we decided to go for a more realistic approach. There was a huge amount of passionate debate but, in the end, I believe it was the right decision. It put the series on the track it’s taken ever since. Without that switch, I think Final Fantasy XIV and XV would have been very different games. After Final Fantasy VII came out, our rivalry with Dragon
Quest changed. They didn’t seem like rivals any more. We were now focused on competing with western games.
Sakaguchi I wasn’t directly involved in Final Fantasy VIII. I left it to another team to develop and let them do what they wanted with it, and take it in their own direction.
Kitase There was a gear shift with the story in Final Fantasy VIII. I think it was to do with the seriousness of the previous game’s theme. I promoted that approach. Because we’d had this heavy, deep story with
Final Fantasy VII and Cloud’s past and Aerith’s death, I said: “Let’s make things a little lighter and more cheerful now.”
Amano It’s the same for me. I always basically approach every game as if this will be the final one, and try and create something new and different than what’s gone before, so it’ll be completely different. For example, if the protagonist had a certain kind of hairstyle in one game, when I move onto the next one I try and do something in a completely different style. There will be connections, of course, but I always try to approach it as if it will be the last one in the series and make something final and unique.
Kitase Fan feedback definitely informed our approach with Final
Fantasy VIII. For example, we were often asked why characters received money for killing monsters. People thought it was strange, which is a valid v criticism. So in Final Fantasy VIII you y don’t get money from beating the monsters; m instead you receive a salary that’s t paid directly into your account at a regular intervals. Likewise, this is what w informed the decision to start the t game in a high school, a more upbeat u location.
Sakaguchi To be honest, when I heard their idea to write the game like a high-school drama I was concerned. But having told them they could go in their own direction, I couldn’t very well take it back.
Kitase When Sakaguchi first saw the demo at the school, and a realistically proportioned human character, he said to me: “Hmm, that looks okay, but might you consider doing it with more deformed characters?” He believed that is what the series should look like. I considered what he said, but ended up sticking to my guns.
Sakaguchi Because of the approach they took with that game, I pulled the rudder hard back the other way with Final Fantasy IX. I wanted to go right back to the beginning of the series, with a traditional fantasy story: knights, castles and so on. I figured that would calibrate and restabilise the series, somehow. Kitase I wasn’t involved in Final
Fantasy IX because Sakaguchi and a new team that we had established in Hawaii were making it in parallel to
Final Fantasy VIII. Part of the reason it looks the way that it does is because we had a big debate about the art style on the PlayStation. The debate centred around whether we should keep the manga-style, deformed characters of the sixth game, or aim for a more realistic approach and develop in that direction. In the seventh and eighth games the new direction won out, but Sakaguchi really wanted to do a classic-looking game on the new technology, which is where Final Fantasy IX came in.
“With every game I try and create something new and different than what’s gone before” Yoshitaka Amano