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You can call Tetsuya Nomura a lot of things, but you can't call him lazy. The Square Enix producer has his hand in almost all the major projects his company's working on right now, from the three announced games set for release under the Final Fantasy XIII label to three new Kingdom Hearts games, the upcoming PSP brawler Final Fantasy: Dissidia, and even The 3rd Birthday, a new mobile game set in the world of Parasite Eve. In an interview published in Weekly Famitsu magazine this week, the master of all things four-sided and equilateral joined the rest of Dissidia's main staff to discuss Square's future plans -- and as you'd expect from Nomura, there's a lot of them.
As reported earlier, Dissidia is a new PSP game that pits famous Final Fantasy heroes and villains from past and present against each other in high-action arena battles. As senior director Takeshi Arakawa (who previously worked on The World Ends With You) puts it, the project is a chance for Square Enix's younger staff to get hands-on with Final Fantasy in a way they weren't able to before. "Most of the staff is relatively young, so a lot of them grew up as FF's main audience," Arakawa told Famitsu. "They really care about this project. There's a lot of dedication to getting deep into the heart of these characters, and I think there's enough depth here that everyone's going to be happy." Executive producer and character designer Nomura agrees: "One theme of this project was giving the younger staff a chance to shine. Even if it's not exactly an RPG, I'm glad we were able to give these people who used to be Final Fantasy's target audience a chance to work on a new FF-related project. It's been hard, though! I'm staying fairly hands-off on this project, so even if I have my opinions, I'm leaving it to the rest of the staff."
As planning director Mitsunori Takahashi (who was involved extensively with the first two Kingdom Hearts games) puts it, Dissidia is designed to appeal to two very different audience: casual RPG fans who like FF's vast array of characters and hardcore gamers looking to lose themselves in the game world. "We are definitely concentrating on characterization here; that's one of the core concepts of the battles," Takahashi said. "Basically, I think every player has their own hero character which they like the most, so we made them relatively simple to control so it'll be easier for them to play as whom they like. The villains, on the other hand, are definitely meant for the hardcores. I grew up as part of the FF generation, so I want to respect all the original games as much as I can. That's why I want to get as much material from the original games as possible into [Dissidia]." As Nomura puts it, there's more than enough depth here for anyone to enjoy: "It will take some time to completely power-up a character. If you try to work them all up to max power, I think you'll be playing for a pretty long time."
Dissidia is due for release in Japan before the end of the year, but right now it's only part of must be an extremely packed schedule for Nomura these days. The producer is currently directly involved with no less than eight titles across the PS3, PSP, Nintendo DS and cell-phone platforms -- and while we'll get a chance to see many of them at E3 next month, Japanese gamers won't get their turn until DKS3713, a small private event taking place in Tokyo on the weekend of August 2. "There will be a lot announced," Nomura said. "Since I'm heavily involved in fewer projects now, I won't be announcing anything related to the Japan market at E3. What I announce there will be dealing with the overseas market, so there won't be any new video at that event, either."
The name "DKS3713" comes from the initials of all the games set to be on display in one form or another. Set to be available in playable form are Dissidia, Nintendo DS mystery adventure Sigma Harmonics, DS RPG Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, and its PSP counterpart Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep; other titles, including the assorted FFXIII projects and Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete, will be shown in video form only. "As I've said before, Final Fantasy Agito XIII [mobile phones] and Final Fantasy Versus XIII [PS3] are not side-story games; they are all XIII," Nomura noted. "The names are different just to distinguish the projects from each other. We're developing both games with the idea that they are Final Fantasy XIII, so a lot of work's going into the story and setting. XIII itself takes priority right now, though, so the Versus team is helping out with that right now. So we're working on the story, the programmers are building the basic framework, and the designers are drawing a lot of concepts. We're advancing in the areas we're able to advance in."
Except for Dissidia and 358/2 Days (both of which are confirmed 2008 releases in Japan), no firm release dates have been announced for any of Nomura's current projects. Nomura did hint at some brand-new announcements at the August event, however: "I hope people can wait until this [DKS3713] event; I think they'll understand why I haven't been saying too much lately."
| Source: 1UP
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06-19-2008, 03:59 AM
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