Apparently, Final Fantasy VII placed quite highly in these so-called "Den-Play Awards." The game took the award for best story, best RPG, and best overall game. Cloud Strife took the award for best character, followed by the other vertices of his love triangle, Aeris at fifth and Tifa at eighth. Six characters in all placed in the top 50, with Sephiroth at 14th, Reno at 15th and Yuffie at 42nd.
Awards awarded, Dengeki PlayStation took the opportunity to get FFXII director Yoshinori Kitase and character designer Tetsuya Nomura to sit down for a lengthy interview recapping the past ten years with the FFVII offshoot. The two offered a few short insights into upcoming projects.
The magazine asked Nomura if Cloud's role will expand from here on out. To this, Nomura responded with, "I have my hands full with Final Fantasy Versus XIII now, so I can't say anything about the future, but the scenario writer, Nojima (Kazushige), says he doesn't want to part from Cloud yet, so there will surely be something."
Next, the PS3 Final Fantasy games. The two were first asked to comment on the changes the move from the PS2 to the PS3 brings to the series.
"On the hardware side," said Kitase, "thanks to the storage space of Blu-Ray and the inclusion of a hard drive, we're able to deal with load times. Regarding the production side of things, because it's a next generation machine, any and all sections require multiple times more work, so it's difficult. With FFVII, we advanced over previous games in all areas, but aiming for the same thing with the PS3 is difficult. For FFXIII, we're looking at what specific areas we should focus on improving."
As for Nomura, the Versus XIII director said, "Compared to the move to the PS2, the move to the PS3 is more difficult. Planning and so-forth haven't changed much as far as work is concerned, but overall, the amount of graphics work has gone up considerably. You can show tiny details, so you have to make put tiny details in your illustrations."
Getting a bit specific on the Versus project, Nomura continued, "It seems that the Versus team was, from the start, trying to get the full specifications out of the PS3, and that takes time. Just the other day, during a Versus meeting, a programmer asked, 'Is it okay to program with PS3 exclusivity in mind?'." I asked why, and he said, 'If we port it to other hardware, we have to program with that in mind.' I responded, 'Of course, Versus is PS3 exclusive.'"
While Nomura admitted that Versus will still take a bit more time, he let slip a big hint on the final shape of the game: Versus may have airships and a world map.
"The other day," said Nomura, "I saw a test of an airship flying over the world map. I felt that I was seeing a Final Fantasy-like screen for the first time in a long time. However, the fact that things have become realistic made us concerned about what to do about the scale. It's the same scale as past FF games, but even then, it's so wide that you can't make out the first town."
Nomura seems to be confident in his team's ability to deliver with Versus, though. "We still haven't announced the Versus team, but there are some well-known members in there, so it will become a good product. Also, we're getting advice from the team working on FFXIII, which is being developed first, so we're progressing well."
Square Enix usually shows new footage from its major titles at the annual Jump Festa event in Tokyo in late December. We'll be sure and let you know if anything related to FFXIII (or even FFVII) shows up.
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