The Evolution of Final Fantasy from Final Fantasy VII to Rebirth with Yoshinori Kitase | BAFTA

Good evening, hello. My name is Yoshinori Kitase, and I am the producer of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth from Square Enix. Thank you so much everyone for coming today, and thank you also to BAFTA for creating this opportunity for me. Hopefully you can listen to my talk today. I'm not just going to talk about games; I'm going to talk a little bit about my career, where I came from as well, so hope you enjoy it. Next slide, please.

So, in 1978, I went to the cinema with my dad and we saw Star Wars for the first time. We were overwhelmed by its magic. Have you seen Star Wars recently? Let me do a survey: split the episodes into three groups: 1-2-3, 7-8-9, and 4-5-6. Clap for your favorite. What about 1, 2, 3? What about 7, 8, 9? What about 4, 5, 6? I think we have a good audience tonight. Star Wars was a massive cultural phenomenon, resonating with all ages. I was curious how they made it, so I bought the VHS of the making of Star Wars, which sparked my interest in film production.

Around the same time as Star Wars, Space Invaders came out and was a huge hit. I played it in arcades day after day. In 1986, I played Super Mario at my friend's house and was blown away. I hugged his console all day, and he wasn't pleased. So I bought my own console and got lost in games, starting with The Legend of Zelda. I became a game addict for life. My father looked at me with exasperation, contrasting with his reaction to Star Wars. This shows games were a small subculture compared to film.

I went to university, studied filmmaking, and worked in animation. But in 1987, I encountered Final Fantasy, which grabbed me with its adult, stylish aesthetic and art by Yoshitaka Amano. I saw it as the future of games, a new medium for visual storytelling. In 1990, I switched careers and joined Square Soft. My first job was on Final Fantasy Adventure as an event planner. I made a scene with a noble Chocobo that built my confidence.

The shift to Super Nintendo allowed new technical possibilities: more colors, stereo sound, and simulated 3D. Over the years, I contributed to projects, and with Final Fantasy V, I joined the main team. Hironobu Sakaguchi saw my work on the Chocobo scene and brought me on board. On Final Fantasy V, I was on the scenario team. For Final Fantasy VI, I became co-director. Then Chrono Trigger, I was full director, and I carried on for Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy VII started in 1994 as a 2D game for Super Nintendo. But the Chrono Trigger team faced difficulties, so we helped them and paused our game. After finishing Chrono Trigger in 1995, we returned to Final Fantasy VII. In the meantime, Sony released the PlayStation, changing everything. The film industry was also adopting CG. Sony's PlayStation tech demos used Jurassic Park's T-Rex, showing how film and games were converging.

It was an interesting time with 3D graphics. We used supercomputers and animation tools. The majority of Final Fantasy VII's budget was spent on Silicon Graphics workstations. As a former animator, I used Softimage to animate characters. For example, I animated the opening scene where Cloud jumps from the train. Switching to 3D allowed more expressive characters and cinematic presentation. Development teams grew larger, increasing development time.

Finally, 20 years after Final Fantasy VII, with fan demand, we decided to do a remake. I was torn because of the effort, but I wanted to deliver the same emotional experience to modern gamers. My son, born in 1997, is into Apex Legends, so I questioned if he'd have the same impact with the original. Core members of the original team joined the remake, and we collaborated with new creators inspired by the game.

Collaboration with Apex Legends was planned in advance. Keeping it secret from my son for a year was the hardest part. The games industry evolves with technology driving art. Technical limitations have improved but never disappear. With PlayStation 5, the main obstacles are time, budget, and the team's will. Returning to where I started, Star Wars was a major cultural form, and games have become mainstream like film, photography, and novels.

They've all got their own history and their own independent appreciation as art and as culture. By comparison, back when I got into video games myself, it was still very much a minor subculture with a very minor following. I think it very much was like you saw in the 1960s when you had people of the generation who were parents then and they saw the music of The Beatles and they thought, 'Yeah, that's just a bad influence on the youth of today.' And games were seen in the same way. I remember though, my older brother back in the day, he grew his hair out long in those days, and my dad scolded him for that, said you shouldn't be growing it out like that, you look stupid.

So I really want to get across the point was back in those days video games were very much a subculture. So my objective, my goal is to take those video games and make them an important integral part of the mainstream culture. So my goal, my dream and what I wanted to achieve with my job was to take it from that position and make it so that games were something that people would talk about every day around the dinner table. There'd be heated debates about games in the same way and they'd be something that really would have that positive influence on people's lives. And my work is very much aimed towards that.

So I am very, very grateful to the organizers today, to BAFTA, and I'm not just grateful for giving me this opportunity today. I really am grateful for all the good work that you guys do in raising the profile, the awareness of video games and everything you do to support us in the industry.

So if I look back over my career in games now, I think we have come a very long way in terms of what we can do now and where we are compared to back then. I always think though, unfortunately my father is no longer with us, but if he were around today I always wonder what he'd see and what kind of expression he'd show me looking at the modern marvel of video games today.

So I'm very confident that video games are slowly but surely becoming that part of mainstream culture now, but I still think there's so much left to do for us in the industry. There's more places to go, more things to do to keep speeding that up. So together with the help of everyone here today, I want to make games even better, even more exciting in the future, and that's a journey you can go on together with me. Thank you very much for everything today.

So I think what I would say about that, and something that I really felt directly, was certainly looking at the difference between films and games back then. And again, my father is a great indicator of that. He was not a real cinemaphile, like he wasn't a big game fan either. He kind of approached these things from very much the middle ground. And I think the difference back then though is with a film, you can watch it and even if you aren't told what's going on, you can look at it and you can see what's happening and understand that immediately, even if you're not deeply invested in that. And at the time that wasn't the same with video games. There were certain visual grammar and logic within games that if you were into games you knew what was going on, you knew the game, you could watch from the sides and pick up on it. But if you weren't part of the in-group with that, you really wouldn't have had a chance. And I think that was a major difference.

To give you an example of that, in the RPG games back in that time before Final Fantasy 7, you'd basically walk around what we call a world map, which was like a simulation of what the world's supposed to look like. And you see your character walking around, then you'd step on a little square icon, and in those days it was like 16 pixels by 16 pixels, and it was drawn to represent a staircase going down underground. Your icon would overlap with that, then there'd be a fairly primitive sound effect, and then you go down into a dungeon area. And of course gamers like myself in those days, you said of course that's what's happening, we know we're going into a dungeon, that's obvious. But for people like my father who weren't in on that and part of that group, he had no idea what's going on there and it just confused him. And I really started thinking about what is getting in the way of his understanding here. And it really was that level of visual depiction and reality. And I thought that was what had to change for people like him to become more interested in games.

So this is obviously a very difficult question and there are a lot of ways to look at it, but I think it is generally in how we depict things and show things on screen in games. And again about the ratings that we go for for games as well, that's part of it too. But certainly, and I'm not criticizing this at all, I think you very much do need these kind of more extreme expressions of things and depictions of things which are a little bit quirky, a little bit weird. But I think to be widely accepted by mainstream culture we have to go for the middle ground as well and have more generic, more mainstream depictions of things which are just normal and average, and struggle and strive to make those portrayals as realistic as possible. That's something that we are striving for in Final Fantasy. Not that all those extreme out there stuff isn't great, we need that too, we need to have a bit more of the balance as well.

Yeah, if we went back there though, we'd have that kind of cheap animation again. Do you want that?

No, but I would say one thing. I am kind of jealous of directors back then and things that we can't do now, which is weird because I'm one of those directors back then. It was something where the director had a lot more direct input into the product. Like I say, we only had a team of 20 people there, and for example if the animation wasn't up to scratch, you didn't like the way a character moved, you could jump in and program it and change that animation yourself. Obviously with the massive teams we have and the level of specialization now, that's not something we can do anymore. So I really feel that that ability to just jump in and directly influence something as a director is something I wish we still had now, but unfortunately we don't. So yeah, if we have to change something now, the first thing I have to do is install the right software to deal with it, and that's where I normally throw my hands in the air and say someone else can do that.

So yeah, I think it's difficult, but one of the things, and again my approach, my entryway into games was through animation, and in some ways like filmmaking technique. So my core, the base of the way I look at things and consider things like camera work in games, for example, is based on the idea of physical filming. The idea that you've got a camera and it exists in a physical space, you have to set up the camera, you've got the tripod, you put it down, and then you set the camera there. And the default angle, obviously you can play with it and do different things, but the base of everything has to be where that camera is physically placed.

So obviously in a game it's a simulated camera, it's a virtual camera, it's not real, so it doesn't necessarily have to be driven and informed by what we'd have in the real world with real physical filming. But obviously people like myself who grew up and were raised and educated on the logic of real physical filmmaking, that always becomes our default.

But you can see the changes that, actually a great example was one of the games we featured here, which was Final Fantasy 13. Obviously that was made about 10 years ago, I think it was 2012, and the camera work guys there, the people who are in charge of working out the angles and how shots should be constructed, this is the next generation. These are the people who are digital natives, and I was really shocked at the way they approached it, but in the end I think, yeah, this is the way it has to go, because they don't think about things like where's the physical camera going to be, where would the tripod be, and how do you move it around in real space. They're just 100% digital and they understand that a virtual camera is the base now. So the kinds of camera work they come up with, the stuff that we could never have done with our ideas rooted in the physical world, it flies around like this and I think how the hell is that happening?

So yeah, I mean this is not something I've been directly involved in. I actually saw it secondhand by an interview I saw with the director, but I hear that the director of Marvel's recent film The Marvels was a big fan of Advent Children and they said that that had inspired them and given them kind of hints in their work. So I think obviously, like you say, it's always been the other way around, and certainly the creators in the games industry very much have that respect for people in films and the way they do things. I think we are seeing that change of generations now though. You've got this up-and-coming generation of people in the film industry who were brought up on games and they've got a lot of respect and a lot of love for games, and we're starting to see more of a mutual relationship, cross-pollination happening now. So I think we are definitely starting to see that coming through, and there are examples, yes, that I see obviously via the medium of news and indirectly, but it is definitely happening, yes.

So that's a very difficult one to answer, but obviously in Final Fantasy 7, after that iconic scene happens, you have to change discs, that's the very last scene of disc one of the game. So yeah, I hope that people would calm down and return to a more stable mental state at that point. That was the idea.

Okay, so the first half of your question is a lot harder to answer, but I can definitely talk about the second part, which is the ongoing legacy, the future of Final Fantasy. And I'm sorry I can't come up with what these are actually called, but I don't know if you guys know, in certain games there's like a hexagon marker with different lines coming out of it for different parameters, like your strength, your magic, your defense, etc., and it represents the power of a character. And I kind of look at things in that sense. I wish I knew what they were properly called, but I don't. And the idea is, if we keep getting the same people to make Final Fantasy again and again, they can achieve the same results, but they'll never expand on that and they'll never increase that kind of, I think it's like a radar chart. It won't get any bigger. For example, one bar will never stick out further, it'll always be within the same parameters. That's why I want different people with different ideas who can take Final Fantasy in different directions to work on successive games. So in very much that same vein, with Final Fantasy 16, we had producer Yoshi doing that game, and I think he took it in a new direction. And again with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Naoki Hamaguchi, he's the director of that, and I think he is again another person I can trust to take the game further than it would have gone before. So I think those new talents coming in and those new people heading up the ship each time really is such an important thing for that legacy, that ongoing future of Final Fantasy. It shouldn't be the same person every time.

So in moving back to the first part of your question there, and I think there's not really one big push to have this massive theme of legacy or passing on to the next generation over multiple Final Fantasy games. It kind of just worked out that way. And I think like everything with Final Fantasy, really it's down to the director of that game at that time. So I'd imagine that generally, if you got a director and he's perhaps just had a child, that's changed his perspective on life, he's going to probably want to put those kinds of themes into the game. So I'd imagine you got those stories about struggles between fathers and sons and the handing over to the next generation, I'd imagine those directors probably had that kind of issues in their personal lives at that time. So yeah, maybe at the time I made Final Fantasy 7, I had something I wanted to say about that.

So I think in terms of the characters, the main characters in the games that I work on, I've been influenced a huge amount by the main character designer I work with, Tetsuya Nomura. When he designs a character, he doesn't just design the visuals of that character, he really goes into every aspect of it, who they are, what they think, etc. And so I think in that he's got such a great sense for character design that I really am very heavily taken by that.

I think in terms of that difference between my views on these things and the way Mr. Nomura looks at character design, that really does come out in, as you say, Lightning from Final Fantasy 13, because I deliberately wanted to make the main character, the protagonist of Final Fantasy 13, a woman. We've had female characters who have kind of played a prominent role as part of an ensemble cast before in Final Fantasy. I think with 6, obviously you had Terra, right? Yes, Terra. She obviously played a big role, but we've never had a main character, standalone female protagonist. I really wanted to have that as a main character, so I asked Mr. Nomura, I gave him the brief for the character, this is the kind of character I want. And I was really very happy with what he came back with, because he designed it. It wasn't as you think of a stereotypical male protagonist, some big macho guy, and you thought, okay, is he just going to do a female version of that? It's not that at all. He really based her appearance on, I think it was, like based on female athletes, like tennis players and that kind of physique and that kind of body shape. And again, his design of that character was just so refined and so well done that, yeah, I thought he can do this so much better than I can.

So that's an incredibly interesting question. And I think in terms of the direction of games, and a game which has that same effect as Star Wars, and I'm not going to say Final Fantasy 7 was that game, but certainly when we made it back in the day, we were looking at the future of gaming and where gaming should go. And I kind of made Final Fantasy 7 as an indication of the direction I thought games should be going in. Obviously when we were deciding on how we were going to do it, we discussed very seriously actually in the company about what the best direction for our games to continue in was with the new technology available. It wasn't an obvious decision. Obviously we could have taken that 2D pixel art style and try to evolve that and take that further in a new direction, definitely one option we had. In terms of the newly available 3D graphics, they did some things that were new, in some ways they were actually retrograde. Certainly with the quality of the polygons we had and the fidelity and just the artistic ability to show characters with that limited polygon count was actually a step back over some of the beautiful pixel art we'd had before.

So that was again, we all know the decision I made back then, 27 years ago with Final Fantasy 7. And obviously, like I say, we had that choice. We could go with those polygons which looked a little bit cheap and a little bit shoddy at that time. They weren't quite where they needed to be yet, but I felt at that time very much that this was the direction. And as kind of a statement of intent, with the idea of getting closer to film and that cinematic presentation, which obviously since then has evolved much further and we've nearly got to that place with games now. But back then I thought, okay, we'll take the hit of the fact that it's not going to look as good as a pixel character, but they're going to move much more smoothly. It's going to be that first step on that direction that I'd kind of predicted for the future. And in the end, I think that was part of the history of why we went that way.

So personally, I think we set out on that journey, like I say, with Final Fantasy 7. I think we only actually reached where we were aiming for back then with Final Fantasy 15.

So I think that also links in as one factor that influenced my decision on when we were going to actually go ahead with the Remake project as well. And like I say, after that huge length of time when I think we finally had reached the goal we set out to with the original Final Fantasy 7, I saw the results of that in Final Fantasy 15. I thought, okay, this is now the time to go ahead with Remake, and we can do it in the way we actually wanted to do all those years ago.

But linking back to your question, I think as I say we kind of achieved what we set out to do and followed that line to its conclusion now. So we may be, as you predict, in a time now where we are looking for that next big step, and people are starting to get content with what we have now and we need to look for that next big change.

So if I said something now, it would just be lip service. Yeah, I might be able to do that. That's possible. I know what's going to happen. You guys are going to get your phones out, you're going to bash out a tweet or two, and then in 20 minutes it'll be around the world that I'm actually decided to make one. So I'm not going to answer that.

Before I leave, I'd just like us all to give a big round of applause to Gavin for all his hard work up on stage.