Final Fantasy Developer Interview with Yoshinori Kitase and Yuji Abe

My name's Yoshinori and I worked as the producer on Lightning Returns, and I've actually been involved with the Final Fantasy series since number five. Obviously one of the things that may be obvious is because the name has changed—it's not Final Fantasy 13-3, but we called it Lightning Returns. The main idea behind that was that when we started out, we really wanted to create a game as if it was a completely new and independent title in its own way, something that would really stand up on its own. When we came to the battle system, to give players a feeling of picking up and playing with something completely new, we took the good bits and the bits people liked from the battle systems in the original two games. But what I really concentrated on was making it feel different. The feeling of playing it, the tactile qualities of playing it, were very new and different. So that's why we decided to add in and change some of the new systems there. Final Fantasy 15 is actually being developed by a completely different team to the one that worked on Lightning Returns, so they're obviously thinking of doing what they want to do in their own system there. So it's not really designed to be a preparation for 15 or a direct link to that. But I think certainly at the moment the 15 team are looking at developing their own new and innovative battle system for that, so obviously you've got a lot to look forward to. But it's not necessarily going to be the same as Lightning Returns. There's basically a period of 500 years that has passed since the end of the story of Final Fantasy 13-2, and in that time the world has slowly been going along the same track towards its own apocalypse. So the world's going to end and it's slowly been deteriorating. The story of Lightning Returns takes place in the final 13 days before the world itself is dissolved and everything ends. The other interesting point about the world in the time between is that people have stopped aging—they stopped feeling the effects of time, so everyone is essentially immortal in that time. But they all know that the end of the world is coming, so it represents a very interesting psychological state for the people of the world that they know they're going to perish at the end but they don't die in the natural manner. Where Lightning fits into the story, she's been frozen as crystal over the 500 years, so she hasn't actually experienced any of this change in the world. She awakens 13 days before the end, which is the start of Lightning Returns, and she has to experience the last 13 days and try and save the people of the world. When we did 13-2, we very much wanted to continue the series and finish it off in another game, so we wanted to carry on the story from there. But for Lightning Returns, this is the final episode of the saga. We decided we were going to make that the ending one. So yes, this is the end of the Lightning story, but as a character she's still very popular, so maybe she might appear—not in her own series of games, but maybe as a guest in a spin-off title sometime in the future, some way like that. Overall for the Final Fantasy 13 saga in the story, this is going to be the end.

Certainly of the Final Fantasies that I've worked on and created myself, Final Fantasy 7 was definitely the one that sticks with me the most. It was the move between the old traditional 2D creation environment to the new 3D—the complete method of developing the whole game, all the processes and the tools and the environment that we used, it all changed. That was certainly one of the most epoch-making of the ones I've created. There's obviously no concrete plans for that at the moment anywhere in the team or the company, but certainly we always get a lot of people from all around the world who love 7 and always ask whether we can remake it or do stuff for it. The thing is, because there's such an expectation and everyone's got their memories of it, if we were to do it in the future—not saying we are—but if we hypothetically were to go and do a remake or an extension of 7, we really would need to prepare very thoroughly for that. Because if we released something and it wasn't quite up to standard, that would really disappoint a lot of people. So if we were to do it, it would need a lot of thought.

I'm not as directly involved with the actual nitty-gritty of the game creation process—I'm more looking at it from a distance, from an overseeing perspective. But I certainly remember in the second half of the development cycle—obviously the game couldn't be played yet as all the parts were being developed separately and it hadn't been put together as one whole. When it got to that point and we made the first build just after the first master, where you could play through the whole game and try it out and see how it really would feel, I still remember when I sat down and first played it. I really found it very difficult. The difficulty level of how hard the battles were and the toughness of a lot of the game felt a lot higher than in all the previous Final Fantasies up until then. I was a bit surprised, thinking, well, this is a bit strange. But at the same time I thought, well, hang on, this actually might be a good way to go and this might actually fit for Final Fantasy. After that there was a longer period of about three months where we fine-tuned everything and played around with the balance, and it did wind up a bit easier and easier to get into than when I first did the test play. But I still remember thinking that for future Final Fantasies, maybe a more difficult, more challenging game would be a good idea. That was an episode that remains with me. What remains with people, what really sticks in their minds and makes them fond of the Final Fantasy games, is the characters. We talked about 7 a bit just now, and I think in 7 what people really remember is the main characters like Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and of course Sephiroth. That was a game we made 15 years ago and people still remember those characters today. In the case of Lightning Returns, the main character Lightning is what probably sticks out most and makes her a bit different from other Final Fantasies. She's not necessarily a heroine or leading lady type—she's actually up there as a proper hero in her own right and she's the protagonist. That's something that sets it apart from the other games. We spent a very long time—10 years—over this series, so people have been with her for a very long time. In many years' time to come she's still going to be a popular character. I'd like to hope she sticks with people and they remember her for her individuality. I remember looking right back at the beginning of the project 10 years ago when we first started doing the original Final Fantasy 13. The first thing I said to the director of the game, Mr. Motomu Toriyama, was: above all, when we're making this game, what I really want you to do is make it so that when people have finished playing the game, they'll have fallen in love with the character of Lightning. They'll be really impressed with her and really fallen for Lightning. I think a big part of that is that she's such a strong and powerful character, and over the last two games you've seen that. What maybe stands out now, what would be interesting for the third game, is that we really wanted to depict other aspects of her as well. Of course she's still the strong, capable character she's always been, but in this one you'll also see a little more human aspect of her—things she's lost and had to sacrifice for becoming that kind of strong and powerful character. In this final game, I hope everyone enjoys seeing Lightning from another angle, this new vision of Lightning as it were. I hope you all enjoy the game.