gamescom 2018 | Final Fantasy VIII Remaster Yoshinori Kitase-Interview | PS4

Okay, so the story of Final Fantasy VIII starts out in a setting called Balamb Garden, which is basically a training academy for a mercenary force. The name of that mercenary force is SeeD. The main character of the game, Squall Leonhart, is one of the trainees, a cadet member of SeeD.

Of course, it's not just school. His friends and allies are also fighting alongside him. SeeD is contracted out to fight with a certain resistance organization led by the character Rinoa. And the great evil that they're fighting against is a witch called Ultimecia.

So just from hearing that, I think you can probably get that it's a very unique and very distinctive setting. But it's not just the fact that the main antagonist in the story is a witch. The game also goes off into some very science fiction stylings, and at certain points the characters even travel out into outer space. So it's very different from previous Final Fantasies.

There's two main things there. But the first is we really looked at upgrading the graphics, mainly centered around the main characters, the NPCs, and all of the monsters, to really bring the quality and the resolution of those character models up to what people would expect from a modern standard of game.

The other main prong of the updates we've done for the game is a number of convenience commands and assist commands that you get to make playing through the game more convenient and easier. The first of those is a battle enhancement menu which lets you change the parameters of your party, upgrade them to make them stronger so you can take on battles at the kind of level you want to play. The second one of those is an option to switch all encounters on and off, so when you don't want to fight one, you don't have to. And the third one of those is a three-times high-speed mode so you can enhance how fast your characters move through the game.

I think rather than the actual process of remastering the game, perhaps what was the biggest challenge there was the fact that the environment which people actually play games in has changed so much in those 20 years. I think if you look back to those days when Final Fantasy VIII originally came out, people were playing on the old-style cathode ray tube TVs and an SD games console. So when we were updating the graphics and the visuals of the game to work on the modern kind of widescreen HD TVs, we really found that was a big challenge. So we actually extended the development period so we could get the graphics for the characters and everything to look really good on the current generation of what people play on these days.

It was a very difficult thing to do, but the people involved in brushing up and improving the graphics to make them something that works on the current generation of hardware was the same people who worked on making those original graphics back in the day when we were developing the game for the first time. So they put a lot of love and care into that. I think they came up with a really great result in the end.

Final Fantasy VIII really was a very unique and very different game in the Final Fantasy series, and obviously that includes both the story and the setting.

It's not just the world, the setting, and the characters. The actual gameplay systems that we introduced for Final Fantasy VIII were quite revolutionary. They're the sort of things you've never seen before in Final Fantasy or even in other RPGs on a wider basis. For example, things like the junctioning system, the draw system, the ability to play a minigame, a card game with other characters in the world. So I think even to players now, 20 years later, these are still very new and unique systems. I think people are going to have a lot of fun with them.

For the older fans who maybe played the game back in the day — because again, on the other hand, they had so many new and different systems involved in the game, a lot of people probably found that quite difficult or had a challenging experience. So for those people, if you want to pick up the game and try it again, you've got all these new assistive functions and new commands that'll help you get through it. I think you'll have a lot of fun too. So it's for the old people and the new people as well.

Certainly going back to Final Fantasy VII, what we really tried to push the envelope with and do more on, with VII, was the visual graphics. Because obviously we had that massive leap in graphical power and graphical technology between VI and VII. It was obviously a further evolution of the graphical enhancements between VII and VIII, but we decided not to focus so much on that. We were more like, what could we do to enhance the gameplay and the actual structures and systems of the game? So that's where we put most of our efforts when we started VIII.

One other thing, of course, in the transition between VII to Final Fantasy VIII was that with VII, we really got in loads of players from outside of Japan. It's when Final Fantasy really took off around the world. So when we were looking at what to do for VIII, we were really thinking a lot more about how we can appeal to players outside of Japan and make it a really global kind of game.

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is going to be available on the 3rd of September this year.

Yes, it will be that close. And we've also started doing pre-orders for the game now. If you order the game on PlayStation, you're going to get a unique dedicated theme for the game as well, which you can't get anywhere else.

It's a direct port of the same mechanics from the original game, and they're still just as good as they were before.

Oh, thank you very much!