Interviews// SPOnG Interview: Square Enix's Senior VP Hiromichi Tanaka
Ponders, laughs with assistants...
Hiromichi Tanaka: Regarding the spells, in the recent FF series you can use whichever spells you like, providing you have the magic… but in FFIII – same as the original version - there are eight different groups of spells and each group can be used, or cast, a limited number of times. This also depends on which job you’re character is in at the moment. If you change your job you can cast some spells more often, or can’t cast certain spells. So you need to choose which job you want to be doing depending on the situation.
Regarding the combat and battle system, it’s an orthodox turn-based system. One feature the old fans really loved was that when you levelled-up your character then your attacks on monsters became more effective.
SPOnG: You mentioned the job system – another popular feature of the game – there’s an impressive 92 different job models in the game, yes?
SPOnG: So, which is your favourite character and job class out of them all?
Hiromichi Tanaka: [Ponders, laughs with assistants, thinks *really* hard] I like the overall experience of trying them all out, I like the experience of trying out different jobs with different people in the party. It’s very difficult to choose one character. When I’m asked I’ll always say a different answer depending on how I’m feeling. Right now, I probably enjoy being a bard more than any other job!
SPOnG: As well as the visuals, another one of the very strong aspects of the game is the music in the game. How was this produced?
Hiromichi Tanaka: Seventeen years ago, when we were working on the original, Nobuo Uematsu composed all the music. Now we made a new movie for this remake we asked Uematsu-san to join us again and create some new music for the opening movie, with a large orchestra and so on. Uematsu-san was also the overall supervisor for the game’s sound and music.
SPOnG: The game was developed by Matrix, could you say a little more about who Matrix are? What the size of the team was? Who the key team members at both Matrix and Square Enix were?
Hiromichi Tanaka: Matrix worked on the remake of Dragon Quest 5 for PS1… The whole team, in total, was about fifty people. We also had Yoshida-san – who’s also FFXII character designer… and Aiba-san is art director on the game (who also did FFXI).
SPOnG: Some people have said that FFIII DS is perhaps a little ‘too hardcore’… that it might not appeal so much to casual gamers… how do you feel about that?
Hiromichi Tanaka: Sixteen, seventeen years ago, when we first made the game it was targeting hardcore players. But now, after all that time… today the hardcore gamers will be playing FFXI all day… or FFXII which takes around a hundred hours to complete. So, to compare FFIII DS is more like thirty hours of play.
Also what we refer to as ‘casual’ games is changing now. So, we refer to brain -training games, mini-games, sudoku and the like on DS as being ‘casual’ games. But we like to think of our role-playing games on DS as being ‘casual’ RPGs, which have a much wider appeal than just ‘hardcore’ players, so we think that FFIII DS will appeal to and attract many different audiences.
However, some people equate ‘casual’ with easy. And there is no way we would describe this game as easy. The original fans in Japan don’t want the game to be made any easier. So, it’s a ‘casual’ RPG, but it is still a very challenging game.
SPOnG: What are your future plans for more DS titles?
Hiromichi Tanaka: We can’t give you specific details at the moment, but as this year is the 20th anniversary for the series, please look forward to some more exciting future announcements.
SPOnG: Thank you for your time Tanaka-san.