Interviews// SPOnG Interview: Square Enix's Senior VP Hiromichi Tanaka
We didn’t necessarily have to use both of the screens so much
Hiromichi Tanaka: The biggest reason we couldn’t complete the project on Wonderswan was because of the limits to the amount of data it could handle.
When we made Final Fantasy III for Famicon we used it, the structure of it, in a specific way which we just found too difficult to recreate with Wonderswan. Also the graphics, we just could not recreate the characters in such a way that we were happy with on Wonderswan.
SPOnG: The DS version of Final Fantasy III makes use of Nintendo’s Wi-Fi system – specifically the feature called ‘Moogle Mail’ – can you tell us a little more about how that works in the game?
Hiromichi Tanaka: The main difference really between Final Fantasy III DS Wi-Fi function and other DS games’ Wi-Fi function is that this time you can communicate with the other players, even if the other player is offline. This is completely new, as usually both sides have to be online. But with our feature, called ‘Mognet’ you can send a letter to another player which, if they are not online at the time, will be kept on the server until they go online. This is very new for the DS’s Wi-Fi network. Plus, through using this function you can get more hidden items, jobs and generally get to see lots more hidden features in the game.
SPOnG: Okay, moving onto the games’ design: firstly, the characters in the game. They are very cute. Yet the monsters in the game are quite different, very realistic. Why?
Hiromichi Tanaka: Yes, well for the original version that difference is also very obvious – cute characters and realistic monsters. But for the DS remake we wanted to play down the difference, just a little, while staying true to the original. So the monsters are, we think, slightly less realistic in the DS version.
SPOnG: Why the move from 2D to 3D, if you want to stay true to the original?
Hiromichi Tanaka: Well, since it has been 16 years now since the original, we of course have to renew the graphics anyway. You may remember that the original version only had three colours each per character, for example. So we also thought that taking the game into 3D was also necessary. In 3D there are just so many more things you can do with the camera angles, displaying character’s emotions and so on, which all gives us more, better ways to tell the story.
SPOnG: The graphics and visuals in the game are certainly some of the strongest features of the game – perhaps some of the best graphics seen on DS to date. How did you manage to squeeze such quality graphics out of the machine?
Hiromichi Tanaka: If we were making an original DS title then the developers would, of course, have chosen to make more use of both DS screens. But because we were doing a remake of the original - the original Famicon version is just a single screen game - we didn’t necessarily have to use both of the screens so much.
So, for the battle scenes or the dungeons we are only using one screen, otherwise if it’s a field or a movie or something we are using two screens. So, if you are using two screens the machine power has to be divided 50-50 between the two. But by concentrating heavily on the one screen, it enabled us to use the most we could out of the whole power of the DS into the one screen.