Interviews// Yoshinori Kitase and Hideki Imaizumi

SPOnG: And Kitase-san?

Yoshinore Kitase: I feel a degree of completion, the satisfaction of the story having come full circle – that a certain milestone has been reached with the compilation. But whether it’s the final – excuse the pun – whether it is the final product in the series I’d rather not say yet. I’d rather leave windows of opportunity open.

In order for a remake to work is that the – excuse the pun, again – the core members of the original team need to come together to work on it. This would include myself; Mr Nomura, the character designer; Mr Naora, the Art Director… all these people would have to work on it together for it to really work.

Now, obviously I believe each of these members have solid images in their heads of what a remake would be like, but to transfer that to an actual project at this point is logistically difficult because all of the core members are involved in their own projects right now. Rather large projects, actually, such as XIII and Vs XIII, and a lot of these projects are going to take a while. Perhaps after all of that’s concluded we can start afresh with another project, but right now it’s difficult to say.

For Crisis Core, the general “let’s do it” decision came in two days. We talked about it for two days and said “OK, let’s do this”. So, you can expect, perhaps, the probability of something spontaneous at some point, it’s just that it’s hard to make an announcement like that beforehand when things are decided in that short a time sometimes, so keep that in mind as well.

In terms of VII, it was a time of transition when VII was being created – the PS1 allowed for this whole new realm of creation, with the 3D graphics and such things, vast improvements in audio. I was a younger man – 10 years younger – and felt I could revolutionise (laughs and interjects during translation) – I’m still very young, don’t count me out yet!... it was this time when with all this enthusiasm as a young creator, setting the standards for role-playing and such with this new realm of possibility with the hardware.

It was a huge impact for not just the fans’ and users’ side but also for the creators’ side as well. So, perhaps it is that impact that keeps bringing us back to that era of time. And looking back - you can say it in retrospect, at the time it was hard to say “we’ve set the new standard”, but to look at it now, 10 years gone by I think that, yes, to a degree we succeeded, that we helped usher in this new age for the genre… for, to a degree, the industry so there is a special place in our hearts for that time just because that was the time it happened.