Interviews// Yoshinori Kitase and Hideki Imaizumi

Hideki Imaizumi:Experience is actually very specific in that there is an internal experience counter which will, after it reaches a certain amount, will kind of spit that data into the DMW and then it will affect the odds of leveling up. Sometimes you will get, like, two level-ups very close together and sometimes you won’t level up for a while. But will you remain at Level 1 forever? No - that’s just not possible probability-wise. Also the material system is kind of inexorably linked to the DMW system and there are material that manipulate the DMW system, so there is that kind of additional level of game play involved there.

One of the concepts that was rejected that I put forward was… four is a very unlucky number in Japan. “Shi” is how you say it, but “shi” also means death in Japanese – that’s why it’s a very unlucky number. I initially wanted, so, if you got four fours in DMW you actually lose a level, but that feature was not added in the game. It’s very fun when you get two level ups in a row, though… that is in the game, so don’t worry about that.

Yoshinore Kitase: With regards to this title specifically, Nibelheim was a area in which there was a very big part of the story in the original. It involved a crucial time for many of the main characters – you’ve got Cloud, Sephiroth, Zack this time around and, to some degree, Tifa as well.

So, we really wanted to revisit this place, where this event happened and to be able to relay a new kind of image of the same event in a way in which the fans would be satisfied. So, we took great care to rebuild that scene – we would actually do things like use the same camera angles that we used in FFVII to show the scene in Nibelheim to get the same feeling but do it in the modern way, in the setting of the modern hardware. We took so much care that, (despite being the Executive Producer) I handled that area myself.

Hideki Imaizumi: Initially, when we released that Japanese version, we did not include a Hard mode because the initial concept we were going after was this role-playing action game that everybody can play and enjoy and see through to the end. That’s what we wanted the most – for a whole lot of people to play it. But after the release we found that even in Japan (gamers in the US and Europe, as a general rule, tend to play more games of a higher level of difficulty than those found in Japan) more people were in tune with the action genre than we had expected, and we saw that people exceeded our expectations in terms of skill level.