Interviews// Yoshinori Kitase and Hideki Imaizumi

Hideki Imaizumi: If you are going to move the title out into the world, you are going to have people who are even more adept at these genres, and really to satisfy the whole spectrum of players out there, we felt another difficulty would really be the best thing to do. We have all played the Hard level and it is immensely difficult – it’s not like playing the same game at all. Things take forever to die. It’s pretty insane, so much so that even the most hardcore players will be satisfied.

Yoshinore Kitase: The first thing I’d like to point out is we made the Crisis Core announcement too fast! We shouldn’t have made the announcement four years ago - that’s something we’ll work on in the future!

For E3 three years ago, we needed to produce a demo for the game and so needed to focus all our attention on creating the functional thing before the actual game was created – and while we were putting all our efforts into that we figured out that we had underestimated the spec of the PSP.

You have to understand it had just come out and stuff was not really known about it. Once we started tinkering with it we found that it’s really not that difference from a PS2 – we can do a lot more things that we thought we could initially, and really the E3 demo was that learning experience.

That really set the standard for the rest of the game. We said, “If we can do that much with the demo, then it has to be this way the entire time – that we make it something even better than what we initially thought we were going to make”. So, we created this extra hurdle for ourselves and maybe that contributed to the lengthening of the development period.

SPOnG: Many thanks for your time!

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