A Glimpse Into The Long Development of Final Fantasy XII

In a talk Thursday at the Game Developer's Conference, attendees were exposed to a rare treat: technical information behind development at Square/Enix. Programming supervisor Taku Murata, co-director Hiroshi Minagawa, and lead realtime rendering programmer Yoshinori Tsuchida were onhand to shed some light on a game many years in the making. Though the session didn't provide any dirt on those interested in the departure of game designer Yasumi Matsuno, there was plenty to take away from the highly focused discussion. "Final Fantasy games require a lengthy development process, and this presents the very real threat of being obsolete by the time it ships. To combat this the team allocated its resources with a heavy emphasis on art."

Comments

Telling us what we already know?

[Lenneth-chan]

I know I don't play Final Fantasy games because they're innovative. I play Final Fantasy games because they're damn gorgeous. Besides, when was the last time any of you played an RPG that doesn't suffer from the same worries/problems that FFXII does?

Bias

[king-manic]

I detect a pretty heavy PC style RPG bias in all the replies so far. The FF crowd enjoy "Role playing" as is reading a book and imagining themselves in that role. Most of the replies come from the pc RPG tradition where your just a walking bunch of stats and take losts of fetch and return quests. The JRPD tradition has you being a slim empheminate walking bunch of stats that has to go on a quest on rails. Both of the styles have their weaknesses. FFXII I found to be a fairly open game for a JRPG. You could start munchkining very early and be insanely powerful. The "automated" combat basically stopped me from having to "press O" a million times a session just to get our of a dungueon.

Apparently you guys are int he minority since it sold insanely well. Perhaps only because of the name but it was fun. Well done. And pretty. You can't even criticize an emo love story. It was all byzantine politics. This one knocked FFVI off the #1 spot for me for FF games.

Transcript

[Zimans]

Has anyone found a transcript for this talk yet? I'd like to hear the technical details of how they produced FFXII, and not just some fanboy drivel about 'ooh they spent 70% time on art, and that's all I can comment on because I have no idea what they are talking about'. --Zims

Re:Article Summary

[Aladrin]

And see, you'd be wrong about that. Final Fantasy Adventure (I believe) for the GB was my first FF. I played the SNES one when it came out. I loved all of them that I played up to that point. FF7 was disappointing for me as the intro was very boring, but it got better later. Enough better than I now count the game as a good one. FF8, 9, 10 were all great games. FF11 is amazingly lame. FF12 is boring.

The plot in FF12 would have to change pace dramatically, and actually have some content, to save it past the 20 hr mark. After 20 HOURS I care not a whit about any character. Any movie that lasted more than a hour and had me feeling like that would have had me walking out.

And before anyone says 'if you made it 20 hours, it must not have been that bad' ... It's Final Fantasy. I kept telling myself it HAD to get better. I had friends telling me they like it. I had GameFAQs fanboys exclaiming how wonderful it is. And I had Fran's amazingly sexy voice. I basically lived for Fran cutscenes, just to hear that awesome accent. "The Mysthst comesths." Seriously. Awesome accent. Apparently it's the actress' native accent, too. Somehow that makes it even better.