Slashdot Mirror
Final Fantasy Creator on Xbox 360, PS3
Anonymous PC Gamer writes "I'm now in the acceptance phase of reading console war coverage. It's just not going away, and it won't until one stands victorious. Throwing his considerable voice into the din is Final Fantasy creator Hironubu Sakaguchi, currently working on Xbox 360 titles with Mistwalker Studios. In a concise, revealing interview with Gamespot Sakaguchi-san gives a simple, honest outlook on developing for the current console scene that cuts both ways (PS3 'really challenging', XBox 360 has 'poor' documentation). On competing with his former series, Final Fantasy: 'I'm willing to break them into pieces, crush them at my feet. [laughs]'"
"I'm now in the acceptance phase of reading console war coverage. It's just not going away, and it won't until one stands victorious"
Uhh, why? Is there some unwritten law that states that there can be only one console? Having 3 different consoles gives us different type of technology, different functional designs, price competition, and all sorts of great stuff.
Think about it, if there were only "one" console, and all others were decimated in sales years ago...How long would it take to get a rumble pack? An integrated DVD player? The Cell processor? The Wii Mote? HD video out?
Heck, if we didn't have MS, Sony, AND Nintendo, the only changes to the console industry would be a yearly upgrade to processing power so that the latest driving and football sims could have marginally better graphics. There would be no financial gain by doing anything more risky.
So personally, I hope they all succeed. I hope they all turn a profit. And I hope they all continue to drive innovation in the console market.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Gee, if you took one thing away from the interview about microsoft it wouldn't be "poor documentation", it would be that their marketing is awful. He did complain that it takes time to translate the documentation of the unreal engine docs into japanese, and in that respect the documentation is poor. But I think it incorrect to make that the summary of what he thinks about the 360. He was pretty positive about it overall, and this complaints about marketing are more to the tune of its a great system, too bad the marketing is preventing it from succeeding.
The part where the interviewer turns to the Microsoft PR guy and says, "you should be taking notes" rings particularly true...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Obviously, the guy is a legend in his own right and deserves some respect, but I'm going to take issue with the following statement:
On the motion-sensor front, I've been intimately involved in creating role-playing games. It's all I've been doing, so when I look at the RPG space, there's not a huge need for motion sensing. So I'm not that interested in that aspect of the technology. But take the 360 controller, for example, which is actually the best one that I've seen, especially the analog. And it's easy to operate, and it's really reactive, unlike the Sixaxis.
That sounds a bit narrow-sighted to me, if not overly biased. Let's avoid the "next-gen/previous-gen" feature debate - the Wii really is drawing in audiences based on the motion-sensing party games. That's what's selling the system right now. To throw out motion-sensing just because it might not pertain to your field right now is wrong, IMO. What he says and what he does are two separate things, and he might make a motion sensing RPG down the line, but the guy makes his money off the 360 so he needs to sell it well. He does give Microsoft a little criticism, namely about the marketing campaign in Japan, but I think this statement was pretty wrong in the long run.
Ah, somehow I knew there would be oldschool fanboy revisionism somewhere in these comments. The only reason Sakaguchi took a hands-off approach to FF7 and FF8 is because he was working on The Spirits Within, a film which may as well have been called "FF7: The Movie." And both of those games still required his approval, not to mention the fact that both FF7 and FF9 were the fleshed-out results of stories written by Sakaguchi. Sakaguchi's involvement with the series most certainly did not end with FF6.
I know you, like many other fanboys, lash out at the later FFs because you don't like the idea that you might be massively overrating FF6 (i.e. the idea that you don't have good taste), but that doesn't give you an excuse to ignore reality.
Rob
Still, having impressive visuals do draw me. I think it has to do with the nature of the genre. Much of RPGs are about being immersed in the environment. It's easy for that to happen if the story is good and the visuals are appealing. The actual game mechanics themselves are quite secondary, which is why games like Dragon Quest VIII, which was very simplistic in gameplay, still did extraordinarily well. I should note that DQVIII didn't use realistic 3D imagery, but instead opted for extremely rich looking cel-shading, which was visually appealing.
That said, there is no reason why you can't have impressive looking RPGs on the Wii (perhaps focusing more on stylized art, rather than "raw polygon output") and innovative gameplay (actual sword swinging using the Wii-mote, etc.). If the player base continues to expand at the pace at it is, then no doubt this will happen. (Keep in mind that the Wii is still quite behind the 360 in worldwide sales, although that may change by the end of the year)
-- jchenx