Final Countdown

This Friday will see the European launch of Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS. It's been a long wait for fans in the West - the game was originally only released in Japan for Nintendo's Famicom system, and that was more than 17 years ago.

GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Hiromichi Tanaka, director and executive producer for the game, to find out more. In this exclusive interview he discusses why it's taken so long to bring FFIII to Europe, how the industry has changed in the intervening years and why this won't be the last DS game from Square Enix.

Hiromichi Tanaka: In those days - around the time of the Famicom and Super Famicom - that was the first time that we'd seen a console hardware transition. Nowadays we know that when you've got a platform like PlayStation, you'll have PlayStation 2 and then PlayStation 3, and where you've got Xbox, you move on to Xbox 360 - you can sort of assume what's going to happen in the future.

But back then, that was the first time that we'd seen a new generation of consoles, and it was really difficult to predict what was going to happen. At that time, we were working so hard to catch up on the new technology that we didn't have enough manpower to work on an English version of Final Fantasy III - we were just totally focused on developing FFIII and FFIV.

When we developed FFIII, the volume of content in the game was so huge that the cartridge was completely full. When new platforms emerged there simply wasn't enough storage space available for an update of FFIII, because that would have required new graphics, music and other content. There was also a difficulty with how much manpower it would take to remake all of that content.

So, although there were several opportunities to redevelop Final Fantasy III, we simply couldn't do it - up until about two years ago, which was about 15 years after the launch of the original game, when it was decided that we would definitely go ahead and remake the game.

At that time we were considering developing it for PlayStation 2, but then we heard from Nintendo about their new handheld platform, the Nintendo DS - and they asked us if we could please make Final Fantasy III on that platform instead. It was good timing, and it was an interesting challenge, so we decided to go ahead with that.

Hiromichi Tanaka: Nintendo does give us a lot of libraries and information to help in our development, but since Final Fantasy III was the first time that we had made a game for the Nintendo DS, we really had to start from scratch. We worked together with a company called Matrix, and it was really an original game engine that we created for this project.

The original libraries which Nintendo gave us don't include a system for communicating with people who are offline - so we made a new library for the DS which allows you to send a text letter, like an email, which is stored on a server. When the other person gets online, they receive this message. That's a new function, and it's something we made.

Hiromichi Tanaka: Actually, I'd say that modern games can have really [deep] gameplay by comparison with older titles. For example, in Final Fantasy XII you have to spend around 100 hours to complete the whole game, while Final Fantasy III - although it was considered at the time to be a very deep, long game - it's around 30 hours of playtime.

These days, perhaps people are looking for very deep, long games - but also, because DS is so popular, you can certainly see other people who want more casual games. I think we need to take notice of these different needs from different audiences.

For Final Fantasy III, we wanted to keep both parties happy - not only the old fans in the Japanese market, who played the game 17 years ago. Those people want it to be kept the same as much as possible, they didn't want to see huge changes made to the original version.

For Western players, though, it's the first time they've seen the game, so we didn't just want it to be like an old-fashioned game - it needed to have some new touches to it. We focused on arranging and adjusting the game to try and keep both sets of people happy.

Hiromichi Tanaka: I only managed to work on this version of Final Fantasy III because of the timing of the project. Also, because it's a remake of an original game, it's a bit different from working on a totally new DS title.

Because the DS has the two-screen system, the touch screen function and also the Wi-Fi network, it's a very interesting platform - especially if you're making a totally new game for it. I may not have a chance to make another one for a while, but Square Enix has other teams who are concentrating on this platform - so hopefully you'll see another DS game from us soon.