PS blog:An Interview With Final Fantasy XIII�s Kitase And Toriyama

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2010/02/08/an-interview-with-final-fantasy-xiiis-kitase-and-toriyama/

Some interesting parts :

How do you feel about Yoichi Wada�s statement that Final Fantasy XIII will be the last game of its kind for Square Enix?

We don�t know exactly what he meant by that. We don�t really know what he meant by this style of game. If you consider that during Final Fantasy XIII�s development, at peak time the team consisted of over 300 people. It was a huge team, plus it took a several long years to get the game finished. So, if Mr Wada meant that we would never make another Final Fantasy title with the similar number of people, taking as long as FFXIII did, we would agree.

Obviously in the future we want to be much more efficient. Having worked on XIII, we feel that we have got much better at making good games for high definition consoles. In the future our teams will be smaller and more effectively run. We suspect that is what Mr Wada meant by his statement.

Is there a specific reason why Japanese voices were left out of the game?

For the European version, the facial expressions and lip syncronisation are all lined up with the English lines, so the Japanese voices would not match up right. That was the main worry.

People are aware that there is a lot of content that has been cut from the game. Do you have any plans to use this content in the future?

You say �content� but, in reality, it�s more like �ideas�. Maybe a map was a little bit too complex and we felt like the player would get completely lost, so we simplified, or whatever. So this content won�t be coming out separately, as it has been binned.

Submit your questions on PS blog US to Kitase and Toriyama here
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/02/square-enix-talks-final-fantasy-xiii-submit-your-questions/

As a regular reader of the PS blog, I was checking out that interview this afternoon when it posted, but I can’t think of a good question to ask. 🙁