Dissidia Final Fantasy producer Ichiro Hazama and director Takeo Kujiraoka recently talked about the action RPG fighter in an interview in this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine just before its Japanese release. [Thanks, Hachima.]

Here are some highlights from the interview:

The story draft was written by Kazushige Nojima (Scenario writer for Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X, etc.), who also supervised the game as a whole.

The basis of the draft was written by Saori Itamuro (Final Fantasy XV lead scenario designer, RPG planner for Dissidia Final Fantasy and Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy).

Setting work has been put into parts such as “why is there a war taking place in that world” and even “Why there are up to six characters fighting in a battlefield.”

The main enemy you must fight in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT has been shown several times in the final trailer. It should ring a bell to those who played the previous games.

As for the chronological order, it goes PSP version → PS4 version → arcade.

The arcade version’s opening movie makes sense after playing it on PS4.

The PS4 ending will also help in understanding why the warriors are fighting in the arcade version.

Making character’s dialogue with each other more appealing was one of the proposals for the game. It would’ve felt like something was missing had they only stuck with self-introductions and lines from their respective titles.

The developers feared that the story could get a bit complicated with too many characters including the likes of Ramza, Kain, Ace, and such, so there wasn’t much spotlight time for characters other than the main numbered ones. However, since they exist in the timeline, Square Enix would like to add event scenes for them sometime in the future.

There are some characters that hardly have much of a role in the story, and this is due to adding even more with six characters in the Season Pass.

Disconnecting during a battle will automatically count as a loss. Square Enix is thinking of a penalty for those who intentionally disconnect, but this has yet to be implemented.

The PS4 version will update after the arcade version does. After the release of Dissidia Final Fantasy NT the developers are hoping to go at a pace of one new additional character every two months, like the arcade version of the game.

The Battle of Gods (an arcade version event) won’t be available on the PS4 version, so Square Enix is thinking of holding a different kind of event for it instead.

Dissidia Final Fantasy NT releases in Japan on January 11, 2018 for PlayStation 4. The game releases in North America and Europe on January 30. Square Enix will host a special live stream tomorrow, January 10 in Japan. Read more info on that in our previous report.