Final Fantasy XV game director Hajime Tabata recently talked about his role in the development of Final Fantasy XV and when he took charge of the project in an interview with Edge Magazine. The game was originally being developed as a spin-off to Final Fantasy XIII under the direction of Tetsuya Nomura. It was eventually rebooted as a brand new mainline Final Fantasy game in 2013.

Rumors about the troubled development of Final Fantasy Versus XIII have been on-going for a long while now however this is the first time we have an official comment on the project and its state back in 2012. According to the interview of Hajime Tabata by Edge Magazine (Issue#314), he talked about the first time he was involved with the project.

Square Enix’s previous CEO, Yoichi Wada, was concerned regarding the state of the game in 2012 when the development wasn’t progressing as smoothly after 6 years in production. He called Tabata in 2012 and wanted to get his opinion on whether they should cancel it altogether and start from scratch. Tabata said that it was not possible for the development to carry on in the same way and this is where he was involved to make sure the project was eventually realized in the form of Final Fantasy XV.

At the start, his development team wasn’t on-board with the idea of taking on the project of Tetsuya Nomura. 90% of the team was against the idea and it took some time to convince them. Tabata then started to look for ideas on how to rework it into a mainline game. The two core concepts that were planned was the idea of Comrades, and the idea of a Journey. Both of these were a strong part of the final game and helped elevate it to something special.

Final Fantasy XV is available now for the PS4, Xbox One and will launch on March 6th for the PC. The game originally launched back in November 2016 and will receive a Royal Edition this March featuring all the post-launch DLC released for it so far.