SAN FRANCISCO – For the future of Final Fantasy, director Motomu Toriyama is looking to Uncharted 2.

The interactive cinematic scenes in Naughty Dog's critically acclaimed action game seem to have inspired Toriyama to try the same thing in the Final Fantasy games, he said at his Game Developers Conference panel on Friday. "In Final Fantasy XIII, the interactivity was focused on the battle scenes," he said. " I think there will be more interactivity (in future Final Fantasy cut scenes) – if you have 1000 flying dragons, hopping from one dragon to the other would be great fun."

"If you can achieve that compared with Uncharted 2, I think that Final Fantasy is going to replicate the masterpieces of film, and that is certainly one of our goals," he said.

Toriyama also floated the possibility of adding in downloadable add-on content to future Final Fantasy games. "We avoided it for XIII, but we have to think that every user will be online, and so the story (could) be downloaded, and the battle scenes step by step... we have that in our perspective going forward," he said.

More snippets from the session (and possible clues to the future of Final Fantasy) are below.

Toriyama (above) went on to make some comparisons between Western role-playing games and Japanese role-playing games. Of course, he played fast and loose with the definition of the genre, using Hitman and Tomb Raider as his examples of "Western RPGs."

The difference, he said, is that Western RPGs like those ones starring Lara Croft have camera systems that zoom in tightly on the main character because the player wants to identify closely with that single character, whereas Japanese RPG cameras are more zoomed out, because the player wants to see the entire scene from a bird's-eye view.

Toriyama spent some time providing justifications for Final Fantasy XIII's linearity, saying that the game design was driven by the fact that the game had a tight linear story. The game's lack of downtime or towns, he said, was because the characters are "l'Cie, an enemy of mankind escaping or fleeing. L'Cie couldn't spend relaxed time in a town."

But it's also, he says, about "Japanese hospitality," a "structure of map that's easy on the novice."

That said, Square Enix might not be sticking with the design: In a brief question-and-answer session at the end of the panel, Toriyama addressed one questioner's complaints about the game's linearity by saying, "Look forward to the next one, I will have answered your complaint about the linear version of the story."

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com