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Hajime Tabata is the director on the upcoming Final Fantasy Type-0 HD, originally a PSP game released only in Japan but soon getting the next gen treatment on PS4 and Xbox One. He has also recently taken over as the full director of Final Fantasy XV, an action-focussed revamp of the classic RPG series.

Tabata speaks with WIRED.co.uk on bringing Type-0 up to scratch for contemporary players, why Japan has yet to embrace the new console era, and how Final Fantasy XV will be the ultimate "bromance".


WIRED.co.uk: Type-0 originally came out on the PSP in 2011. Players have seen a few PSP to PS3 upgrades, but going to PS4 is a huge technological leap. Was that a steep learning curve?

Hajime Tabata: You're right in that it's essentially jumping two generations of hardware. My own personal development team that is handling this project actually has a lot of experience with this generation of hardware, because we're also making Final Fantasy XV. In that sense, we very much knew what we could do with the hardware and where could go with a port. We don't actually have anyone on the team who has experience with PS3 or Xbox 360 hardware -- we never made games for that generation. It was actually easier to just go straight to PS4.

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Why do you think a four-year old game that only saw release in Japan is suited for an upgrade and global release?

I think there are really two major reasons. The first is, we wanted to get the game to people who had never played it, and this platform was best for that. The second reason is when we'd done the PSP version, there was a feeling that with so much information on such a small screen that not everything was getting through to the player; that maybe they weren't appreciating the little details. We thought allowing you to play on a big TV would be fitting and let you take in everything we wanted you to see. My eyesight's also getting worse and worse recently, so I find it harder to play things on these little screens! I thought porting to bigger screens would make it easier for everyone to see.


When did you decide to re-master? Has the success of the PS4 factored into the decision?

A little after Tokyo Game Show last year. The PS4 hadn't become quite the huge success at that point. We had an inkling or an idea that it would [but] it's actually not doing as well in Japan. We were originally planning on having it on all four consoles -- PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One -- to reach as wide an audience as possible. Around December or January, we decided just to focus on the new generation platforms and optimise the game for that hardware. We were starting to see the progress of the PS4 in Japan and how it wasn't going to be as big a seller as we thought, so part of the idea was to put the game on PS4 to encourage people to buy it.

Why do you think Japanese sales of the new generation have been sluggish?

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Look at Destiny. It's a very good game, but there's a lot of users in Japan who won't buy a console for that game. They'll think it's a good game, but it's not enough for them. They see a lot of great western games but might not buy a new console until there are more good Japanese games out. I think that's very much part of the trouble in growing the systems.


If the PS4 is struggling, does Xbox One have any hope in Japan?

The two major factors that Xbox One really pushes are Kinect and the viewing sports online, especially American sports. Those are things the Japanese audience just don't want. My personal opinion is that both Xbox One and PS4 are having problems but for different reasons.

When Type-0 was first announced, it was part of the 'Fabula Nova Crystallis' series, and titled Agito XIII, which itself has been used for a different game. How much has that original series idea changed?

The original idea was to create a series of games around the

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'Crystal Legend' mythology, but not restrict developers to a single direction. We wanted it to be quite a broad idea. It was like the mythology of ancient Greece and how so much fiction comes out of those -- it would be easier to make future Final Fantasy games if we were to create a shared mythology and base games on that. I remember when Yoshinori Kitase came around and told me to make the first Crystal Legends game -- he said that if you pay attention to the legends and the idea behind them, you can make almost any sort of game around it.

Type-0 is very action-oriented. Has that helped development of Final Fantasy XV, with its real-time combat that isn't often seen in the franchise?

I do think it was a good experience for the team to develop a game where you control the character more directly and can go around conducting these action scenes. The current FFXV team has members from a lot of other teams -- Final Fantasy XIII,

Kingdom Hearts, and some of the Type-0 members.

[When Type-0 began], it was the same team that did Crisis Core, and they didn't all have backgrounds in action games. When we started Crisis Core we wanted to make a game that was more action-oriented but because the experience wasn't there yet, we made it a basic RPG with some action elements. As the team's experience grew, we made later games more action-oriented.

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Is Final Fantasy as a turn-based game over?

It's not that we're tired of making that kind of game at all. It really depends on the team in charge of the individual games. If the team just wanted to make a turn-based style game, they'd be welcome to. I wouldn't want to make a turn-based game, though.

Final Fantasy XV's development has appeared quite troubled -- starting on PS3 as Versus XIII, then years of delays and changes in creators. Why shouldn't players think there's something fundamentally wrong with it?

On the staff changes, I've always been on XV as co-director, but I only recently became director. I've been involved with the project since December 2012. After

Type-0 was finished, I was basically given the mission to come in and finish what is now the FFXV project. At the time I came on board, there was a lot of discussion and hard looking at the project, what the team had planned and what they'd made. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we might need to change the team structure and so on. I think that's cleared up a lot of the internal problems we might have had with the game and it's been going much more smoothly without problems.

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I think the platform for the game changing helped as well.

Something we were very conscious of was that we had a lot of fans who were following the game from the beginning, that liked the ideas we had for it -- we felt it only right to apologise to them.

The engine we had for Versus-XIII had to be changed to make XV, so we want to make it clear that it's not going to be the exact same game that was first advertised.

So, Versus-XIII has essentially been scrapped, and XV is a new project that looks really similar?

There's a lot of things I can't say! [laughs] Certainly one of the things I can say about pre-production is that in August 2012 we entered a new phase of the project. At that time, when we got together to look at what we had ready during the second stage of pre-production, there were a lot of things I looked at and liked, that I wanted to try and keep in the game in some way or form.

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There were also things that we looked at and said that no matter how long we spent developing it wouldn't be a great thing and took it out. There was a lot of long hard looks and restructuring.

Final Fantasy is arguably still the best-known J-RPG series. Going from a spin-off like Type-0 to main numbered entry, has the team felt a greater pressure?

I don't feel that much extra pressure. Because the goal is so much bigger, the work feels much more worthwhile. That's how I feel about it. I mean, we don't feel everything is very easy and we can just get it done overnight. We probably spend a lot of time thinking too much about things to make them right. I've always been told that we need to take Final Fantasy away from being this cultural artifact or relic and being something that's still living and energised. That is a big ask, but I think it's something we can do. It's a huge objective, but because it's such a huge objective I can't slack off! The mood and morale of the team is really high.


Everyone's engaged and interested in what they're making, so I think we can make this maybe the best Final Fantasy ever.

There's a lot of discussion, particularly in the west, over representation in games. Do you think that having only male playable characters in FFXV is problematic?

What's the word.. bromance? I learned the word "bromance" today! I think it's a great word for this buddy-dynamic in FFXV. I really want to express what we might call 'bromance', a trip with close friends sharing a communal experience. There are female characters turning up -- I'm a guy, I want to see female characters too. They're not the main four characters, but I can't really reveal much more about them.