One of the best games you've never played

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Remastered Edition’s producer Ryoma Araki, character designer Toshiyuki Itahana, and composer Hidenori Iwasaki sat down for an interview at TGS 2019. Check out a summary of the interview below.

- Producer Ryoma Araki originally played Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles as a regular consumer

- he remembers being flabbergasted at how the game really used the specs behind the GameCube/GBA

- Designer Toshiyuki Itahana mentions that the reason why the characters look a bit generic is because of the multiplayer

- this is also because of the character creation aspects of the game

- it wasn’t a game about detailing the individual heroes, as would be in a mainline game

- Itahana considered redoing designs for the remaster, but staff said they’d like to recreate the designs they originally used

- one new male and one new female design have been added to each race respectively

- composer Hidenori Iwasaki mentions that the remaster wasn’t originally going to have rearranged tracks

- the team went for it when Iwasaki called Araki out one day and said, “Hey, I have this on hand.”

- the original game is known for its music, but as there were hardware limitations, there were some tracks that couldn’t be added

- these tracks will be added in for the Remastered Edition

- dungeons originally in Crystal Chronicles will keep the old music, while new dungeons have newly composed tracks for them

- Iwasaki jokes that during the planning phases for the original game, a planner suggested to go with a techno music direction

- one of the big additions to Remastered Edition is the inclusion of cross-platform online play

- Itahana mentions that they still get photos from overseas fans showing that they managed to assemble the 4-player setup

- the console and smartphone versions will have different UI

- for multiplayer, you don’t need to wait in a lobby, as players will show up when they join naturally as you advance

- the team also reiterated that cross-platform saves are a feature for the Remastered Edition

- extra difficult “alternate” dungeons have been added as well, which change up the atmosphere and appearing enemies

- the new dungeons will drop new weapon recipes for newly designed weapons by Itahana

- over 10 new tracks have been composed for the new dungeons

- Araki mentions that remaking the game was an option, but he felt it had to be a remaster for Crystal Chronicles

- this was in order to show to the fans (including himself) that Crystal Chronicles was truly back

- because he played it as a regular player back then, Araki has made sure to change the game in areas that needed updating