Hajime Tabata, the director of Final Fantasy 15, is surprisingly humble in person. He speaks softly, with a slight smile, and his dress sense is uncomplicated. He is also immaculately polite. Amusing it is, then, that I meet Tabata in a Los Angeles hotel that has been fully assimilated by a garish, faux-Renaissance design that envelops every wall, ceiling, and floor. East very much meets West.

The night before I meet Tabata, he takes part in an elaborate show at the Shrine Auditorium in Hollywood, California, a venue that has hosted everything from the Academy Awards and the Grammys, to the LA Lakers and Miss Universe. Some six thousand press, publishers, retailers, and fans were squeezed into the auditorium to watch Uncovered: Final Fantasy XV, cheer at FFXV's September 30 worldwide release date, and gawk at new trailers and the Hollywood stars that introduced them.

The clear message, within a venue synonymous with such large swaths of American pop culture, was that FFXV will engage with a Western audience more than any other game in the series. What's more, Square Enix believes that—after a string of so-so sequels and rocky product launches—FFXV is the game that will make Final Fantasy great again.

"We're taking [FFXV] on from a position of thinking that no one knows who we are and what Final Fantasy is," explains Tabata as I quiz him about Square Enix's bold ambitions. "Basically, we've finally woken up from the dream that was Final Fantasy VII. Up until now we have been in this Final Fantasy VII bubble of thinking that Final Fantasy is still as popular now as it was then."

Is West best?

When Tabata took over directing duties from famed character designer Tetsuya Nomura, a switch made public during the 2014 Tokyo Game Show, one of the first things he did was educate himself on the Final Fantasy brand outside of his native Japan. What he found was, in his words, "truly shocking." Many people had never even heard of the franchise, and few outside of a "very small hardcore set of fans" even knew how many games there were in the series.

Tabata was dismayed, for instance, to see how little impact Final Fantasy-focused stories on English-language news and videogame websites were having on the audience. He uses the announcement of the much-hallowed Final Fantasy VII remake as his primary example here, with stories dedicated to its reveal staying in the "top story" rankings for only a day or two before news regarding other (typically Western-made) roleplaying games took over.

"That's when we realised that the position we have to adopt on [FFXV] is to understand as a development team that Final Fantasy is not this amazing special thing that we thought it was all around the world," Tabata continued. "We also realised, however, that the series does have something very good within it that keeps some fans coming back, and we have to go back to working out how we show that good side to the whole world."

A big part of teasing and presenting that "good side" has come down to completely reworking the game's development philosophy and mechanics. Previous games adhered to a Japan-centric model, in which the game was created in Japan primarily for a Japanese audience. Only when development was finished did localisation on foreign language editions begin. The result was a staggered release strategy that few appreciated, as well as a narrow cultural focus that made it difficult for the franchise to expand beyond its core fanbase.

"There was this really big distance and disconnect between ourselves in Japan and those players outside of Japan under the old export-focused model," Tabata laments. "We couldn't take onboard feedback or ideas from non-Japanese players as their responses to our ideas, and what we'd make for them came long after the game had been finished and sent out. It was impossible to get any feedback outside of Japan under that old model."

Knowing that the franchise had been riding the illustrious coattails of Final Fantasy VII for so long in the West amongst all but the most dedicated of fans gave Tabata ample excuse to change some of the most iconic components of the franchise. The turn-based battle system is gone, a proper open-world map has come in, and there's even a flying car that bears more than a passing resemblance to something seen in certain iterations of Batman.

"I realised that I could remove all of the stuff that was in the way of the series progressing and all of that stuff that just wasn't working anymore. Instead, we can switch focus to the stuff that would help modernise the series. Coming to understand that and focusing on what new things we can do, rather than what old stuff we should carry on doing, really opened the door for us," says Tabata with a grin.