Dear Reader:
Tales of the Abyss director discusses the game's design, his start in the company, Western appeal and more
The following information comes from Yoshito Higuchi, director of the original PS2 game…
“I was the director on Tales of Symphonia before Abyss, but before that, I was in the group that developed SoulCalibur and the Tekken series, handing gameplay balance and features on the console ports. There were several internal help-wanted ads for the assorted titles we were working on, and I chose the Tales studio because I wanted to try out a genre I had no experience working on. I was the sort of person who never wanted to work on the same series after finishing up a game; I liked being able to make my own choices.
I joined Symphonia midway through development, so I wanted to be involved from the very beginning next time. More importantly, though, working on Symphonia opened me up to the excitement in taking a series and expanding on it, trying to challenge new things with it.
We were trying to implement Free Run in Symphonia, actually. Enemies have that ability in Symphonia, and towards the end of development we had the programmers test it out for the player characters as well. The trouble was that the enemy AI wasn’t tuned at all for this new ability on the part of the players — it made it too easy to win every battle, so we had to drop it for that title. Abyss was built from the start to allow both party members and enemies to run freely around the field.”
(The Field of Fonons) came about because we needed to have battle positioning play a more important role if we wanted players to use Free Run at all. At first, the FOF effect wasn’t as pointed and you had to think very strategically in order to get it to work — that later changed to what it is now, where you can set it off even if you aren’t paying special attention to it. Some people on the team worried that it would lose us some depth in the battle system, but once we all tried it out, we decided making it set off more often was a lot more fun.
…the concept wasn’t to create this game with an eye toward Western cultures. There’s a pretty clear delineation between JRPGs and sandbox RPGs like Oblivion and Fallout. You see a lot of forum posts from overseas gamers pointing out all the weird things about JRPGs, but I’d like to see dicussions like that as a sign that JRPGs are still being played over there. They’ve established themselves as a genre, and if we can make something that’s a hit in Japan, then naturally it’ll resonate with JRPG fans elsewhere too. We’ve been seeing a lot more JRPG-like games lately, and I think that’s a good trend to see.”