Kawazu talks DS

Final Fantasy XII Executive producer Akitoshi Kawazu sat down with CVG to discuss the Final Fantasy series. A portion of the interview below…

CVG: You are, however, making a version of FFXII for the DS (Revenant Wings). How will it differ from the PS2 version?

Kawazu: We’re not able to talk about specifics at this time, but the game system and the story will be completely different in the DS version.

CVG: It has been said before that the DS game will be designed with those who are new to the series in mind, correct?

Kawazu: Since a lot of people who own the DS aren’t necessarily hardcore gamers, we want to design the game to appeal to broad an audience as possible.

CVG: Do you have any plans to bring remakes of FFVII, VIII and IX to PSP or DS before Sony allows gamers to download the PSone versions cheap?

Kawazu: We haven’t heard any specifics from Sony about how the download system will work, so we’re not at all in the position to say whether or not FF games will be available.

When we have more information we’ll evaluate it and decide where to go from there. As for converting FFVII, VIII or IX over to the Nintendo DS or PSP - the size of those games alone would make it very difficult to port the across to portable platforms. Those titles were as many as four CD ROMs so getting that down to something portable would be very difficult.

If you thought about porting those titles to the PS3, for an alternative example, you only have to look at the DS port of FFIII to see that a lot of effort and recourses. So if you were going to make FFVII for the PS3, that would become a large, cost-intensive and resource-intensive project to do, so there’s a lot of difficulty involved in a project like that. Although we’re very aware that there are many fans out there would love to see this happen.

CVG: So does that mean we ARE likely to see ports of these games?

Kawazu: Generally speaking, we’re focusing on making NEW titles for the new platforms. Also, there are a lot of young developers within the company and we want to give them the opportunity to create their own titles. Although there are people who are interested in remakes, allocating the resources to do something like that is another matter.