Uncharted 2 is inspiring more than just Western developers. Japanese role-playing developer Square Enix has taken liking to the game’s interactive cut scenes and hope to implement it in future Final Fantasy titles.
“In Final Fantasy XIII, the interactivity was focused on the battle scenes,” game director Motomu Toriyama said during a GDC 2010 panel. ”I think there will be more interactivity (in future Final Fantasy cut scenes) — if you have 1000 flying dragons, hopping from one dragon to the other would be great fun.”
“If you can achieve that compared with Uncharted 2, I think that Final Fantasy is going to replicate the masterpieces of film, and that is certainly one of our goals,” he said.
Toriyama added the possibility that future Final Fantasy titles could have downloadable content added to expand the story.
“We avoided it for XIII, but we have to think that every user will be online, and so the story (could) be downloaded, and the battle scenes step by step… we have that in our perspective going forward,” he said.
Toriyama took the opportunity to address Final Fantasy XIII‘s linear design. According to him, the game’s tight story prevented it from being an open game. The characters are l’Cie, fleeing the government, so they can’t really stop and relax in a town or sight-see the land.
Toriyama also mentioned the design is a “structure of map easy on the novice.”
Fear not about the next Final Fantasy, though. When quizzed whether the next game would be as linear, Toriyama responded: “Look forward to the next one, I will have answered your complaint about the linear version of the story.”
Whether he is talking about Final Fantasy Versus XIII or the next numbered game wasn’t clarified.
GDC: Final Fantasy’s Future Is Interactive Cut Scenes, Downloadable Content [GameLife]
Very interesting! Interactive cutscenes would be brilliant imo. Glad to see SE always thinking ahead about what they want in the next games.
Japan developers need to stop making games with the occidental twist, we like japanese games because they r very japanese, Uncharted its awsome but look what SE did with FFXIII and his influense by COD and others FPSs.
Thing is: there’s a reason that there’s a line separating Japanese and Western games. They’re different. They need to stay different. If Japanese developers like Square Enix start trying to adapt to Western development techniques, then would there be any more games with Japanese technique?
Square needs to continue developing the way they once did and while Final Fantasy XIII is great, the linearity bugs me and they need to revert to the open world, towns, interactive NPCs, mini-games, and exploration that we’ve all learned Final Fantasy to be.