OMG Nintendo.com

Another day, another Revenant Wings interview. Today we have the scenario team, those guys responsible for writing up the game's story and figuring out how that story gets told. This interview features Game Director Motomu Toriyama, Co-Director Takanari Ishiyama, and Scenario Assistant Nanako Saitoh.

As you might expect, you can't really talk about the game's story without heading into major spoiler territory, so proceed at your own risk!

Q: Mr. Toriyama, you directed the FFX series, so I was surprised when I saw that you were being put in charge of a FFXII sequel.

TORIYAMA: When we started, we thought it would be a completely new Final Fantasy for the DS. Partway through, it turned into a sequel to FFXII.

ISHIYAMA: Before the change, we'd only decided on the general flow of the story. Toriyama and I had only talked about "we want a story that has so-and-so feel to it."

TORIYAMA: But from the beginning, we wanted it to be about a group of young people traveling to another world in search of "something important."

Q: Were there any parts of the story you created with the DS hardware in mind?

TORIYAMA: The DS reaches more casual gamers than other systems do, so I wanted to make the game simple and easy to understand, and revive some of the spirit of adventure that was present in the earlier FFs. I also wanted to give everyone slightly grander ways of speaking; not over-the-top, just an honest and unpretentious way of acting and speaking.

SAITOH: FFXII's actual story is very serious, and Vaan himself got drawn into that atmosphere a little bit, so I don't think he had any choice but to start saying serious things. I joined the Revenant Wings production staff partway through, but when I read the scenario, I decided Vaan should get to say happy and heroic things more appropriate to someone his age. I wrote Vaan's lines in the intermission and side-mission scenes with that in mind.

TORIYAMA: I wrote the game's story thinking about how I would've envisioned Vaan if I had been the one writing FFXII. Or maybe I should say I wanted to try writing a sequel as if the subject matter of the FFXII we were basing it on had been written by someone else. But really, when you're trying to create a work within a world someone else has created, it's like their ideas get mixed in with your own, it's a very novel feeling.

********

Insider Production Secrets

Motomu Toriyama: "In chapter 7 there's a scene where Penelo talks to Vaan in his dreams. Originally, we had Penelo make a sort of flirtatious movement there, but after I saw it, I thought it might be too flirtatious. We ended up cutting it, but you can see the sprite animation for it below."

Takanari Ishiyama: "Filo is supposed to have a crush on Llyud, but when Llyud gets attacked by Feolthanos in Chapter 9, Filo doesn't have any special reaction to it. I was shocked when I noticed that."

Nanako Saitoh: Cu Sith, Master Artificer's gender isn't established clearly [in the Japanese version of the game], but I decided to think of her as female. I wrote her lines thinking that she adored Tomaj like a little girl.

********

Q: Were there parts where you were afraid of interfering in someone else's creation?

TORIYAMA: I didn't have that many reservations about it. I guess that means I've become a real veteran. (laughs) When I worked on FFVII, I asked Mr. Nojima [Kazushige Nojima: FFVII Scenario Writer] "Is it okay that this has really become 'Nojima world'?" and he told me "Yes, you'll understand some day." Now that I think about it, I think he's right. (laughs)

SAITOH: I tried to write on a gradient between FFXII's original "color" and the "color" which Toriyama was writing, so as not to make FFXII fans uncomfortable.

TORIYAMA: It feels like you reached a happy medium. (laughs)

ISHIYAMA: For me, I thought that if it we made it too different from FFXII it would defeat the point of a sequel, so I tried to have some degree of consciousness about the earlier game. I thought about things like "would Vaan really do something like this?" and "I think we should show a new side to this character" and in the end it felt like I could just write it freely.

Q: What motivated you to set the adventure in a continent floating in the sky?

ISHIYAMA: We had the idea of the setting being a huge, carrier-like airship that everyone could call home while they traveled around the world. In order to bring that setting to life, I thought we had to move the setting from the recognizable Ivalice to an unknown world that would stir the adventurous spirit. We decided on a floating continent for the setting.

Q: And to match that, you came up with a new race called the Aegyl.

ISHIYAMA: We wanted the dwellers of the sky to look like they're from another world, so we gave them wings, and since they lived in a shut-off world we combined the image of being very wise and very melancholy to come up with the character designs you see today. Also, we knew we were using the Melee-Ranged-Flying relationship in our battle system, so we used the winged Aegyl race to allow for more flying-type characters.

Q: Of the characters who were carried over from FFXII, Filo and Kytes stand out. What made you think to use them as main characters?

TORIYAMA: We wanted to include a character in the same age group as our target audience, but at first we only wanted one. Then, we asked Ito [Ryoma Ito: Character designer] which of FFXII's characters he'd want to push as main characters, and he said Kytes or Filo would fit the bill. Since you don't talk to them much in FFXII, it was easy to add color to them in Revenant Wings. On the other hand, we paid attention to characters who were strong and resolute during the timespan of FFXII, like Ashe and Basch.

Q: Rikken also makes a big impression this time around.

ISHIYAMA: When it was decided that the game would be a sequel to FFXII, we received materials for the earlier game, and Ito said that when he saw all of them, Rikken's design popped out at him more than any other character. (laughs) Rikken didn't get much use in FFXII, so I thought we should give the guy a fair chance to act. I had a lot of fun writing his lines. My actual job was just to bring together all the scenarios that the various staff had written into the actual events, but in missions where Rikken appeared, I secretly rewrote his lines. (laughs)

SAITOH: That's right, in the mission where I wrote Rikken's lines, Ishiyama rewrote them all. I couldn't reproduce that kind of tension.

TORIYAMA: Of course you can't. Only Rikken can. (laughs)

Q: Of the new characters in the game, I thought Cu Sith, Master Artificer was very cute.

SAITOH: Her prototype materials only said "Calls Tomaj 'Master Tomaj'" and "Uses very polite language." I enriched her setting by deciding that she had been summoned long ago by the Aegyl to make weapons for them, and that she had been pulled along on the wing of the airship until Tomaj rescued her.

TORIYAMA: Originally, we'd planned to have Ba'Gamnan be in charge of the forging. When we were assigning allied characters to run each of the shops, we thought that that kind of strength-based work would have to go to Ba'Gamnan (laughs). But he's kind of heinous and inhuman from the start so you couldn't trust him to forge your weapons properly, and since he'll end up leaving your party to betray you halfway through, we thought it would be better to give the job to another character, so we created Cu Sith especially for the game.

Q: Saitoh-san, you were in charge of the "Lemures report" that you can read on the airship's bridge, weren't you?

SAITOH: Yes. I thought that players would normally just go through the game without reading them, but if they did take the time out to read them, it would give the game an extra dimension. I had a lot of fun thinking this while I was writing.

Q: You put in a lot of stuff that would have FFXII fans grinning if they took the time to read it.

SAITOH: Originally it wasn't divided into "News" and "Glossary," and you just moved your cursor over an item to receive an explanation for it. I thought it would be really boring if all you got to read was a straightforward explanation, though, so I tried to make things more interesting by adding flavor text, like in a CCG.

Q: The Ship's Log that Vaan and the others write in really added a lot of flavor.

SAITOH: That was also originally just a very basic outline, but I showed it to Toriyama and he said "This isn't what I want!"

TORIYAMA: Nowadays, there are a lot of people who keep public diaries, like blogs. Using the kinds of things they write as my standard, I thought that might be a more interesting addition to the game. There were fun ways you could show character through it, like deciding that Vaan never uses big words.

Q: The keyword "something important" appears many times in the game's story. Could you explain what "something important" really means?

TORIYAMA: I can't give a definitive statement on it, but I think each player will think about it in relation to their own lives, and they'll know.

SAITOH: All of the characters give hints to it in what they say.

TORIYAMA: And then each player can say figure it out for themselves, what each character's 'something important' is.

Q: Of all the things communicated by the story and all the things to see, what do you really want the players to get out of it?

SAITOH: I want players to really get the impression of things like "Cu Sith is a useful forger" and "Ba'Gamnan is a nasty pest" and other characters' traits, not just from their images, but from the little details of what they say, and perceive their gradual changes of heart. If they can pick up on this and suddenly notice a little change and another face of a character and think "Oh!" then I'll be very happy.

ISHIYAMA: Games are meant to be entertainment, so really I just want to get across the feeling of heart-pounding excitement and exhilaration. The organization of the story and the way events are portrayed, and the expression of dialogue, all that construction, I hope that it will surprise people and get them feeling something, and if they think that it is fun and interesting, that will be enough to satisfy me.

TORIYAMA: The thing I most want them to see is the growth of Vaan and Penelo over the course of the game. Obviously they grew over the course of FFXII too, but I wanted to portray them as sort of reaching the next level of maturity. We talked about how to draw that out amongst the staff many times, and the result is something that is only shown in the game's secret ending. That is something the player will have to work on their own to achieve.

Another interview down. What do you think? Did the creators of Revenant Wings stay true to the original game, or did Mr. Toriyama overstep his bounds?

Stay tuned tomorrow to hear from the movie team and find out how they fit those big big cutscenes onto those tiny little screens.

• << prev
• next >>