The Final Fantasy saga is one of the longest-running in video game history. Its numerous main deliveries, spin-offs and remakes have made it considered one of the mainstays of the industry and the maximum exponent of the Japanese RPG genre. Final Fantasy III has been no less than 30 years between us And to celebrate, its creator gives us new details about the game.
Square Enix has published a new interview with the game's creator, Hiromichi Tanaka, on the development of Final Fantasy III. With two Final Fantasy games already released and with game cartridges increasing their storage space on a new platform, the team wanted to go further with Final Fantasy III. "We had learned to make good use of the NES, and the cartridges had megarom data sizes that were approximately double those of Final Fantasy II«Hiromichi Tanaka said. "So we were doing Final Fantasy III with the mentality of taking the amount of data that can be packed in these cartridges to their maximum limits".
Tanaka also explains how they went from a story-centric Final Fantasy II with a complex plot to a Final Fantasy III where what stood out the most were the game mechanics. "That is because Mr. (Akitoshi) Kawazu was not involved."he explained. «When Mr. Kawazu creates stories, they have a certain distinctive feature, so his participation often tends to make that game be remembered as a story-centric game ».
While SquareSoft, now Square Enix, currently has thousands of employees, at the time it was much smaller and development was not as organized as it is today. Tanaka explains that her participation extended to "Essentially everything but history" with Final Fantasy III.
"Mr. (Hironobu) Sakaguchi started writing the Final Fantasy III story, so I took care of everything that was not related to that: the battle, the menus, the system design, all that », said.
It was also the first game to be properly documented in Square, a process that is now considered fundamental in the development process. "After doing Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II we realized that there was no documentation left"he explained. "With Final Fantasy III, we decided to create an official project plan, organize all the material in a folder and archive it properly". These processes at that time were not too common, so you could easily lose all the project work or if you wanted to resume it in the future without having enough references.
While the Final Fantasy saga continues to grow thanks to Final Fantasy VII Remake, as well as a more than likely Final Fantasy XVI still to be announced, it is worth remembering the games that planted the seeds of a historical saga and that thanks to people like himself Tanaka was able to take off and save SquareSoft from her latest fantasy, a last attempt to revive the company that became an icon of the industry.
