An interview with multiple key team members at Sony. Present: Shuhei Yoshida (Producer), Yasuyuki Hasebe (Director), Kenichi Iwata (Art Director),

First off, congrats on finishing the game.

All: Thank you very much

It’s been a huge three year process with more than 100 staff members
I think it must have been hard making a game of this size but how about producing it? What were some of the troubles you ran into?

Shuhei Yoshida: Right. We started with very little staff and at that time, programmers, designers, and planning all talked together. As we grew to about 30-40 people, gradually we started splitting the work up into teams, and the concern that we didn’t know what was happening with the game outside of our teams came to light. So, one of the staff members launched a team-specific homepage where we could see all of the in-progress designs, scenarios and plans that were being uploaded by the other teams. So one example is that we made it so that we could all see how the other teams were progressing.

Kind of like a large-scale Hollywood movie production.

SY: I suppose so, yes.

The concept of reviving the game balance-oriented RPG has come up, but what exactly does this mean? Director Hasebe if you could answer this for us please.

Yasuyuki Hasebe: Sure, I think that there are a lot of people out there who might think of game balance and say “that’s a bit obvious”
but this is an important concept for me personally. Even if the game has good systems, good characters, good graphics.. if the balancing of the game is bad, you may not play it to the end, give up in the middle or just fail a lot. If that happens, the good graphics and the good systems can’t save the game. However, if the game’s balance is good, even if those systems and graphics are slightly inferior, you might play it all the way through and in the end say “Oh, that was a good game.” So, game balance really means a lot of things
and in RPGs the battle system balance is the first thing that comes to mind, but it’s not the only thing; the graphical balancing, the sound design balance, like ‘this song has to match this atmosphere’ and things like that, it’s all about balancing those things as well.

I want to focus on those aspects and make a well-balanced game. I want to ask art director Iwata, “this game’s defining feature is its exceptionally beautiful CG scenes.” Fundamentally, what were some difficulties of achieving this?

Kenichi Iwata: Because it’s such an epic RPG there are a lot of big scenes,”

Well as far as the Dragoons are concerned, they’re a fusion of Dragon and human, so in that sense they are raw and organic beings. So they’re not just meant to ‘look cool’ but also naturally like that; some kind of creature that makes you think “what is that?”.