Final Fantasy IV Interview

There’s a massive, five-page interview with Square’s Takashi Tokita on 1UP this evening, during which the original Final Fantasy IV creator talks about his early days at the company, how the fourth installment compared to other titles in the series, the difficulties in bringing it and other titles to North America, and more. The conversation is no doubt spurred by next week’s release of Final Fantasy IV The Complete Collection on PSP:

1UP: In 1991-92 Final Fantasy IV was really unlike any other game I’d played, especially other RPGs. Can you talk about the direction that you took with the game? It was so story driven and very different than previous RPGs. Can you shed some light on the origins and inspirations of the game?

Tokita: When we were creating Final Fantasy IV, we had the idea of creating an ultimate Final Fantasy in a sense. One where we would take the good aspects of I, II, and III. So, from II we took the story-driven aspect of it. From I and III we drew on the job change elements. We really tried to balance the two aspects, and that’s what resulted in Final Fantasy IV.

1UP: That’s something I noticed in comparing IV with its predecessors. Almost like you took III, which had a very simple story and lots of gameplay options, and said, “How can we take these mechanics and make them more about the story?” At the same time, IV was a much more linear game compared to other Final Fantasy games I’d played. That seems like it was a really big change for the series. How did you arrive at that style of game design?

Tokita: I guess up until then RPGs tended to have a map, a dungeon, a castle, and boss battles, and you kind of went back and forth between the gameplay and the boss battles. But our idea was if we approached it from a movie editing perspective, perhaps we could create a more dramatic, story-driven game.

And it was also a big development in terms of music, because up until then we had one piece music per map, essentially. For IV, we focused on how to make the game more emotional — to have the music play at the right timing. And so it was kind of a new way to approach the music in a game.

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1UP: So you hadn’t had a lot of experience with RPGs before Final Fantasy?

Tokita: No, I wasn’t very knowledgeable with RPGs at the time, but I had a programmer friend I met prior to working with Square who then went to ChunSoft and worked on Dragon Quest II. That’s when I started playing RPGs and got interested in the genre.

Playing Dragon Quest II, I sensed that it was a game that you could actually come up with a scenario and staging and the creatives. You have a theatre style of acting within the game itself. My personal take is that there were games like Ultima and Wizardry, and then DQ took those and added a Japanese manga-ish taste to them. And Final Fantasy added an animation taste, and that’s where it kind of falls in the line of history.

At that time, I didn’t anticipate Enix and Square merging as one company!