FFXII PRESS CONFERENCE SUMMARY REPORT
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Posted on 12.08.2003 by Sifar
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Square Enix has revealed quite a bit of information (since November 15) for its next true Final Fantasy game, FFXII. On November 19, Square Enix held a press conference at the Virgin Cinemas complex in Tokyo's Roppongi section. A selected group of fans and news reporters were invited to the event. The audience had the oppotunity to listen to key Square Enix speakers including Yasumi Matsuno, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yoshitaka Amano, Yoichi Wada, Yoshinari Kitase and many others. Also, the audience viewed a three minture trailer for the game which revealed several gameplay, story, and character details.
Pamphlets handed out
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Inside the Cinema Complex
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Yoshitaka Amano and Nobuo Uematsu gave their speeches via video messages. Uematsu has been swamped with work and thus couldn't make it to the event. Yoichi Wada (Square Enix President) mentioned how he had been a fan of the series even before joining the team. He joked on how he got in trouble when he overwrote his wife's saved game. Yoshinori Kitase also gave a video message in which he said that competition was a good thing for the Final Fantasy series since it would bring the best out of it. Kitase is best known for his recent work in Final Fantasy X. To everyone's suprise, Hironobu Sakaguchi (Father of the Final Fantasy series) was present at the event. He has been in Hawaii for the past two years and had to make it to the event to give his best to Yasumi Matsuno (Director of FFXII). Sakaguchi mentioned how he adored Matsuno's work, especially the Ogre Battle series.
Sakaguchi says a few words
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Matsuno discusses FFXII
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Uematsu via video message
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Amano via video message
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Some of the key staff members involved in Final Fanatsy XII were also confirmed at the event. Yasumi Matsuno (previous works include FFT + FFTA) will be the Director, Akihiko Yoshida (previous works include FFTA + Vagrant Story) will be the Character Designer, Hideo Minaba (previous works include Final Fantasy IX) will be the Art Director, Isamu Kamikokuryou (previous works include Final Fantasy X) will be the Background Director, and Hitoshi Sakimoto + Nobuo Uematsu will be responsible for the game's soundtrack.
It is known that Final Fantasy XII will have many connections to the recent GBA hit, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. However, Matsuno (FFXII Director) has confirmed for us that the two will be completely different projects in all aspects including story and gameplay. Like FFTA, FFXII's world will be called Ivalice. While Ivalice was a country in FFTA, it will be the name of the entire world in FFXII.
Kamikokuryou (Background Director) mentioned how the staff had gone to Turkey to draw inspiration for some of the game's background designs. Matsuno discussed at the event how India, the Middle East, and New York were some other countries which inspired the environments in Final Fantasy XII. Final Fantasy X took inspiration from Asia (mainly Japanese areas), and so Matsuno wanted to go somewhere different. None of the locations in the game resemble Turkey, but they bring in many elements from the region along with the creative and unique touches of Isamu Kaikokuryou. There is a country by the name of Dalmaska which is one of the game's most important locations. Hideo Minaba (Art Director) and Akihiko Yoshia (Character Designer) mentioned in an interview with Famitsu Magazine about how the country would mainly consist of the colours orange and blue. This was because of Dalmaska's very high temperatures.
FFXII's detailed environments
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Dalmaska's high temperatures
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In the Famitsu Interview, Akihiko Yoshida also discussed how he designed the game's characters based on how they would look in the game rather than how they would look in the game's FMVs. This approach was taken because FFXII is said to have a significantly lower amount of FMVs due to production costs.
An FMV battle scene
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Princess Ashe in a FMV
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The FFXII team (Production Development Division #4) will be using an entirely new system rather than using that of Final Fantasy X. FFXII will use half the number of polygons that were used in FFX, but will focus more on textures and lighting. This has brought a much more realistic feel to the Final Fantasy XII game. However, the team has increased the polygon count in the facial area of the characters to the 1400 range. Vaan's face will consist of 1487 polygons, and Ashe's face will consist of 1479 polygons.
Vaan's facial animations
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Ashe's facial animations
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Because of the focus on textures and lighting, many of the game's backgrounds will feel much more realistic. Isamu Kamikokuryou (Background Director) said that the game's environments will be much more realistic because of the little details. For example, in certain areas you can witness the details done on the brickwork. You can see the brick's decay and the vegetation that grows over it. To help enjoy this factor even further, the team has added a First-Person mode into the game where gamers can actually see their environments, including the cielings.
In Final Fantasy XII, gamers will witness a lot of diversity in terms of the characters and NPCs. There will be many races in FFXII, all of which were also in FFTA. They include Humes (Humans), Moogles (Trademark Recurring FF characters), Bangaa (Big lizard type creatures), Viera (Elf-like tall and thin creatures), and Nu Mou (still not confirmed but are most probably in the game aswell). This diversity brings different beliefs into the world of FFXII, and thus issues aswell. Matsuno talks about how the preliminary designs for the Moogles looked quite ugly and scary. The final design however looks much more promising and pleasing to the eye.
The Nu Mou race ?
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A Bangaa in FFXII
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The female protagonist of the game is the 19 year old Princess Ashe of the Dalmaska Kingdom. This Kingdom is located between two large continents who are waging war against one another. One continent is ruled by the Arcadian Empire, and the other by the Rosarian Empire. Hell breaks loose in Dalmaska when the Arcadian Empire takes control of the land. Princess Ashe is displaced and so she forms a rebel group of her own. As time goes by, she loses her comrades one after another until she meets the game's male protagonist Vaan. This 17 year old optimistic boy has dreams of controlling an airship of his own and so joins Ashe on her adventures. The team behind FFXII is saying that there is a relationship between the two main characters, but it is of a different kind (of love) than that portrayed in most Final Fantasy games. The overall theme of the game involves the war between the two empires, but the story in between the war is the heart of Final Fantasy XII.
A battle takes place
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War based artwork
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There have been both positive and negative responses to the looks of the main characters of Final Fantasy XII. Ashe sports a look similar to that of the designs of Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy XI (which held Tetsuya Nomura's work). In response to this idea, Yoshida (FFXII Character Designer) said that the only connection is the actual use of colours. The game's characters have to use the colours of the worlds in which they will be present. Yoshida was compelled to use colours such as pink, blue, and orange to adorn his characters. This is something that he has not really done in his previous works. He believes that this is the reason why people may see his work having small similarities to Nomura's work. In my opinion, his work is fairly different seeing that his characters don't have as many belts as Nomura's characters do.
Many journalists have commented on how Vaan has a very feminin look in him and believe that FFXII should have had a tougher looking lead character. In response to this, Yoshida (Character Designer) and Minaba (Art Director) said that the original Vaan was tough looking, but as they developed him and considered the targeted markets, they ended up with the Vaan we see today. As mentioned before, Vaan was designed to look good in the game, rather than in CG renders and FMVs. Yoshida and Minaba feel that Vaan looks much more masculine in the in-game visuals and because of the motion capture sequences being done by Voice Actor Kouhei Takeda. Yoshida also commented that the characters were designed from the back to the front seeing that gamers will see the back of the characters more than the front.
Other characters revealed include Fran who is a female Viera that carries a bow as her weapon. Vaan will be carrying a staff root, and Ashe will be carrying a sword. There is a story behind how Ashe recieves this special sword. In the trailer shown, there is an image of a young man recieving a sword. This may very well be the same sword that Ashe uses in the game. Cid was also revealed in the three mintue trailer shown at the press conference. What role he will have in the game is yet to be disclosed. Another character is the one shown leading an army in Dalmaska in some of the FMV shots. Details on him are yet to be released aswell.
The leader of an army
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A character named Fran
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Could he be Cid ?
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Princess Ashe's sword ?
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Final Fanatsy XII's logo is quite large and the creators joke about how they might get more magazine exposure because of it. The character in the logo is a judge who enforces terror onto the people of Ivalice, including the henchmen under him. This is clearly shown in the trailer where the judge talks back to one of his Bangaa henchmen. He is a very important character in the game and is Vaan and Ashe's main foe. There will be many other judges in FFXII who also terrorize the citizens of Ivalice unlike the judges of FFTA who served more of a policing purpose.
Final Fantasy XII logo
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The wicked judge
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Yasumi Matsuno mentioned how Airships will play an important role in FFXII. They will be locations where gamers can roam around and have cut scenes. There has been no mention if whether battles will take place on these airships.
Most of Matsuno (FFXII Director)'s games have held dark storylines, and so 1UP.com asked him whether FFXII would also continue the trend. Matsuno mentioned that FFXII would be like the movie Gladiator in the sense that it would please audiences looking just for the action, and please those looking for the dark storyline.
The soundtrack of the game will be worked on by Hitoshi Sakimoto (previous works include Final Fantasy Tactics Advance + Vagrant Story) and Nobuo Uematsu. Sakimoto will be creating most of the tracks in the game and Uematsu will be responsible for the main theme song and a few others. Matsuno (FFXII Director) commented on how the game's main theme song would play an important role in the game. He was quoted saying that it will be "more than just a song". Details on it are still sketchy.
Details on the gameplay were kept quite secret. From the trailer shown at the press conference, we could see that three characters would be the standard format in battles. Characters have the ability to guard from attacks by pressing certain buttons at the right time. There will also be some sort of combo attacks of which details are still unknown. A few random details mentioned include the fact that all three characters can be seen on the world map at the same time, thus confirming the existence of a world map. It hasn't been confirmed whether there will be summons in the game, however, the totema Ultima (from FFTA) was shown in the game's trailer thus hinting towards their possible existence.
Ultima from FFTA
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Totema for the Nu Mou
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Despite the sketchy details, we know that there'll be a whole new besitary (list of enemies), airships, different races, the use of bows and arrows (the Viera race), and that the game will not be linear like past Final Fantasies. It will take a new mode/route which is bound to suprise all fans of the series. The last detail was revealed by V-Jump magazine. It said that in FFXII, gamers could find the crystals named Ramuh, Ragnarok, Omega, Pamp, and Tornberry. The airships in the game would also hold names that most FF fans have heard of before.
Final Fantasy XII is 70% complete and will make its way to Japan in Summer 2004. The project should be finished in 6 to 7 months, however, the FFXII team asks fans to be patient as they do not want to dissappoint fans by hurrying the project. More new footage will be shown at this year's Jump Festival which takes place in Chiba's Makuhari Messe on December 20, 2003.
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(Image Source: Quiter)
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