Final Fantasy 7: Eine Mündliche Überlieferung

[Gamabunta]

Wir stehen kurz vor dem 20 jährigen Jubiläum von Final Fantasy VII, dem wohl erfolgreichsten und einflussreichsten Spiel das Square Enix entwickelt hat.
Das hat Polygon zum Anlass genommen einen wirklich massiven Artikel rund um die Entstehung und Auswirkungen die das Spiel gehabt hat zu verfassen.
Hierbei sind rund 35 Personen interviewt worden. Neben dem Spiel selbst werden unter anderem Themen behandelt wir: Die Wechsel von Nintendo zu Sony, der PC Port, der EA Publishing Deal, FF: The Spirits Within, Sakaguchis (und andere) Rücktritt, Reunion bei Microsoft Japan und natürlich das Remake.

Ich würde den Artikel wirklich jedem ans Herz legen. Da sind ein paar nette Details und selbst Sakaguchi kriegt sein Fett ab.
Im laufe des Artikels wird es auch deutlich, dass man nicht alles wörtlich glauben sollte, dafür gibt es zu viele gegenteilige Behauptungen.

Final Fantasy 7 An oral history

Ein paar ausgewählte Zitate:

I think calling him (Sakaguchi) a god would be going too far, but it kind of felt like that. He was a superstar.

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[In September 1995] I was hired by the president of the company, [Tetsuo] Mizuno-san, and he told me that, “Squaresoft will always be with Nintendo. … As long as you work for us, it’s basically the same as working for Nintendo.” And the week after I joined, they started saying, “Oh, maybe we should switch to Sony.” So I was kind of shocked.

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The biggest problem was, of course, memory. Based on our calculations there was no way it could all fit on a ROM cartridge. So our main reason for choosing the PlayStation was really just because it was the only console which would allow us to use CD-ROM media.

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At that time, Square was really close to Nintendo — we were basically like a second party for them. So when their new system was in development, we gave them lots of advice, like, “You’re going to need a CD-ROM drive for it,” “You don’t have enough bandwidth to do what we’re trying to do,” and, “With what you have now, we’re not going to be able to make an RPG.” We gave them lots of advice. But [Nintendo president] Yamauchi-san at Nintendo basically refused to listen to any of it. And that’s when Sakaguchi-san and the management team at Square decided, “OK, we’re going to go with Sony now.”

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What I heard was Nintendo said, “If you’re leaving us, never come back.”

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One thing that surprises me even now is, at the time, the PlayStation development kits were about $20,000 each, and they were just sitting there in cardboard boxes in the hallway where pretty much anybody could enter off the street and grab them. And there were SGI machines sitting there too, and literally anyone could have just walked in from outside and taken one. There was pretty much no security.

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OK, so maybe I did kill Aerith. But if I hadn’t stopped you (Kitase), in the second half of the game, you were planning to kill everyone off but the final three characters the player chooses!
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In the scene where they parachute into Midgar. You (Kitase) wanted everyone to die there!
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Yeah, remember? You (Kitase) and [writer] Nojima-san were all excited about this. I was the one who said “No way!” and stopped you guys. You wanted to kill everyone except the final three characters the player chose for the endgame.
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The theme of Final Fantasy 7 was “life,” and we sacrificed Aerith in order to give weight and depth to that theme. Her death is a tragedy, but if we suddenly just killed off everyone else after that, it would dilute the meaning of her death.

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It sold pretty close to a million at full price, I would say, and then it went into a number of variations — budget versions and whatnot.

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Officially, the reason for Hawaii was that we could connect all the artists from Japan and America, and Hawaii is the middle point between both countries. … [But we moved there] because Sakaguchi-san liked Hawaii.

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The checks and balances weren’t there. I think, in terms of producing a game, Sakaguchi-san was probably pretty reliable in terms of his beat in terms of what worked and what didn’t work. But when it came to working in a different medium, I think … the fact that there wasn’t really anybody there to provide objective and constructive criticism was a detriment.

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The movie … was an unmitigated disaster. … I talked to the lawyer, and I just remember at a party, but she was the lawyer from Hawaii who had handled their applications for doing the movie there. And there were so many tax benefits on the table, and they didn’t take a single one. Because they went in and they were like, “We’re bringing our team.” And they were like, “You hire 10 percent Hawaiian and you get this huge tax cut.” And I don’t think it was like Sakaguchi sitting there going, “No, we’re keeping it pure. It’s our team.” I don’t think there was any thought at all. I think it was like, that came in and the whole organization was so dysfunctional that when that kind of news hits the grind, it never gets to the person that needs to hear it.And that’s the problem when you’ve got that kind of power structure. It’s like a family thing. And this is endemic in Japanese companies where it operates like a family instead of a business. And so, if something isn’t on the family’s radar, it just doesn’t happen. And there are so many missed opportunities there. So apparently, they could have saved so much money — millions of dollars — if they had taken advantage of these really easy [opportunities]. They just had to hire janitors locally, really, and they could have done it.

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Especially during the Final Fantasy 7 period, Sakaguchi-san made every big decision. That was why everybody moved quickly. It was so exciting. And after Sakaguchi-san left, no one wanted to take responsibility, so all the decision making needed lots of approvals, which took a long, long time. The company didn’t move very quickly. It suffered from “big company disease.”

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Management was totally changing at Squaresoft. They went from one extreme to the other. Before then, they had no control over costs. But all of a sudden, cost control became a big deal.

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Back when I ran development at Square, I would say, “Let’s not do remakes.” I was always thinking, “Rather than remakes, let’s put that energy into new projects.” But time has passed, and now we can construct game worlds with CG far more detailed than what I was thinking of at the time. Now that we’ve reached this level, you can’t help but get excited about the possibilities. [Laughs] With the announcement of the FF7 remake, I’m looking forward to it both as its father and as a player. If possible, I’d like to see a scalpel taken to not just the visuals, but the game mechanics as well, to create something that we can become even more deeply immersed in.

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