The Evolution of Final Fantasy from Final Fantasy VII to Rebirth with Yoshinori Kitase | BAFTA

would you please give a big warm welcome to yoshinori kitasi and his translator [Applause] Gavin hello my name's Y and I am the producer of Final Fantasy 7 rebirth from Square Enix so thank you so much every everyone for coming today and thank you also to baa for creating this opportunity for me so uh hopefully you can listen away to my talk today I'm not just going to talk about games I'm going to talk a little bit about my career uh where I came from as well so hope you enjoy it I have next sl

ide please so 1978 uh that was the year that I went to the cinema with my dad and we saw Star Wars there for the first time so both myself and my father we were just overwhelmed by the magic of that film uh from the beginning scene where you see the awesome size and Majesty of the star Destroyer through to the end and the final attack on the Death Star it really was something to witness so have you guys seen Star Wars recently so I asked this to a lot of people actually I just want to ask you gu

ys a question do a little survey today I mean Star Wars has got a lot of films but there's the numbered ones you got from number one through to episode number nine I want to split those into three different sections got 1 2 3 four five six 7even 8 n so I'm gonna call them out now and if you get the group of films that you like the best start clapping so I know who likes which one's best so first of all what about numbers one two and three which star [Applause] Anakin okay what about the ones wit

h Ray and kylo ren that's number 78 and N okay what about 456 with Luke and Le and everyone I think we got a good audience tonight so as you guys have handly proved for me there um Star Wars obviously was a massive cultural phenomenon it was something that resonated with all people of all ages from myself back in the day I was a small child my father of the older generation uh male female everyone uh it was a major culture phenomenon it really resonated with with them [Music] all so as well as b

eing overwhelmed by it though I was also really curious about how they actually managed to make something like that so I went away and I bought the VHS cassette of the making of Star Wars and and I was fascinated especially by how they did the visual effects on that and that was what uh generated my interest and got me to want to go on and learn more about Film Production so that was how I wanted to learn about uh films and how they were made so yeah around the same time as Star Wars actually in

the gaming world we had Space Invaders come out and Space Invaders was a huge hit not just in Japan where it came from but around the whole world and I too was no exception to that I remember playing Space Invaders In the arcades day after day all day long and then in 1986 I think it was I remember I went to my friend's house and he had the Nintendo Entertainment System the family com in Japan and he had Super Mario uh I didn't have a console at that time but I remember playing that game and I

was I was just blown away by it so I just got so into that game I remember I hugged his console all day uh and it went dark outside I was still playing and I remember my friend's face at that time he wasn't best pleased with me so I regretted that and I went out the next day and said I have to buy my own console so that doesn't happen again uh and I went out and I got one uh and then I just got lost in games from there starting with the Legend of Zelda I became a game addict for life so I was uh

absorbed in these games and sat there at home playing them day after day but uh next to me uh my father I remember he uh looked at me with quite an exasperated look when I was playing them it was uh quite the contrast to the reaction I remember he had when we went to the cinema to see Star Wars together um he looked at me in a kind of a very bored a bit of of a cold way when we started playing [Music] games so I guess that really illustrates where games were around that time that compared to fi

lm which was already this accepted this major mainstream cultural medium at that time games were still very much a a small minor subculture with the fairly limited follower so moving on then I went to University and at University I actually studied film making uh and then after graduation I went on I got a job in an animation studio we were making animated programs and animated TV commercials so I was really keen and really passionate about a career in um in animation making animated shows but t

he next big chain turning point in my life came in 1987 when I encountered a game called Final Fantasy of course in those days I wasn't making games at that point I was still just one game and one fan so to explain what really grabbed me about Final Fantasy was it felt like a very adult uh game with a very smart very stylish aesthetic to it and as you can see here the um the UI the user interface the text on screen and just the general screen design very reminiscent of what you had on the Apple

Macintosh computer at the time it was just that much higher level of refinement so the next ma really big point point that Drew me in was the art here by Mr Yaga Amano um and compared to the other games especially in Japan the RPGs of the day which used a very comic book style very cartoony style of of graphics and art which was good in itself but compared to that the art that you got from uh from Mr armo was was like high art it was just that much higher level of uh of artistic Brilliance [Musi

c] really and the game system the the game playay itself seemed very much aimed at the hardcore gamer base um so I really saw in Final Fantasy that this was perhaps the future of games as I saw so I thought it was a new medium really and especially from someone with my background who studied animation and storytelling and was really interested in that that this was a new medium for telling stories in a visual medium so then in 1990 I switched careers and moved into the games industry sare en so

I joined Square Enix or Square soft as we were back then in 1990 uh and of course I hadn't had any experience of making video games or programming or anything like that but I really did feel that with my background and my interest in visual storytelling and animation I could definitely do something to contribute to this medium in terms of the direction of of that storytelling and and that art with engame [Music] itself so my first job when I joined the company was on Final Fantasy Adventure whic

h is actually a spin-off of the final fantasy series it was actually in of the the Mana series or what later became the Mana Series in Japan but I worked as an event planner uh on that first [Music] title so uh what that job involved was taking the script for the game and then actually turning that into the levels that the player will be um exploring later on and doing the programming of that as [Music] well and I remember one scene that I made for this game still stands out to me uh it was a sc

ene featuring a chocobo which is a familiar character that we see in Final Fantasy even today and this was a really Noble self-sacrificing Chocobo who gave up his life to save the hero of the game uh and it was a really emotional scene and fans reacted very well to it um which I was great to see uh and that really did help build my confidence uh going forward so the 19 in 1990 it was actually a very fortuitous time for me completely unexpected in the uh the shift over from the original famicom t

he Nintendo Entertainment System to the super famicom Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the extra technical power that came with it so to give you some examples of the new things we could do up until then we'd only really been able to use 25 colors on screen at any one time but with the new Super Nintendo Hardware that shut up to 256 at once and in the sound that we had available as well we now had a dedicated 8 channel stereo sound chip so the processing uh that you could do with games as

well had a really great um innovational leap as well so because of the specific custom chipsets you could now put in Game cartridges that allowed us to do all kinds of new things for example there was a it's not true 3D yet but a simulated 3D display that you could get from that Hardware so over the next couple of years I worked hard and tried to contribute as much as I could to all the game projects that I was assigned to but because of the the Super Nintendo and all the new things that it all

owed us to do that really um invited us to up our game and try and make much more ambitious game projects and then with Final Fantasy Five that was finally when I was accepted and moved over to the mainline Final Fantasy development team and the reason why they asked me to join the final Fant FY team and work on five was actually down to the decision of the director of the game at the time uh Mr hiron no sakaguchi uh and he' seen my work on the the emotional Chocobo scene in Final Fantasy Advent

ure uh and decided that he wanted me on board for his team the final Fant so on Final Fantasy 5 I was part of the scenario and planning team but moving on uh on Final Fantasy 6 I was given the role of co-director then the next game we did Chrono Trigger I was promoted to full director and I carried on that director role for Final Fantasy 7 so moving on to Final Fantasy 7 and some people know this but interestingly enough Final Fantasy 7 started life in 1994 and it was supposed to be another 2D g

ame for the Super Nintendo so we've made a prototype for Final Fantasy 7 and we were about to move on with the project but uh it just so happened at the same time the Chrono Trigger team who were developing in parallel uh we're facing some difficulties so my team moved over to help them to complete their project and put our own game on pause so we managed to get Chrono Trigger across the line and finish it off and then in 1995 five we thought okay we can get back to work on Final Fantasy 7 howev

er in the meantime there was another massive sea change in the games industry uh as you may well know at the end of 1994 Sony released the PlayStation in Japan so yeah um as you can imagine uh the fact that the the PlayStation changed so much the specs of that machine changed what we could do so much was uh was such a big change so at the same time actually you look at the world of film and they were undergoing a very similar kind of change with a a more and more introduction of CG Graphics so y

ou had films at that time like Terminator 2 then through to things like Jurassic Park and ultimately Toy Story so they were seeing a massive rise in this CG and the same kind of Technology as well so interestingly we talk about Jurassic Park because quite ironically around the same time as that came out Sony were doing their first PlayStation one uh technical demos and they were using it to rannosaurus to show the 3D Graphics it could do so really that was a turning point it marked one step of u

h the film industry and the techniques they use and the game making industry coming that much closer together [Music] for [Music] [Music] what [Applause] [Music] [Music] so it was very interesting time with that move into 3D Graphics that but um we now in the games industry were using the kinds of supercomputers and the animation tools that uh the film animators was using stuff that I was actually familiar with myself so interestingly enough um the majority of the budget we spent on Final Fantas

y 7 was actually spent on buying uh supercomputers workstations and software from Silicon Graphics well so yeah as I say I previously worked as an animator so I actually did use some of those very same tools uh basically a tool called Soft image was the main one and I used that to actually do some of the animation of of the characters in the game so it may be a bit embarrassing to say that now but the Motions you just saw there where you see Cloud jump down from the train you see all the members

of avalanche come out and they take down the Shinra Soldiers with their martial arts I animated all that [Applause] myself if I did that now I'd people get very angry with me and I'd be a bit embarrassed hi pi so again from the modern lens it looks very primitive now but back in the day this was state-of-the-art stuff and we allowed it to do so many more things so by having that switch from traditional 2D Sprites to 3D character models uh and a 3D environment we could use different camera angle

s to look at the same location from different angles um and you could have characters scaled and moved around within that environment it really did uh allow that much more realistic depiction of things in game so again that shift from Pixel Sprites to 3D characters allowed us to make much more expressive characters uh and things that we just could not do before with with the 2D Graphics uh and that allowed us to have that much more cinematic presentation and the characters actually performing th

at much closer to what real people do when they move so yeah um it continued the way that we handled development uh the team would have various different people working in different sections but the scale of the teams working on on games really became that much bigger with Final Fantasy [Music] 7 so previously before Final Fantasy 7 we generally work with smaller teams of about 20 to 30 developers to make any one game with Final Fantasy 7 that shot up so much and I'd say we increased by at least

five times that amount maybe at the peak of the team when the most people involved it was maybe even 10 times that amount so I was the director of the game but of course the game is not something made by one person so all of the team were really strongly involved in that and it really is thanks to all of their efforts that we were able to to make that awesome game in the end another so the way Final Fantasy 7 came about uh obviously we had the different teams with their own uh specializations a

nd their own skills we had some really skilled some really um talented guys in every single one of those sections and of course good ideas don't just come from one section there isn't an ideas section they can come out in any of those teams so we all came together and discussed and shared those ideas and the uh the amalgamation of those ideas is what made Final Fantasy 7 in the year so then uh carrying on from Final Fantasy 7 over the preceding the um years after that um game technology game dev

elopment continued to evolve and and grow so when we came to Final Fantasy 10 we were able to make another big inov ation and we added voices to Final Fantasy for the first time so we also implemented a lot of other new technologies for Final Fantasy 10 including motion capture for the first time to get true realistic lifelike motions in the characters also facial animation that could match the content of the dialogue to the lips sying so before then we were kind of forced to use a kind of OV ex

aggerated very cartoony style of of motion and acting because of the limits of the technology with the dawn of of voice actors and uh and motion actors and thanks to the real life performances of these these talented artists we were able to then move that much closer to a true realistic depiction of characters and they became that much more subtle in how they expressed [Music] themselves so of course it's not just the size of the teams that increased with this extra technology but the length of

time it took to make a game also increased drastically when we were talking about previously when we had our small 20 30 man teams generally it would take a year maybe a year and a half to complete a single game when we're looking at these bigger hundreds of hundreds of people teams uh you can see many years before the single game comes out there's also much more of a um a silo of responsibilities within the team you had each different section had its very special uh specialist job it needed to

do you had experts in that field within that team so obviously the nature of of the work became more specialized and we had to split down into much more specialist smaller teams so you're looking at the changes in this era and I think we can definitely see that we are now very much using the same kinds of techniques and pretty much the same same technology that film CG animators would use in in in the in the cinema uh and again like I say with the bigger teams and the much longer development per

iods and the sheer scale of work involved in in just making a single game the other big change was we now have to look to Outsourcing and have collaboration with various outside companies in order to create everything we need to to make that game so finally we come 20 odd years after the release of Final Fantasy 7 uh and obviously it's uh a game there's been a lot of call uh for people to see it again to see a remake uh over the years um and finally we came to the decision that yes we're going t

o go ahead and do one so again there are a number of uh games media Representatives here today uh thank you for all your help uh and you may remember about 10 years ago actually when I was still working on the Final Fantasy 13 series we traveled around many different countries uh talking to the media about that game so I remember again we're mainly talking about Final Fantasy 13 so the media played along and they ask questions about Final Fantasy 13 they're very well behaved but always at the ve

ry end of every interview they finish asking what they want about 13 everyone asked the same thing like when's Final Fantasy 7 being REM they asked it as if it already been decided and we'd announced the project oh when's it coming out it's not if it's coming out when's it coming out so yeah we've finally done it so I hope you're [Applause] happy [Music] however um it was a little bit of a headache really I was very torn about the prospect of actually approaching a Final Fantasy 7 remake because

I knew deep down how much time how much effort and resources it would take take to do a project like this justice so I think for about 10 years I carried on huming and iring in my head and even though I heard all the demand from the fans that they wanted to see one I kind of held back on the idea for quite a long time I think the the deciding factor that really made me change my thinking and want to go ahead on the Remake project was when I decided that I wanted to have the modern generation of

Gamers and deliver them that same emotional resonance that same experience from the Final Fantasy 7 story that the players of the original had 20 years ago so in actual fact and incidentally uh my son was born in 1997 which is the year Final Fantasy 7 was released that makes him the same age as the game but I'm I'm bit annoyed about this really but he's a really big Apex Legends [Music] [Music] player so yeah if he was to play Final Fantasy 7 I thought obviously this is a game that came out in

the year he was born so I asked myself the question if he was to play that game now would he have the same emotional impact the same resonance as the people who played it uh in 1997 when it was cutting edge I don't think he would so the reason we actually went ahead was because I felt I wanted to give that same experience deliver that same thrilling emotional story to people of my son's Generation by updating and remaking the game with the latest technology so in the same manner that I wanted to

get this project off the ground I was delighted to see there were a number of other core members of the original Final Fantasy 7 development team who had the similar kind of vision to myself and they wanted to remake this game and and make it a really great game at the same time I was was very happy at the response I got when I asked around about this project I went to our original um scenario writer for Final Fantasy 7 Mr kazos noima and also our character director Mr tiura and they both were

very happy to come on board and and just as passionate as I was one other thing that I was really happy about the way that the the project came together was it wasn't just the Old Guard who made the original game or coming back to give it one more try you also got the opportunity to work together with a new generation of creators these were people who' have played the game when they were younger and become inspired by it and come to work at the company so we could all work together on a remake o

f this game that we all had such a history with well [Music] so yeah it really was a delight to see that because I saw very much the same thing happening as I remember from my childhood when I went to watch Star Wars and that inspired me to become involved in in Creative industry and and to make things like that uh and the same thing happened with them when they they played Final Fantasy 7 that made them want to come and do the same thing what happened to this place it was seph it can't be he wa

nts to finish what he started and rule over the planet you coming way ahead of you we have to help them let's get to work you are truly a model Soldier people we can handle this I will reclaim our world [Applause] so if you asked me now to make that animation myself I could no way do that so I think I was born at the right time you know so yeah I already understood that the Remake project would be a massive amount of work but looking into the details of it we soon come to the conclusion that bas

ed on the schedule we had available the size of the development team and just the sheer time it would take it really was impossible to remake Final Fantasy 7 as one game of course we had the option of cutting it down to fit it into one game but obviously we'd have to take out so many different elements that uh the fans would really want to see and we felt that wasn't the right approach for it so the only option we really had to keep that quality level where it want where it needed to be and not

cut out any of the content the fans wanted to see was to make it multiple games so that decision to make it a Trilogy was very important because it allowed us like I say to remake the game without cutting any content and to keep it at the Quality level that people would want to see and also from a producers perspective and this may be most important to me it allowed us to get the game done on time and on budget as wellex inly this is something we've done recently which is a collaboration between

Final Fantasy 7 and Apex Legend [Music] of course to do a collaboration like this obviously you have to start discussing it very much in advance so our our guys and the Apex Legends teams I think about six months ago we started talking about how we should be we should be approaching it it was a really difficult period about a year of discussions overall and not letting that secret out of the bag to my son in all of that time was probably the hardest thing of all so the games industry and the wa

y it moves and the way it evolves it really is a case of the technology driving the artistic side of things and the Fidelity the quality of and the impact of the visuals and the sound that we can produce at any one time really does have to follow the tech so the kind of technical limitations we find ourselves faced with uh in making video games for example you've got issues with memory memory capacity you've got processing capacity the memory capacity of media you have to use and also the read s

peed that you have those kinds of really technical issues those things have gotten a lot better since uh since the old days but they'll never really go away [Music] so in the past in previous Hardware Generations there have been many games that we've d RT of that we wanted to make but just technically we couldn't do because of the limitations I think in the current ER we find ourselves with the PlayStation 5 level of Hardware that kind of thing really doesn't happen anymore the kind of obstacles

we Face to to making the games we want to are obviously do we have the time to make them do we have the budget to make them and then more than anything of course it really is down to the uh the will to succeed of the development team and the ultimate artistic vision and artistic sense of of the directors and the guys driving the project okay so I'd like to return to where I started now with that discussion of how I went to see Star Wars as a boy uh and the reaction that my father had to that as

this major uh impactful cultural work and the comp comparison then to the way he looked at games with a kind of exasperated way uh expression so there are a number of major mainstream cultural forms which really have become established and and integral part of people's lives and affect them and that's things like uh film video photo photography and novels Etc they've all got their own history and and their own independent appreciation as art and as Culture by comparison back when I got into vid

eo games myself self it was still very much a minor subculture with a very minor following I think it very much was like you saw in the 1960s when you had uh people of the the generation who were parents then and they saw the the music of The Beatles and they thought yeah that's just a a bad influence on the Youth of today and games were seen in the same way what now I remember though my my older brother back in the day he like grew his hair out long in those days and my my dad scolded him for t

hat said you shouldn't be growing out like that you look [Music] stupid so I really want to get across the point was back in those days video games were very much a subculture so my objective my goal is to take those video games and make make them an important integral part of the mainstream culture so my goal my dream and what I wanted to achieve with my job was to take it from that position and make it so that games were something that people would talk about every day around the dinner table

there'd be heated debates about games in the same way and they'd be something really would have that positive influence on people's lives uh and my work is is very much aimed towards that so I am very very grateful to uh the organizers today to [Music] bafta and I'm not just grateful for giving me this opportunity today I really am grateful for all the good work that you guys do in raising the profile the awareness of video games and everything you do to support us in the industry so if I look b

ack over my career in games now I think we have come a very long way in terms of what we can do now and where we are compared to to back then I always think though uh unfortunately my father is no longer with us but if he were around today I always wonder what he'd see uh and what kind of expression he'd show me looking at the the modern Millar video games today so I'm very confident that video games are slowly but surely becoming that part of mainstream culture now but I still think there's so

much left to do for us in the industry uh there's more places to go more things to do to to keep speeding that up so together with the help of everyone here today I want to make games even better even more exciting in the future and that's a journey you can go on together with me thank you very much for everything today amazing I love seeing the old stuff back again it's great isn't it it's brilliant and then the comparison is also brilliant um so thank you very much for for your time and for yo

ur thoughts I guess I'd like to hop straight into it because I know that the audience have got questions as well so I want to make sure I give them enough time to chat as well um and I'd like to pick up on what you where you finished off if that's all right and this idea about sort of games becoming main stream and that crossover here in the west Final Fantasy 7 was a big part of the beginning of of that Journey so I just wanted to get a sense from you as to why you think that title out of all t

he others you've helped make and all the others that were out at that time why was it that one you think that struck a c with so many people to start up all roll in no so I think what I would say about that uh and something that I really felt directly was certainly looking at the the difference between films and games back then and and again my father is a great IND indicator of that he was not a a real Cinema file like he wasn't a big game fan either he kind of approached these things from very

much the the the the middle ground uh and I think the difference back then though is with a film you can watch it and even if you aren't told what's going on you can look at it and you can see what's happening and understand that immedi even if you're not um deeply invested in that and at the time that wasn't the same with video games there were certain like visual grammar and logic within games that if you were into games you knew what was going on you knew the game you could watch from the si

des and pick up on it but uh if you weren't part of the in group with that you really wouldn't have had a chance and I think that was a major difference no I mean to give you an example of that in the RP games back in that time before Final Fantasy 7 you'd basically walk around what we call a world map which was like a a map a simulation of what the world's supposed to look like uh and you see your character walking around then you'd step on a like a little square icon and in those days it was l

ike 16 pixels by 16 pixels and it was drawn to represent a staircase like going down underground you icon would stand would overlap with that then there'd be a a fairly primitive sound effect that that that that kind of sound effect and then you go down into a dungeon area yes what go what about and of course Gamers like myself in those days you said of course that's what's happening we know what we're going into a dungeon that's obvious but for people like my father who weren't in on that and a

nd part of that group it's just he had no idea what what's going on there and it just confused him and I really started thinking about what is getting in the way of his his understanding here and it really was that level of visual depiction and reality and I thought that was what had to change for people like him to become more interested in games you talked about right at the end there about how uh you're still working to try to to really get games Over The Line in terms of their mainstream cul

tural appreciation and it's interesting that often people think that it's culture that needs to accept games but you were saying at the end there that it's also still up to the industry to make the case so what are the types of things you're trying to do and would you like to see the industry do to keep making that case that games are just as important culturally as um Star Wars and uh and books telion spe [Music] so this is this is obviously a very difficult question and there are a lot of ways

to look at it but I think it is generally in how we depict things and and show things on screen in games um and again about the ratings that we go for for games as well that's part of it too but um certainly and I'm not uh criticizing this at all I think you very much do need these kind of more extreme expressions of things and depictions of things which are a little bit quirky a little bit weird but I think to be widely accepted by mainstream culture we have to go for the middle ground as well

and have more generic more mainstream depictions of things which are just normal and average uh and and struggle and strive to to make those um portrayals as realistic as possible that's something that we are striving for in Final Fantasy not that again all those extreme out there stuff that's all great and we need that too we need to have a bit more of the balance as well you talked about the difference between making Final Fantasy 7 are we seeing um rebirth now on the Remake compared to the o

riginal do you ever miss those times where there's just 20 of you making a game in a year would you like to go back to those times yeah if we went back there though we'd have that kind of cheap animation again do you want [Music] that [Music] no but I would say one thing I am kind of jealous of of directors back then and things that we can't do now which is weird because I'm one of those directors back then um is that it was something that the director had a lot more direct input into the produc

t like I say we only had a team of 20 people there and for example if the animation wasn't up to scratch you didn't like the way a character moved you could jump in and program it and change that animation yourself obviously with the massive teams we have in the level of specialization now that's not something we can do anymore so I really feel that that ability to just jump in and and directly influence something as our director is uh something I wish we still had now but unfortunately we don't

so yeah if we have to change something now the first thing I have to do is install the right software to deal with it and that's where I normally throw my hands in the air and say someone else can do that uh you also talked about how um the change the main change you've seen in in your time has been about sort of the technical advancements and the things you were able to do with the the software and the power of pH computers that you use have you seen any other changes in terms of how game a m

that have that have pushed the medium forward in that time or is it really about the technical side of things [Music] so yeah I think um it's difficult but one of the things and again my Approach my entryway into games was through animation uh and and in some ways like film making technique so my my core the base of the way I look at things uh and consider things like camera working games for example is based on the idea of physical filming the idea that you've got a camera and it exists in a ph

ysical space you have to set up the camera you've got the tripod you put it down and then you you set the camera there and the default angle obviously you can play with it and do different things but the base of everything has to be where that camera is physically placed [Music] so obviously in a game it's a simulated camera it's a virtual camera it's not real so it doesn't necessarily have to be driven and informed by what we'd have in the real world with real physical filming but obviously peo

ple like myself who grew up and and were raised and educated on the logic of of real physical film Mak uh that always becomes our [Music] default but you can see the changes that actually a great example uh was one of the games we featured here which was Final Fantasy 13 um obviously that was made about 10 years ago I think it was 2012 um and that the camera work guys there the people who are in charge of of of working out the Angles and how shots should be uh constructed Etc this is the next Ge

neration these are the people who are digital natives and I was really shocked at the way they approached it but in the end I think yeah this is the way it has to go because they don't think about things like where's the physical camera going to be where would the tripod be and how do you move it around in real space they're just 100% digital and they understand that a virtual camera is the base now so the kinds of camera work they come up with the stuff that uh that we could never have done wit

h our uh ideas rooted in the in the physical world it flies around like this I how the hell is that happening two more questions for me before we go to the audience um talking about the relationship between movies and and games and and your your answer there about where where the camera sits in in certain positions when when you're making the game and you talked about Star Wars of course and you worked on Final Fantasy 7 advent children do you think that we've seen movies influence you and and m

ovies influence games are you starting to see the reverse starting to happen now can you see the work you're doing and the work others are doing in the game ST space starting to influence the movie industry so yeah I mean this is not something I've been directly involved in I actually saw it secondhand by an interview I saw with the director but uh I hear that the director of Marvel's recent film the Marvels um was a big fan of Advent Children and they said that that had inspired them and uh and

given them um kind of hints in their work so I think obviously like you say it's always been the other way around and certainly the the creators in the games industry very much have that respect for for people in films and the way they do things I think we are seeing that uh that change of generations now though you've got this upand cominging generation of people in the film industry who uh were brought up on on games and and they've got a lot of respect and a lot of love for games and we're s

tarting to see that uh more of a of a mutual relationship across pollination happening now so I think uh we are definitely starting to see that coming through and uh and there are examples yes that I see obviously via the via the medium of news and indirectly but it is definitely happening yes and last one for me and I'm assuming that everybody in this audience I can be spoiler AIC right if you don't know what happens in final fale I don't know what you're doing in this crowd right but in case t

hat happens to be you for whatever reason then put your fingers in your ears for the next 20 seconds um you talked about in your uh presentation about the Chocobo sacrifice in the 90s and also you've traumatized a generation of Gamers by what happens to erth how do you feel about that [Music] or so that's a very difficult one to answer but uh obviously in Final Fantasy 7 after that iconic scene happens uh you have to change discs that's the very last scene of dis one of the game so yeah I hope t

hat people would like calm down and and return to a more stable mental state at that point that was the idea that's all I have that's all that's all it's got enough for me there we are very good right okay so we've got a couple of um uh of uh of mic holders out there who will find you if your hand is up we've got about slightly less time than we planned so so if you want to get your questions in then I suggest you get your hands up nice and early which lots of you have which is fantastic but our

first question is going to be from Lauren who's from the Final Fantasy Union first of all fantastic a wonderful wonderful uh presentation wonderful questions um yeah uh so I I mean this is my question but I just wanted to say uh in 2011 uh me and my husband Daryl we interviewed you for Final Fantasy 132 with multiple Tama we did not ask about Final Fantasy 7 remake so you're welcome okay okay it's good enough for me um okay so this question is quite multifaceted I'm I'm sorry in advance Gavin u

m but so Legacy seems very important to you uh it serves as a prominent theme in Final Fantasy and according to some of your original design documents in that game from 1994 um it was even meant to be more extreme with actions taken by the father influencing the world the son grew up in something that you said was influenced by The Godfather Part Two Notions of that are then carried on through to Final Fantasy 8 and 10 as shown by swalen lagona and tetus inject but it's also important in the rea

l world when we talked to sakaguchi uh he actually spoke about his Legacy and how you wanted to ensure that Final Fantasy lived on which is why he named you as his essential Heir the question is therefore multifaceted where did you where did your interest in Legacy um come from uh and at Square Enix what steps are you taking to ensure that the legacy of the franchise is in good hands for many years to come [Music] for for okay so the first half of your question is a lot harder to answer but I ca

n definitely talk about the second part which is the ongoing Legacy the future of Final Fantasy uh and I'm sorry I can't come up with what these are actually called but I don't know if you guys know in certain games there's like a hexagon marker with different lines coming out of it for different parameters like your strength your magic your defense Etc and it like represents the power of a character and I kind of look at like things in that sense I wish I knew what they were properly called but

I don't so we'll have to get away with that U and the idea is if we keep getting the same people to make Final Fantasy again and again they can achieve the same results but they'll never expand on that and they'll never increase that kind of I think it's like a bar chart you call it whatever it is but it won't get any bigger for example one bar will never stick out further it'll always be within the same parameters that's why I want different people with different ideas who can take Final Fanta

sy different directions to work on successive games so in very much that same uh vein with Final Fantasy 16 we had um producer Yoshi doing that game and I think he took it in a New Direction um and again with Final Fantasy 7 rebirth um hamaguchi Nai he's the director of that and I think he is again another person I can trust to take the game further than it would have gone before so I think those new talent coming in and those new people uh heading up the ship each time really is such an importa

nt uh thing for that Legacy that ongoing future of Final Fantasy it shouldn't be the same person every time so in moving back to the first part of your question there uh and I think there is not there's not really one big push to have this massive theme of Legacy or passing On to the Next Generation over multiple Final Fantasy games it kind of just worked out that way and I think um like everything with Final Fantasy really is down to the director uh of that game at that time so I'd imagine that

generally if you got a director and he's perhaps just had a child uh that's changed his perspective on life he's going to probably want to put those kinds of themes into the game so I'd imagine you got those stories about struggles between Fathers and Sons and and the handling over to the next Generation I'd imagine those directors probably had that kind of issues in their personal lives at that time so yeah maybe uh at the time I made Final Fantasy 7 I had something I wanted to say about compa

nies thank you so much and I love you Gavin right hands up we have got as a lady just there in the white top there we are perfect um hi um this is a bit of a crazy little story but I remember that back in 2010 there was an opening in Oxford hmb and I believe you were there at the time I went there with my mom and I was only 10 years old so I didn't know a about Final Fantasy say hi again but um yeah there's one thing I remember playing Final Fantasy 13 a couple years after what I could actually

understand the game I remember that I loved lightning as a protagonist like she was so strong and cool and looking back actually you've actually directed a lot of games where the protagonist is quite cool and hard-headed so I just wanted to ask to you um whates [Music] protagonist adjust yes so I think um in terms of the the characters the main characters in the games that I work on I been influenced a huge amount by the main character designer I work with namura tsia when he designs a character

he doesn't just design the visuals of that character he really goes into every aspect of it who they are what they think and Etc and so I think in that he's got such a great sense for character design that I I really am very heavily taken by [Music] that [Music] f I think in terms of that difference between my um views on these things and the way Mr more looks at character design that really does come out in as you say lightning from Final Fantasy 13 because I deliberately wanted to make the th

e main character the protagonist of Final Fantasy 13 a woman uh we've had female characters who are kind of played a prominent role as part of a of an ensemble cast before in Final Fantasy I think with six obviously you had uh it's Tera here right isn't it yes Tera um she obviously played a big role but um we've never had a main character Standalone female protector I really wanted to to have that as a main character so I asked Mr nesia um I gave him the brief for the character this is the kind

of character I want and I was really was very happy with with what he came back because he designed it wasn't as again you think of a stereotypical male protagonist it's some big macho guy and you thought okay is he just going to do a female version of that it's not that at all he really based her appearance on uh I think it was it's like based on on female athletes like tennis players and that kind of physique and that kind of uh body shape uh and again his design of that character was just so

refined and so well done that yeah I thought he can do this so much better than I can yeah thank you very much uh gentleman with glasses down the front in the sort of Front Middle here I I want to say we we all talked about we we selected the original Star Wars as our favorite films in in the uh Star Wars franchise here um and they came out at a time when Cinema was already the mainstream but the audiences had grown a little bit bored with Cinema and they started leaving the theaters I feel that

perhaps a lot of that is happening with games right now as well and the industry as a whole do you feel that games have had their Star Wars yet and do you think the star of video games will look realistic like all the games now that are trying to simulate reality through technological advancements or do you think the Star Wars of games might be something none of us have ever [Music] expected [Music] [Music] for [Music] so that's an incredibly interesting question um and I think in terms of the

games for the the direction of games uh and a game which is has that same effect as Star Wars and I'm not going to say Final Fantasy 7 was that game but certainly when we made it uh back in the day we were looking at the future of gaming and where gaming should go and I kind of made Final Fantasy 7 as an indication of the direction I thought Games should be going in obviously when we deciding on how we were going to do it um we discussed very seriously actually in the company about what the best

direction for our games to continue in was with the new technology available it wasn't an obvious decision obviously we could have taken that uh 2D pixel art style and try to evolve that and take that further in in a New Direction definitely one option we had um in terms of the the newly available 3D Graphics they they did some things that were new in some ways they were actually retrograde certainly with the the quality of the polygons we had and the the Fidelity and just like the artistic abi

lity to show characters with that limited uh polygon count was actually a step back over some of the beautiful pixel art we'd had before [Music] so that that was again we all know the decision I made back then 27 years ago with Final Fantasy 7 and obviously like I say we had that choice um we could go with um those polygons which looked a little bit cheap and a little bit shoddy at that time they weren't quite where they needed to be yet but I felt at that time very much that this was the direct

ion and as kind of a statement of intent with the um the idea of getting closer to film and that cinematic presentation which obviously since then has has evolved much further and we've nearly got to that place with games now but back then I thought okay we'll take the hit of the fact that it's not going to look as good as a image as as a Pixel character but they're going to move much more smoothly it's going to be that first step on that direction that i' kind of predicted for the future uh and

in the end I think that uh that was part of the history of why we went that way so personally I think we set out on that Journey like I say with Final Fantasy 7 I think we only actually reached where we were aiming for back then uh with Final Fantasy 15 so I think that also links in as one factor that influenced my decision on when we were going to actually go ahead with the Remake project as well and like I say after that uh that huge length of time when I think we finally had reached the goal

we set out to with the original Final Fantasy 7 I saw the results of that in Final Fantasy 15 I thought okay this is now the time to go ahead with remake and we can do it in the way we actually wanted to do all those years ago but linking back to your question I think as I say we kind of achieved what we set out to do and and followed that line to its conclusion now so we may be as you as you predict in in a time now where we are looking for that next big step and people are starting to get uh

content with what we have now and we need to look for that next big big change so I've got we have got time for one what I'm going to Define as a quick question so uh so who who thinks they've got that question for black jumper uh so here we are perfect thank you very much now I'm not be I'm I like being bang on time so no pressure mate but it's all on you now thank you guys thank you um quick question well quick thing when you first got the Silicon Graphics workstations 26 27 years ago or so yo

u created 3D um um um images of lock Terror and all the other characters from ff6 plus I'm pretty sure there was even a small Tech demo could that ever be have you still got the assets and could they be used to make a 3D um like a 3D remake rather than a full remaster of Final Fantasy 6 ra don't want to wait 20 years great question I nice and shot love it so if I said something now and it would just be lip serviceing yeah I might be able to do that that's possible I know what's going to happen y

ou guys are going to get your phones out you're going to bash out a tweet or two and then in 20 minutes it'll be around the world that I'm actually decideed to make one so I'm not going to answer that before I leave I just i' like to give all of us to give a big war a big round of applause to Gavin for all his hard work up on stage thank you uh excellent work gin I think you you've earned yourself a beer uh and also of course to our speaker tonight and the the the reason we're all here to yoshin

ori kitasi right thank you very much everybody have a lovely and safe journey home and we see you all again soon thank you [Applause] ticket