“When I was still in my 20s and had only just entered the games industry,” Final Fantasy series producer Yoshinori Kitase tells me, “I was playing Final Fantasy at home with my father sat next to me watching. His impression of the game was that he had no idea what was supposed to be happening on screen.”
That’s understandable. For those of us who grew up playing video games, their idiosyncrasies have become normalised. But for others, video games present a world that feels alien (sometimes literally) and hard to comprehend. That was especially true in its infancy.
As Kitase explains: “The way games depicted things with 2D pixel art actually used a lot of stylized conventions that only worked within that medium, and gamers had become used to them over time. However, people of my father’s generation who had not experienced games before could not easily understand these.
“I personally want games to be something that anyone from any generation in any country around the world can enjoy, just like film and TV dramas.”
The Final Fantasy series has always been focused on dramatic, perhaps even cinematic, storytelling. But it wasn’t until Squaresoft (as it was at the time) shifted from its then-home on Nintendo’s SNES to the more technically proficient Sony PlayStation console and its CD ROMs, that the company was able to truly achieve its storytelling ambitions. 3D graphics! Full-motion videos! It was all possible at last.