Weekly Famitsu has a very interesting weekly column where Editor-in-Chief Katsuaki Kato discuss everything about game with prominent figures in the industry. Previous guests include Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Sensui (Xbox Japan boss) and Shawn Layden (SCEJ boss). Tetsuya Nomura is the latest guest and the first part of his 3-part interview is published in issue 7/17 of the magazine. Full translation after the jump.

Kato think Kingdom Hearts is a significant series and would like to know about its birth. Nomura says he can’t remember the situation exactly but it was during a discussion with Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy creator) and Shinji Hashimoto (Kingdom Hearts II Producer) where they expressed their wish to collaborate with Disney. At the time, Nomura already had ideas about an original ARPG and it became the foundation of KH. He thought it was a good opportunity and volunteered himself to make the game.

So was the collaboration between FF and Disney difficult during development? Nomura says Square wanted a game with Mickey Mouse as the main character but Disney wanted Donald Duck and he also has his own ideas (laugh). As a result, he made a proposal that doesn’t have just one main character but many of them and it would become the KH series of today. Not only did the proposal already contains the game’s world view, setting and game system, Nomura says the game was already in motion in his mind and he could easily answered questions about the game from the developers.

Game development usually begins with game system instead of story for Nomura, he would think “in order to make use of this system, what kind of story to use?“. Something Kato is very surprised because he think KH has plenty of story elements. For KH, the first thing that came to Nomura’s mind was a Keyblade weapon and the scenarios would be created based on this keyword. However, the first weapon that was shown to Disney was a chainsaw, they were obviously not impressed and the meeting went quiet for a while. At the time, Nomura also thought that it was not an unexpected reaction (laugh). Kato think it’s remarkable for Nomura to still be able to complete the game so smoothly after such a disastrous start.

Ideas for KH’s game system came about during the development of Final Fantasy VII in which hardware limitation means players can’t just go anywhere they want. After playing Super Mario 64, Nomura knew it’s what he was looking for and really hope to make a full 3D game after that. KH is the first title that he fully in charged and it allowed him to design based on his ideas. Kato says the result is remarkable as proven by the great sales and it was a fresh take at action games. Not only it attracted plenty of non-gamers, it’s also a very satisfying game for the existing gamers and he think it’s a truly original game.

Posted in PSP on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 12:28 am | Tags arpg famitsu interview kato kh nomura square enix | Comments Feed | You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.