E3 2009: Talking Dissidia: Final Fantasy with Yoshinori Kitase and Takeshi Arakawa

Interviews conducted in the presence of other journalists, combined with those carried out via translators can be nightmare, but I have to say my shared interview through a translator for Square Enix's highly anticipated action game in the Final Fantasy universe, Dissidia: Final Fantasy was, in the circumstances, a fairly pleasant experience.

Of course, I'm conceited enough to have wanted producer Yoshinori Kitase (left) and director and designer Takeshi Arakawa (right) for a solo chat, in a common language, somewhere fairly exotic - perhaps a nice Tokyo bar.

As it was, here's how the words panned out in a noisy meeting room at E3. The quotes are via translation and the order has been tweaked to improve the flow.

Yoshinori Kitase: The project came about because it was the 20th anniversary of the Final Fantasy series so we were thinking about a commemorative game. At the same time, the Kingdom Hearts II team wanted to use their combat action engine in another game. So the two things were combined.

Takeshi Arakawa: There are over 20 characters in the game. The team went back and forth trying to decide which characters would be included. The programming of the different moves and animation was complex so we had to decide early on who would appear and there were definitely many arguments over this.

TA: For each character we went back to the source material and worked with this in terms of getting the appearance and their moves right. For some characters we had to add new moves though so we worked hard to ensure that they stayed true to those characters.

TA: The Japanese version had a more hardcore RPG element, so for the other versions we decided to include an arcade version of the game as well. New events and new abilities are also added, and a Moogle appears, which isn't in the Japanese version.

TA: There is nothing planned but there is some content in the game that can only be unlocked using a password system.

Yoshinori Kitase: This is a unique game in terms of its fighting style but the fighting is linear in terms of how the characters interact with each other, even if they are running on the walls or flying through the air. In this way, adjusting the camera movement and angles so the player can see what's going on was the hardest thing to get correct. But the end result is one of the most satisfying parts of the game too.

TA: Absolutely. The game has its own original storyline so you don't need to know anything about Final Fantasy to enjoy it. In fact, we hope that people who enjoy the game will move onto other Final Fantasy games and in this way find out more about this world.

YK: Cloud, because I was the producer of Final Fantasy VII

TA: Bartz from Final Fantasy V.

YK: The game has been received well in Japan but we want to see the reaction in North America and Europe before we thing about anything new so there are no plans yet.