Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles - interview

The interviews continue! We had a chance to sit down with the creators of the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series and briefly pump them for info on the upcoming Wii game: FFCC: Crystal Bearers. Executive Producer Akitoshi Kawazu and Director Toshiyuki Itahana, as well as FFCC Ring of Fates (DS) Director Mitsuru Kamiyama were happy to answer some of our questions - more so than we might expect.

We learned that,k for the Wii game, seamless movement and attacking will be possible using the Wii remote. The game does use the nunchuk, is action-based like its predecessors and will even use the nunchuck for different purposes in different scenes. To find out more, read on:

GamesRadar: The original game required the GBA and the GameCube both to have a connected style of gameplay. Is there any possibility the Wii version might have connectivity with the DS?

Mitsuru Kamiyama: The next title - how about that for advanced news?

Akitoshi Kawazu: Once the Wii units start making it into more and more households and the network capabilities - the infrastructure and such - become much more solid, then we would like to start contemplating these concepts.

GR: Relating to the fact that the DS version has a very similar feel to the GameCube version, whereas the trailer you showed last week has a very different style of character design and world setting. It's very exciting. Please discuss this change.

AK: The concept that we thought of when we began the Wii title is that we wanted to provide a very rich solo playing experience on the Wii. The result is Crystal Bearers. We wanted intentionally, because that hasn't been the case with the past Crystal Chronicle title, we wanted to take a whole new direction in terms of the worldview, the older hero and such and we've essentially taken a departure from that. It is the same world. We didn't want to make a completely new experience.

GR: It may be a bit early to talk about specifics of the Wii version. However, can you talk about how - given that many Wii titles do not do much about being Wii-specific in terms of control - can you talk about how you're approaching that challenge?

Toshiyuki Itahana: In terms of the Wii, it is something where we do want to use the hardware to its full capacity as developers, obviously. But in the end, what we always [decide] is that we want to make games that we want to make. We don't want things like hardware specs and how hardware is used to interfere with that, so that the original vision is lost, or that it is taken over by a feature in the hardware, or whatever.