Hironobu Sakaguchi says he "cheated" on Nintendo when bringing Final Fantasy 7 to the PlayStation instead of the SNES or Nintendo 64 like all the other fan-favorite JRPGs that came before it.
While Final Fantasy's earlier history is more closely tied to Nintendo's raft of earlier consoles, the demands of FF7 necessitated a switch-up – the PlayStation's CD-ROM format did what the SNES and Nintendo 64's cartridges could not. The story is well-told by now, though Sakaguchi has been looking back on that time in a recent interview and with plenty of fondness for both Nintendo and Sony.
"I look back at my career and I really got a huge part of my start from the NES and Nintendo," he says (thanks, One More Game). "So, without the NES, I would say none of any of this would have been possible, but then, you know, I cheated on Nintendo and went to PlayStation, but whether it was Nintendo or Sony, I think both of those companies in addition to Final Fantasy 7 kind of represent a lot of my origin story in terms of my career development."
- Sony finally managed to pry Final Fantasy 7 away from Nintendo thanks to a "schmoozer" of a former employee who hung out with Square Enix executives at his parties, according to one former PlayStation boss
- Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth producer says the JRPG sold well, but future games "cannot be exclusive to a single platform" anymore
I mean, hey, Final Fantasy 7 eventually landed on the Nintendo Switch many years later, so there's that. Also coming to the Switch soon is Sakaguchi's latest JRPG gem, Fantasian: Neo Dimension. Funnily enough, the throwback turn-based beauty was inspired by a replay of Final Fantasy 6, which was Square's last FF game released on a Nintendo platform before going with Sony for FF7.
"In terms of Fantasian, I can attribute a lot of it to my experience playing Final Fantasy 6 over again," he says. "A few years ago, the platform makers were making miniature versions of their consoles, and it was the SNES that it was included in, and it was one of the first ROMs that was on that particular platform.
"And playing FF6 for a Famitsu livestream, it made me realize how this is really kind of the origin or kind of epitome of what I felt was my creative JRPG. So after playing that, having spent, you know, 20-plus years away from it, made me realize that this is the type of feeling that I really want to invoke in my game, and I think that informed a lot of how Fantasian turned out to be."
Fantasian Neo Dimension launches on December 4 on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox all at the same time –no one's cheating on anyone here.
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