Final Fantasy XIII Director Explains Lack of Choice/Nonlinearity

Image Via Exploding Dog

One of my personal fears going into Final Fantasy XIII was the Japanese media's claim that the game was linear to a fault, a sentiment I still hear echoed even though other contributors to this blog seem to be enjoying the game immensely. I can't help shake the feeling that I'm missing something by not having a town to run around in and I wondered why this was the case.

Director of Final Fantasy XIII, Motomu Toriyama offers this explanation:

"Personally, the Final Fantasies that I have worked on have been very story-driven, so in terms of the development I wanted to, of course, use my personal strengths which where those. I call it a bento box system, where you have all of the different little things in there. So we had minigames or towns were you were able to talk to all of the townspeople. But with the HD console you’re not really able to do that because it takes so long to develop.

"Now that we have that base technology… The next time you see a Final Fantasy, we might be able to pack in more of those elements that existed in the past. And I also think that a game doesn’t need to have all of those items in the future. We can create additional downloadable content for people to add, too. It doesn’t have to come with that game itself."

So not this time but next time. Frankly I think that until technology reaches the point where we can easily output the level of graphics that the FF team seems to require, they should stick to just making a game where you can actually make choices.

Now if you'll excuse me, there are some kids on my lawn I need to yell at.

Via Gamasutra