Nintendo has published the latest entry in the Iwata Asks series on its Japanese website. This time around, Satoru Iwata, Dragon Quest creator Yuuji Horii, Square Enix’s Noriyoshi Fujimoto, ArtePiazza’s Shintarou Majima, and ArtePiazza’s Sachiko Sugimura participated in the discussion.
Read on below for a roundup of details from the interview.
– DQVII was the first game on a CD rather than a cartridge
– Game’s creators needed to brainstorm what could be used to fill up the sudden vast increase in space
– Writers would send in stacks of hundreds of pages of script and ideas a day for series creator, Yuuji Horii, to read and edit
– Horii wanted to go with something different
– Horii always enjoyed the MYST games
– At the time, he had been wondering if players had gotten tired of leveling through battles, and so he decided to make Dragon Quest VII more about puzzle-solving
– This is why it’s possible to go five hours without battling
– Dragon Quest VII was about exploration and looking into every nook and cranny just like MYST
– This was the first time there would be so much opportunity for exploration in what had originally been a very straightforward series
– There were a lot of difficult-to-find items
– This was one of the main points that the development team wanted to change about the remake
– Concept was: “A VII that is easy to understand, unambiguous, and comforting”
– Differences between the audiences of 2000 and the present, and the game will take this into account
– Concept of the original VII was “an RPG that chews you out and makes getting lost fun,” and it was in part because of this that there was such an overwhelming amount of content (close to 1000 different areas)
– The team felt that if they were going to make such an extensive game, then they may as well go all the way and get people as lost as possible in the vast world
– Because of this focus on making “getting lost” and exploration fun, extra effort was put into making every town feel unique
– With the current audience, Majima feels that most players would leave the moment they think something looks boring or tiring
– Because of this, one of the first points he thought of when faced with the remake was that a different approach would be needed
– The main challenge would be to keep the “having fun while getting lost” aspect alive while somehow guiding players a little to reduce the stress and energy needed to move through the game
– Sugimura believed that the game needed to be modified a little
– Sugimura felt that VII was extraordinarily suited for a portable system like the 3DS because the overall plot is written like a series of short stories
– Players are able to experience the title in short bursts
– New summary system explains what happened up to that point in time
– This feature took a year to write and incorporate
– Immigrant Town takes advantage of the 3DS
– This town changes based on whom you recruit to live there
– Originally, you could trade immigrants between two different memory cards, a unique feature at the time that took advantage of the fact that the game was separate from the memory card
– Now: trade inhabitants through StreetPass
– Monster Park also takes advantage of StreetPass
– Can tame monsters in different environments
– StreetPass lets you send a party of 3 monsters out to explore, and sometimes they may even return with new stone shards, which you can then trade with others
– Art and story changes also made
– Ex: while town layouts weren’t changed much, the art and the body ratio of the characters were modified
– Flow of the game was changed as well
– While the number of things and places were the same on the first island, for example, the organization and how the story is organized was completely changed
– Job system has been reveamped
– Originally, you could carry skills learned from a previous job which, while it allowed for great customization, also ultimately led to all the characters being the same
– The uniqueness of the job was lost
– This was changed so that if you change jobs, you could only “do that one job.”
– While this is a risky change, Fujimoto states that this change had actually come about through the many comments of those who had played the original game
– Entire original release was treated as an enormous test, where the feedback good and bad were taken into account
– Iwata summarizes that the remake was created by taking into account the numerous comments and the differences in time and audience between the current and past release while still keeping the core concepts alive
