FF III Q&A with Tomoya Asano: It’s a matter of timing

FFIII-DS Producer Tomoya Asano goes back a long way – back to the dev team behind the original NES (well, Famicom to be exact) FFIII, lo, these sixteen years ago. He sat down with IGN during TGS 2006 to talk about what it felt to come back to spearhead porting his “baby” to the DS, and what it entailed.

It really was all a matter of timing, he says, when he was asked by IGN about the reasons why it was FFIII that was updated to the 21st century. At the time, FFIV-VI were also in in the porting pipeline – but to the GBA, not the DS. It really was a matter of timing that demand for an FFIII port grew (both in Japan and abroad – the Famicom FFIII was never released outside of Japan) at the same time that Nintendo launched the DS. So Square-Enix decided to capitalize on both.

The team Square-Enix and Asano gathered to remake FFIII was no stranger to remakes or FFIII. The Matrix dev team had ample experience with the Dragon Quest V PS port. The Square-Enix people were the same people who worked on the Famicom FFIII sixteen years ago – up to and including composer Nobuo Uematsu.

One difficulty in porting a Famicom game to the DS was realizing that – surprisingly enough – there are limitations to porting a Famicom game to the DS. The original 8-bit game actually has more enemies on screen at the same time than the DS port, says Asano. Pushing everything up to 3D posed additional challenges, especially with the Jobs system, with graphics team trying to make 92 job models times four different characters small enough to fit on a DS cartridge.

Finally, are they thinking of bringing more classic FF gems to current-gen systems? Asano: Square-Enix plans to explore it.

Buy: [Final Fantasy III]

FFIII-DS Producer Tomoya Asano goes back a long way – back to the dev team behind the original NES (well, Famicom to be exact) FFIII, lo, these sixteen years ago. He sat down with IGN during TGS 2006 to talk about what it felt to come back to spearhead porting his “baby” to the DS, and what it entailed.

It really was all a matter of timing, he says, when he was asked by IGN about the reasons why it was FFIII that was updated to the 21st century. At the time, FFIV-VI were also in in the porting pipeline – but to the GBA, not the DS. It really was a matter of timing that demand for an FFIII port grew (both in Japan and abroad – the Famicom FFIII was never released outside of Japan) at the same time that Nintendo launched the DS. So Square-Enix decided to capitalize on both.

The team Square-Enix and Asano gathered to remake FFIII was no stranger to remakes or FFIII. The Matrix dev team had ample experience with the Dragon Quest V PS port. The Square-Enix people were the same people who worked on the Famicom FFIII sixteen years ago – up to and including composer Nobuo Uematsu.

One difficulty in porting a Famicom game to the DS was realizing that – surprisingly enough – there are limitations to porting a Famicom game to the DS. The original 8-bit game actually has more enemies on screen at the same time than the DS port, says Asano. Pushing everything up to 3D posed additional challenges, especially with the Jobs system, with graphics team trying to make 92 job models times four different characters small enough to fit on a DS cartridge.

Finally, are they thinking of bringing more classic FF gems to current-gen systems? Asano: Square-Enix plans to explore it.

Buy: [Final Fantasy III]