Weekly Famitsu has a very interesting weekly column where Editor-in-Chief Katsuaki Kato discuss everything about game with prominent figures in the industry. Previous guests include Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Sensui (Xbox Japan boss) and Shawn Layden (SCEJ boss). Tetsuya Nomura is the latest guest and the first part of his 3-part interview is published in issue 7/17 of the magazine. Full translation after the jump.
So was the collaboration between FF and Disney difficult during development? Nomura says Square wanted a game with Mickey Mouse as the main character but Disney wanted Donald Duck and he also has his own ideas (laugh). As a result, he made a proposal that doesn’t have just one main character but many of them and it would become the KH series of today. Not only did the proposal already contains the game’s world view, setting and game system, Nomura says the game was already in motion in his mind and he could easily answered questions about the game from the developers.
Game development usually begins with game system instead of story for Nomura, he would think “in order to make use of this system, what kind of story to use?“. Something Kato is very surprised because he think KH has plenty of story elements. For KH, the first thing that came to Nomura’s mind was a Keyblade weapon and the scenarios would be created based on this keyword. However, the first weapon that was shown to Disney was a chainsaw, they were obviously not impressed and the meeting went quiet for a while. At the time, Nomura also thought that it was not an unexpected reaction (laugh). Kato think it’s remarkable for Nomura to still be able to complete the game so smoothly after such a disastrous start.
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