Mr. Final Fantasy Himself

Luckily, things picked up as the podium was handed off to the famed creator of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi. His speech also required the aid of an interpreter, but he was far more vocal then Amano. He talked briefly about the history of Final Fantasy and his initial fear of approaching Amano for designs. He mentioned the technical hurdles they had to overcome in making Final Fantasy on the 8- and 16-bit systems and how they tried to create something more stylistically sophisticated than their top competitor at the time, Dragon Quest.

He then balanced out his speaking with video clips of the recent Final Fantasy VIII and newly-created animations for Final Fantasy Anthology, which were projected onto a theater-sized screen. Televisions of all shapes and sizes, showing the same transmission, decorated the area around the large screen. The cyber-hip screen with its flashy sound hardware and wiring set up against the antiquated cathedral church was an environment truly worthy of the mystical versus technological world of Final Fantasy. The clips shown from Final Fantasy VIII included the opening introduction, the runaway train action sequence, lively celebration/party scene, and the romantic dance between Squall and Rinoa. For Final Fantasy Anthology, a 16-Bit clip of a battle from part 6 was shown first before cutting to the newly-created CG graphics. The purpose of doing that, as Sakaguchi explains, was to demonstrate the evolution Squaresoft underwent from the 16-bit era.

Plugging PS2

It’s at this point that Sakaguchi’s presentation takes a decisively commercial turn. Almost as if hidden Sony executives were putting cash into his back pocket, Sakaguchi began to talk about PlayStation 2 and how he was surprised about the recent technological advancement in consoles (he thought it wouldn’t be possible till the mid 2000s). He then differentiated the pre-rendered CG clips shown earlier with the new possibility of having those same quality graphics now generated real-time. Challenging the audience to imagine such a game, he then preceded to demonstrate the power of the PlayStation 2 by showing a few more clips on the projection screen.

The first was the expressive ‘old man head’ demo that has become synonymous with the PlayStation 2. The second clip which followed was the same pre-rendered dance sequence between Squall and Rinoa, only this time the scene was generated real-time using the processing power of the PlayStation 2. It was hard to be overly impressed by that clever little side-by-side comparison since the real-time version was a decisive step down from the pre-rendered one. But any disappointment quickly faded when a clip of Squaresoft’s much hyped PlayStation 2 game, Bouncer, took center-stage.