Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi calls FF6 the "epitome of what I felt was my creative JRPG."
Speaking to the press at the Tokyo Game Show ahead of Fantasian's eventual console and PC release, Sakaguchi takes a question about how his experience with the Final Fantasy franchise played into the development of Fantasian Neo Dimension, a souped-up version of the original JRPG that launched on Apple Arcade. He initially credited replaying Final Fantasy 6 as the inspiration to make the original Fantasian, though lately is more frequently spotted in Final Fantasy 14.
"Right now, I'm a big consumer of RPGs and I've been playing Final Fantasy 14 every day," he says. "I just arrived in Japan yesterday, and I was already spending a few hours in Final Fantasy 14 raids. In Savage 1, 2, 3, 4… (laughs).
"In terms of Fantasian, I can attribute a lot of it to my experience playing Final Fantasy 6 over again. A few years ago, the platform makers were making miniature versions of their consoles, and it was the SNES that it was included in, and it was one of the first ROMs that was on that particular platform.
"And playing FF6 for a Famitsu livestream, it made me realize how this is really kind of the origin or kind of epitome of what I felt was my creative JRPG. So after playing that, having spent, you know, 20-plus years away from it, made me realize that this is the type of feeling that I really want to invoke in my game, and I think that informed a lot of how Fantasian turned out to be."
It's not the first time Sakaguchi has spoken about the role Final Fantasy 6 played in Fantasian's direction, though hearing him call the JRPG the "epitome of what I felt was my creative JRPG" is certainly heartening for fans of turn-based RPGs.
And he wasn't joking about the Final Fantasy 14 part, either. Sakaguchi previously revealed that his MMO habit got so bad that "on rare occasions" some of his employees would hop on the FF14 to DM him about missed meetings.
