With Nintendo’s WiiWare download service set to launch in Japan later this month and across North America during May, Nintendo itself and one of the biggest supporters, Square Enix, have both gone on record to talk about their plans, some of the issues involved and various other aspects of WiiWare.
First on the cards during the Game Developers’ Conference was Square Enix. Producer Toshiro Tsuchida, stated that the company did not become the world’s bigger RPG developer by taking too many risks. Instead, since the massive success of Final Fantasy VII, the formula has not changed much, with big budgets, huge teams, two-to-four year development cycles and an emphasis on visual arts being the way forward for them. However, the advent of the WiiWare service has flipped that whole idea on its head, with Square Enix bringing the lower budget, quickly developed Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King coming into existance. Tsuchida-san and Programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi both went on to discuss lessons learned from creating such a small game for the download service.
The new entry into the Crystal Chronicles series, which began on the GameCube and is set to continue on Nintendo DS later this month, will launch alongside WiiWare on 12th May and although it may well appear to be an a-typical Final Fantasy adventure, the game actually goes off at quite a tangent, with it being a simulation effort, where you take on the role of a city’s King, must build up your town with the help of its inhabitants, ordering them around to gather necessary resources, and looking after your estate in a proper fashion, whilst also protecting it from intruders.
As Toshiro Tsuchida says, “You can’t use high-quality CG as a weapon on WiiWare. We wanted to maintain our original strengths, though. That was a huge challenge for us - maintaining the qualities that players expect from “Square Enix games.” Whilst the English-fluent Programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi added that “I wanted to try to make a game that did not rely on volume,” which fits perfectly with the constraints of WiiWare games and the lack of external hard-drive for Wii. After all, long-term Squaresoft and Enix fans will argue that some of the respective companies’ efforts came from their NES, SNES and Game Boy efforts, all platforms that forced developers to rely on substance rather than aesthetics.
Initially the project started back in September 2006, with barely any information, a target price of $10 and the aim to release it by Summer 2007. Therefore, everything was crafted using old assets during the first three months, with a story and scenario wrapped around it before new assets were eventually created in the next three months of the development cycle. To aid with the process, Nintendo offered up a new script language called Squirrel, and a middleware library called NintendoWare. This proved to be a first for the RPG heavyweight company since, as Shiraishi said, “At Square Enix, we don’t…use other people’s code, but since we were aiming for a Summer 2007 launch, I had to streamline the development process.”
From : Nintendic - USA
