Final Fantasy VII Producer Talks How Western Developers Caught Up To Japanese Ones

gameranx.com:

The history of video games is fascinating no matter what period you start in. You can talk about the earliest days of games when people could create marvels on the most basic machines. Then you can jump to the arcade era, where people flock to those cabinets and put in as many quarters as possible. Once you get to the console and handheld eras, you’ll see even more unique stories of the hardware and the software. A key fact of which was brought up by Final Fantasy VII producer Hironobu Sakaguchi at a panel who had some insight into why certain things in the modern era of gaming weren’t there in the earlier eras.

“I think that one of the main reasons for that is the fact that consoles like the NES and PlayStation were very specific hardware. This made it easier for Japanese developers to master the hardware, as we could ask Nintendo or Sony directly in Japanese.

This is why – I realize it might be impolite to say this – Japanese games were of a higher quality at the time. As a result, Japanese games were regarded as more fun, but when hardware became easier to develop for, things quickly changed.”

One of those changes could be seen in Final Fantasy VII when it originally came out on PlayStation 1. Before that game, all the titles in the franchise, which Hironobu created, were pixel art. They had been super popular that way, but as times changed, so did perceptions. That’s why the team went full tilt and had CGI elements in the RPG alongside the new 3D graphics. While they weren’t the best graphics ever, they were revolutionary for the time, and the game was incredibly successful thanks to the graphical leap. Among other things, of course.

As for his “history lesson” on Eastern and Western developers, he’s not wrong about