We chat to Square Enix's Yoshinori Kitase and Motomu Toriyama about the upcoming RPG

Can you talk about the personalities of the two protagonists, Snow and Lightning, in Final Fantasy XIII?

Motomu Toriyama: Lightning has a very cool personality. Snow, meanwhile is a little on the hot side, he’s very passionate about things and outspoken, so a lot of the exchanges between these characters has them not meeting eye-to-eye. A lot of the time, Lightning becomes annoyed because Snow is too passionate about certain things, so the way these two characters interact is going to be very entertaining for the players.

Were they designed to be opposites to increase the level of drama on-display?
MT: That was the original concept.

A lot of people on the Internet assume that Lighting is almost a female version of Cloud, from Final Fantasy VII – how true is this, really?
MT: The only two basic similarities are that they’re cool characters and have an ex-military [background]. Other than that, there’s no real connection between the two characters. Lightning really is her own person.

How do you think Final Fantasy XIII will affect the Japanese mentality towards RPG design?
Yoshinori Kitase: Japanese RPGs have traditionally always been command-based, and it’s all about really taking your time to strategise and work your way through the battles. That’s really what Final Fantasy has been as a series, but in XIII [there’s] more action. It’s still a command-based RPG at its core, but there’s a lot more speed, a lot more action – this might be the first step for the Final Fantasy series or Japanese RPGs as a whole to move out of the tradition solely command-based system into a more action-based system.

Final Fantasy games have always taken about a year to be translated for Europe – have you improved the process, this time?
YK: The development for the Japanese and European versions of the game are moving along, side-by-side, as the voice acting and subtitles are complete. Usually, we’d release the Japanese version and then begin localisation, meaning there was a big gap between the two releases, but we’ve announced Winter for the Japanese release and for North America and Europe, we’re targeting Spring, so it could be anything from a six-month gap to as small as a three-month gap. We’ll be bringing it to worldwide audiences much quicker than previous titles.

Is accelerating the localisation process key to making XIII a success, then?
YK: We definitely consider it important to decrease that gap. For Final Fantasy X, for example, players were scolding us for making it late. It’s definitely something we were looking into. We wanted to get the game out to overseas audiences as soon as possible.

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