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When long-time Square Enix producer Hiromichi Tanaka revealed that his involvement with the Final Fantasy III remake wasn't limited to overall supervision or production, but that the veteran developer would in fact be directing the game, it came as a pretty big surprise. Tanaka, who was one of the original founders of Squaresoft before rising up through the ranks to senior vice president, rarely actually directs games these days; his role within the company at the time was mainly wrapped up in his oversight of one of the company's product development divisions.
Despite the fact that he'd largely ceased game direction, though, Hiromichi Tanaka was the perfect choice to direct the remake for one simple reason: he was the lead designer for the original Final Fantasy III on the NES. With the exception of Hironobu Sakaguchi himself, no one was more intimately involved in the creation of that game, no one more familiar with it. As he gave interviews during the process of developing the remake, Tanaka spoke about how he'd followed the game's reception over sixteen years since its release and how he'd thought over the things it did right and the flaws it had.
With the subsequent announcement that the remake of Final Fantasy IV would be directed by Takashi Tokita (the director of Parasite Eve and the co-director of Chrono Trigger), Square Enix made one thing abundantly clear: it was taking these remakes very seriously and treating them with the utmost of respect and care for the original source material by giving the games to the people most adeptly qualified to go back to them for a modern reworking and updating.
Takashi Tokita, like Hiromichi Tanaka, was one of the founding staffers at Square. And like Tanaka, he'd been promoted often throughout his long tenure, and hasn't been hands-on directing games very often. But like Tanaka with Final Fantasy III, Tokita was the most ideal candidate to create a remake to the treasured classic Final Fantasy IV. Just as Tanaka was the lead designer of the third game, so Tokita was the lead designer on the fourth. But more notably, he also wrote almost the entirety of the game. The first three Final Fantasy games were not written by the Square development team, but rather were outsourced to novelist and scenarist Kenji Terada. But after a falling out between Terada and Square, the team needed to find someone in house to write their first game story. Tokita was their pick.
Some may not see it as a major point that Square Enix is having the original creators of these games personally handle the remakes, but I think the value is self-apparent. The company could just as easily have shunted the projects off to untrained or rookie junior-level designers; they could have allowed the remakes to be done by their outside developers with limited oversight or involvement by any internal staff. This was the case with the ports of the Final Fantasy and Chrono games done for the PlayStation and Game Boy Advance.
But the people who know these games best can bring their own personal experience to bear in making better games with decisions tailored to the need of the specific game. For instance, Tanaka recognized the need for Final Fantasy III to have more firmly developed characters, but didn't want to shift the overall focus of the game to a heavy story away from its emphasis on dungeons and the class system. Based on his years of experience and feedback on the game, he determined that slight modifications were needed to enhance the job system at the core of the title, in addition to rebalancing of specific classes deemed considerably lacking in the original. Tokita, on the other hand, identifies Final Fantasy IV as a much more story-focused game, and so has expressed his desire to bring a much more comprehensive overhaul in certain respects -- the addition of many more story elements (based on parts of the original game's draft that Tokita wrote but which were cut from the game due to memory and time constraints), a more cinematic direction to the cutscenes, and so on.
He's also pointed out that more gameplay revisions are needed to help Final Fantasy IV, which originally differentiated itself strictly through the Active Time Battle system that's since been reused in five of its sequels. For that, they've brought in a major talent in the form of Hiroyuki Ito, a man with more experience in Final Fantasy gameplay than almost any other individual. In addition to directing Final Fantasy IX and co-directing both Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy XII, Ito is responsible for the game design in Final Fantasy Tactics and the battle system design for Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VIII. While some purists may be leery of seeing any modifications done at all to the game, the fact is that it's a remake, not a port; the point is to enhance the game while being respectful to the original, and there's no one more qualified to create new gameplay systems than Ito.
Aside from the creative staff and directorial roles, there's also the matter of programming -- you know, making the games themselves. While this stuff isn't being done in-house, it's also not being done on the cheap. The cheap and easy ports of Final Fantasy I and II and IV through VI for the GBA, Valkyrie Profile and Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSP, and the Final Fantasy Origins, Chronicles, and Anthology collections for the PlayStation were all done by budget codefactory Tose, and each of these was plagued with numerous issues such as battle system bugs, poor sound emulation, load times, and slowdown. For the actual remakes, however, Square Enix recruited Matrix Software, the same team responsible for the full fledged (and critically praised) console remake of Dragon Quest V for the PS2.
Regardless of what one thinks of the idea of remaking games in general, it's undeniable that Square Enix is putting quality efforts here with major talent, and recruiting the original creators of the games speaks of a respect for the titles they're remaking. The games are in good hands.
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