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I think, when I look at Final Fantasy XIII based on what I've played so far, what the game really does is it takes the elements such as story, graphics, and battle system that Final Fantasy is very good at and retains those, and it gets rid of things that Final Fantasy hasn't done much or wasn't as good at, like town simulation, NPC interaction, or the field map. Was that the goal -- emphasize what you're good at and drop what wasn't as much of a strength in the series?

MT: Personally, the Final Fantasys that I have worked on have been very story-driven, and so, in terms of the development, I wanted to of course utilize my personal strengths, which were those.

But in the past, in the Final Fantasys on previous, non-high definition consoles, we were able to kind of take everyone's ideas and include all of them in the game -- kind of a bento box system, where you have all the different little things in there. So we had mini-games or we had towns where you were able to talk to all of the townspeople.

But with a high definition console you're really no longer able to do that because it takes so long to develop. When you think about how long it's already taken us to develop this game, to have to have included all of those other aspects it would have been far too long. So what we did instead was to define what was truly important to the game and include those aspects and really emphasize those items that we wanted.

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