I’m a little nervous as I step into the hotel room. How can I not be? I’m meeting with Hironobu Sakaguchi, one of the founding fathers of Japanese Role-Playing. But as I shake Sakaguchi’s hand, something strikes me as reassuringly familiar. He’s in America to promote Mistwalker’s latest game, a mobile RPG called Terra Battle. The game casts grid-based SRPG combat in a very minimalistic light, with a heavy emphasis on positioning, formation, and flanking. Its battle system is purpose-built for touch devices, but packs the sort of mechanical depth you’d expect from the creator of Final Fantasy.

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Though it’s not their first mobile game, Terra Battle marks Mistwalker’s first attempt at a free-to-play business model. It has a lot of the trappings you’d expect of an F2P game (including gashapon), but true to form, Mistwalker is trying something a little different. A big part of Terra Battle’s release is its “Download Starter” campaign, where the studio has promised to add extra content to the game (like new modes and extra music from Nobuo Uemtatsu) when certain download milestones are reached. Sakaguchi seems excited about the prospects of this bold experiment.

That familiar feeling clicks. I’ve had this conversation before. Sakaguchi has a long and impressive history, but the look in his eye belies something that he shares with countless indie devs, young and old. It’s a certain mixture of pride and enthusiasm – satisfaction about the game he’s made, and excitement for its impending release. At this revelation the nerves subside – talking to devs like this is what makes me love this job in the first place. (Also, the fake mustaches he brought with him do a lot to diffuse tension) After seeing a bit of the game, I launch into my questions.

 

[Hardcore Gamer] Terra Battle has 165 unique characters, which, while not unprecedented in JRPGs, is quite a lot. Are all of the different characters defined within the story, or are they just portraits with different stats attached?

[Sakaguchi, via an Interpreter] There’s a couple of different characters that are actually in the story, and the others are just characters that you collect. For the characters that aren’t in the actual scenario, you can read their profile to see their backstories and their relationships with other characters. There’s a side story within each character.

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There was mention that there would be an expanded storyline through DLC – that the experience would be endless. Are there plans to have side plots starring some of the extra characters?

There will be special dungeons, and that’s where you’ll go to find more information about the world. We’ve already started development of the first one. On top of that there’s going to be online play – as part of the Download Starter, so we’re waiting to hit the download milestone before they release it. If we hit the milestone fast, we’ll have to work really hard.

With the endless story expansion, do you worry that’ll dilute

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the core narrative of the game? Is the main plot going to be concise, with a definitive ending?

It’s one of those American-style stories that keeps going. So it makes logical sense to go into season two and so on. It’s not just fantasy either – as the story progresses we’ll be going through different types of genres and storytelling. We’re following the storytelling of Lost Odyssey, so it’ll be going in all sorts of directions. As you progress the world gets more technological – there’s a reason for the order.

Will some of the characters be rarer than others? Is party-building a big element of the game’s strategy?

Yes. Characters have special skills that change your tactical options.

Do you anticipate that the game will build a competitive scene once versus mode rolls out?

I really want to make it fun, because I like the concept of building parties to take on other players. I see a lot of potential.

Will we see DLC characters from your previous games?

I can’t really talk about specifics, since there aren’t any plans yet, but it would work with the way the characters are represented, since they’re all 2D. Even if a character is from outside the Terra Battle world you can sort of slip them in and it won’t look odd. In 3D it would be a lot more work, and it can sometimes come across as strange.

It’s more data-driven, so you’ve got to worry about parameters and special skills and whatnot, but in 3D you have to worry about animations – it’s a lot more difficult. This is more of a fluid process. That’s the main concept of the download starter. I think of mobile development as being more like a festival, where you have people coming in and adding new content later. It’s much more fluid and creative.

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How are you balancing the game so that players feel like they want, rather than need to pay for microstransactions?

My team does have a console background, so I want to make it so that it won’t be too difficult to play with the base game. When it comes to editing the team, that’s were people are gonna want to spend the money, just trying to get the rare characters, change their team, and soup them up. There are high odds with the gashapon [Japanese capsule machines that dispense random toys) mechanic that you’ll be able to make a good team, so we want to make it so players can enjoy the team that they build.

We wanted to make a point that people who don’t spend a lot of money on the game won’t get stuck. We did a lot of testing to make sure that you can get good characters without spending any money, and testers purposely ran through without spending any money at all to see how far they could get.

Movement plays a big role in Terra Battle’s combat system – and that’s the case in a lot of recent JRPGs. Is it easier to make turn-based combat engaging when you focus on positioning?

The whole concept was built around the use of a touch-screen, and we specifically wanted to make something you could play one-handed. People hold their phones in one hand all the time, so it seemed natural that you should be able to play that way.

I’ve been making horizontal games forever, and now that I’m working with a vertical orientation it’s given me a whole new perspective on development. It’s very new to me, and it’s let me change how I design things.

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So it’s designed to be played on a commute?

My intention is twofold. I want people to enjoy the visuals and music in a sit-down setting, but I also want them to be able to play while they’re waiting for someone, or sitting in a coffee shop. You can play it both ways – get immersed like you would with a console, with headphones on, or when you have a spare moment as well.

Looking at different games in the mobile space, who would you say are your biggest competitors? Obviously, in Japan, Kantai Collection is a force to be reckoned with.

Actually, KanColle was designed by a former Mistwalker employee. [Sakaguchi says the next part in English] Keisuke Tanaka. He was in Square, I know him well.

So do you see it as a competitor?

It’s a little bit different, but I do see them as a competitor. But at the same time I don’t think we need to focus on any specific competitors. Instead we’re concerned with our game balance – and when people play it a lot and understand that balance, I think they’ll find that there’s no other game in the mobile space that’s built and balanced this well.

Terra Battle seems like a very mechanic-focused game, but many of your games are known for their cinematic flourishes. Did you intentionally want to break away from that and make something more text and number heavy? Or did this design come about as a result of testing?

It came from developing for the mobile platform, since players won’t have time to watch long cutscenes, so we wanted to make sure that the game had a very fast tempo.

I’ve found that in recent years I’ve enjoyed playing JRPGs on handhelds – like Radiant Historia, Persona 4 Golden, and Trails in the Sky – a lot more than I have on consoles. Do you think mobile RPGs are the next logical evolution of that?

I don’t see it as an evolution, per se, but more like a branch. When you play a game, the most important thing is the “wow” factor. I want people to think “wow, I’ve never played an RPG on a device like this.” For thirty years I’ve been developing horizontal games, but now I’m making something vertical. It lets me offer new things to players. Rather than an evolution of JRPGs, I think of this as a completely different experience.

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You’ve overseen a lot of teams with designers who became big in their own right. Keisuke Tanaka’s an example, obviously, as is Tetsuya Takahashi with Xenoblade Chronicles. How does it feel to see your juniors come into their own like that?

I worked with many people at Square over the years, and I want them all to do well for themselves. I don’t quite see it as a Senpai/Kouhai relationship, but more in terms of coworkers.

Alright, one last question:  what JRPG would you say has set the high-water mark for the genre?

I prefer old-school games. I think JRPGs are much stronger in 2D. In my own body of work, for instance, I prefer Final Fantasy 6. As for other designers, I like [Yasumi] Matsuno-san’s work, like the Tactics games.