During the madness of E3, we got the opportunity to sit down with Director Motomu Toriyama (also Director of Final Fantasy XIII) and Producer Eisuke Yokoyama of Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings to discuss some of the things that they're trying to do with their new hybrid RPG/RTS title for the DS. Joining us were a few other media brethren including a journalist from Source as well as another from GameSpot. What follows is a transcription of the interview focused on both the combination of genres and the localization of the finished product; essentially fashioning an unfamiliar genre into something the Japanese would like to play and then converting it into something the North American gamer will find challenging. Without further ado, let's see what Toriyama-san and Yokoyama-san had to say about their first foray into the RTS genre.

Source: How did the idea to take the characters from Final Fantasy XII and put them in a real-time strategy environment come about? Is it an RTS first and a Final Fantasy game second or vice versa?
Eisuke Yokoyama: The initial plan wasn't to create a new RTS or a Final Fantasy game, it was just that we were looking to make a new RPG and both my team and Toriyama-san's team were actually working separately at first. But, we had a battle system in place, and at the time that this project was needing a theme, FFXII was very popular so it felt like the right timing to go with that theme. It's not an RTS, but we wanted to create a new way to enjoy a role-playing game, so this is kind of an evolution of our way of creating a new RPG system in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings


GameSpy: Building on that idea (that the game isn't an RTS as much as a new style of RPG), each Final Fantasy game seems to have some new innovation in the battle system, what was the inspiration for the combat system in FFXII: Revenant Wings?
Motomu Toriyama: As you say, the battle system in the Final Fantasy series is always evolving, and when our two teams got together and tried to come up with a new system for this title, we wanted to do something that focused on the stylus. The RTS genre was something that we had focused on when we were thinking about the stylus and since Japanese players aren't very familiar with these types of games, we wanted to come up with something that would introduce this genre to them in an enjoyable way while incorporating the stylus.
GameSpot: How has the response been from the Japanese market? How have they taken to this new type of gameplay?
Yokoyama-san: A lot of people have been saying that at first it is a little difficult to adjust to, but once they actually get playing it's a very enjoyable game. Also, a lot of the DS players in Japan have never played a Final Fantasy game, because they're generally more casual gamers, so they don't have any preconceived notions about what the Final Fantasy stylus system is supposed to be like. A lot of the new users have reacted very positively and aren't having any trouble adjusting to this new control style.

We also made sure that anybody that picks up the game can get into the gameplay right away, and we've included tutorials so that it's easy to familiarize yourself with the game. Nobody has to read through the manual in order to play, and people love that.