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Kingdom Hearts III Ultimania interview with Kingdom Hearts III technical director Takashi Isowaki


Leamax

Kingdom Hearts III Ultimania, the official companion book for Kingdom Hearts III has released in Japan, and translations from the book's interviews are starting to appear online. In addition to all of the Kingdom Hearts III mysteries expanded on, a full interview from the book has appeared – with the Technical Director of Kingdom Hearts III Takashi Isowaki .

This interview is one of many from Kingdom Hearts III Ultimania and has been translated by @lunesacree. With a big thanks to them, you can read this interview below!

Quote

DISCLAIMER: This is only a tentative translation and should not be relied on for any concrete information. It is possible that there are mistakes. I tried hard to be as clear as I could just in case.

Previously worked on: FFXII, Chocobo's Dungeon 2, The Last Remnant, FF Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, Bloodmasque, SaGa: Scarlet Grace

Q: What kind of work were you responsible for?
A: Coordinating various arrangements and schedules, negotiating with different departments and contract manufacturers, and as support, I had a behind-the-scenes role.

Q: What point did you consider most when putting together schedules?
A:
That particular goals could be completed within a specific time frame. In that regard, I asked a lot of the production staff. In all honesty, I thought "is this too much?", but the staff kept at it and worked hard, and was able to continue producing an outstanding quality of work, just barely keeping up with the schedule, so we successfully completed a highly difficult team mission.

Q: Please tell us something you won't forget about the development process.
A: In the final stages of development, one of the designated goals was to have under X amount of bugs, but up until the previous day every time there were always a hopeless amount [of bugs] remaining, to the point where I thought "maybe it's impossible this time..." over and over. However, during [one of] the days there was a miraculous fix, and we managed to just barely complete the goals every time. "Amazing!", I thought, but at the same time, "you can afford to be more generous..." so I ended up feeling a bit complicated [laughs].

Q: What kind of work would you like to try next?
A: For this project, I had a more administrative role, so I wasn't as involved with work on the actual game, but the development staff had such passionate feelings about making even just a slightly good game (note: he means as long as the game was even just a little good they would be happy) that as a creator, I could feel a refreshing kind of thrill. As a result, my desire to make something increased, so for the next
work I really feel that I'd like to work on something [concretely] as a programmer.

BONUS! "A secret about the game only you know"
About half a year before the game was completed, the amount of game data was so massive it couldn't all fit on one disc. After that, the amount of data was dramatically reduced, and thanks to the leeway we gained as a result, the compression ratio of the movies and sounds
was reduced and the quality was able to be improved.

Source: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqqs20

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The amount of data was drastically reduced...does it prove that some of the game's contents just got cut out indeed? That's what it seems. But reducing it to less than 40GB was too much. I wanted them to talk more about this situation

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2 hours ago, VocaloidLover13 said:

The amount of data was drastically reduced...does it prove that some of the game's contents just got cut out indeed? That's what it seems. But reducing it to less than 40GB was too much. I wanted them to talk more about this situation

I doubt it was cut content. They probably removed old code/images/models/cutscenes that were no longer being used, as well as changing things like compression algorithms.

I'm reminded of the story of how the Devs of Pokemon Gold and Silver were intially having trouble fitting all of the Johto region onto a gameboy cartridge, and Iwata came it and came up with a compression technique that not only allowed them to fit the Johto region, but also allowed them to fit the entirety of Kanto as well!

Things are of course way different nowadays, but in general, there is plenty of things that can be done towards the end of a project to cut down on the total size that doesn't actually cut any content, and I really doubt they would be cutting anything that close to release for the sake of disk size, especially since it all gets copied to the systems hard drive anyways, and the excess could be downloaded. Source: Am a software developer/studied game development in Grad school.

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5 hours ago, Rikukun said:

I doubt it was cut content. They probably removed old code/images/models/cutscenes that were no longer being used, as well as changing things like compression algorithms.

I'm reminded of the story of how the Devs of Pokemon Gold and Silver were intially having trouble fitting all of the Johto region onto a gameboy cartridge, and Iwata came it and came up with a compression technique that not only allowed them to fit the Johto region, but also allowed them to fit the entirety of Kanto as well!

Things are of course way different nowadays, but in general, there is plenty of things that can be done towards the end of a project to cut down on the total size that doesn't actually cut any content, and I really doubt they would be cutting anything that close to release for the sake of disk size, especially since it all gets copied to the systems hard drive anyways, and the excess could be downloaded. Source: Am a software developer/studied game development in Grad school.

Still, it's obvious that quite a few things were cut. Not least of which is the Mysterious Tower being a playable world. 

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