"If we don't do something that people think is amazing, it's meaningless."
- Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata Earlier this month, Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata expressed concern over the viability of big-budget console RPGs if his game doesn't succeed in the marketplace. Now, he's offering bold proclamations which add a little context to his fears that "perhaps there's not much of a future" for triple-A RPGs like Final Fantasy XV. In a new Kotaku interview conducted at Tokyo Game Show, Tabata talks about what the franchise means to him: "Before I joined Square Enix, I always looked at Final Fantasy games as the benchmark for game consoles. Each new game showed what was possible on video game hardware," Tabata said. Final Fantasy XV is a big-budget, high-fidelity open-world iteration of the franchise, and appears to be attempting to live up to that proclamation. But whether it can do so profitably is, perhaps, the crux of his worries. Tabata took over the director's chair from Tetsuya Nomura, who helmed the project from its 2006 announcement (as Final Fantasy Versus XIII) until two years ago. Tabata previously worked on games including Final Fantasy Type-0 and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. A demo download for the game will be included with the upcoming Final Fantasy Type-0 remake for Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The company debuted a new trailer for Final Fantasy XV at Tokyo Game Show that showed major progress on the game for the first time in years.
