SQUARE ENIX MEMBERS

— Did you struggle at all designing the seeq race?
Ryoma Ito  The seeq started as pixel art, and they certainly show a lot of skin. [Laughs] I thought they might be a little too exposed. Especially the berserker. [Laughs]

— The berserker is a little racy, isn’t he.
Ryoma Ito  He is! The only thing he’s covering is his groin. [Laughs] Since we couldn’t touch the graphics at this point, I couldn’t do anything but wonder if we could really get away with it. But [director] Mr. [Yuichi] Murasawa pushed for it, and nothing ended up changing. Making sure their poses covered up as much as possible was a real challenge. [Laughs]

— Of the four gria jobs, which was done first?
Ryoma Ito  The ravager. When deciding how to portray the gria, the first design finished was the ravager.

— Did Mr. Murasawa make any specific requests?
Ryoma Ito  He didn’t for the other races, but for the gria he asked that they be “moe.” [pronounced “mo-eh”] I had a hard time figuring out what exactly that meant. [Laughs] Grasping for a way to explain it, he said it’s sort of like cute, but different. I had a vague idea of what he meant, but I wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted. Coming to a consensus on what exactly it meant was very difficult.

— Ultimately, what things would you say are “moe” about the gria?
Ryoma Ito  Honestly, I don’t know. But since Mr. Murasawa gave his OK, I guess it must be “moe.” [Laughs] Since there were only four jobs, I decided to leave this to Mr. Murasawa. I told myself I’d just redraw them if he didn’t like them, and I submitted them again and again.

— Do you have any favorite race or job?
Ryoma Ito  I really like them all. So the most honest answer is for me not to pick.

— But if you had to pick...
Ryoma Ito  If I were really forced to, I’d pick the chocobo knight. Since they had me make some merchandise related to them, they have a special place in my heart. I’d also pick the flintlock. These are the only two jobs that didn’t start as pixel art. I insisted on having them start with my designs. But since I was able to draw them however I liked, the graphics for the flintlock’s portrait turned into a problem. Its head was much taller than it should have been. [Laughs]

— The hat, you mean.
Ryoma Ito  I based the design on the Royal British Guard, so I thought it would look interesting to see a whole bunch of flintlocks lined up in a row. So when I was working on the design, I had a really great time drawing it. But when I handed it off to the person in charge of doing the portrait graphics, I had to apologize. [Laughs]

—[Laughs]
Ryoma Ito  But they did a great job, and it made me think how wonderful our staff is. [Laughs]

— Are there any secrets you can tell us about the game’s development?
Ryoma Ito  There’s an enemy with a unique portrait. His name is Ghi, and he was supposed to have a different portrait. When I received the design documents for him, I made him the way I wanted to make him. He had a big nose, and he was a parivir with a very distinct character. I thought he looked great. But Mr. Murasawa said I’d gone overboard with it. [Laughs] So that’s how we ended up with the Ghi portrait we have now.

—You hate to see that happen to something you were passionate about.
Ryoma Ito  I thought he was a good character. In my opinion, the version we ended up with is too clean. It looks like he had a nose job. [Laughs]

— What things would you like people to pay special attention to in this game?
Ryoma Ito  It’s not an area I was involved with, but I hope people pay attention to the effects. I do my drawing on paper, so I didn’t have much contact with what went on the actual game screen. So when I see what they’ve done, I’m very impressed. I’m not sure how appropriate it is to praise co-workers in the same company, but seeing what they’d done, I really thought we had some great developers here. Seeing the effects in the opening and the summons, I really admired how far they were able to push the Nintendo DS.