Final Fantasy creator thinks HD graphics are ‘excessive’ for video games

Posted February 8, 2012 by Jallen (170)

Hironobu Sakaguchi, the legendary creator of Final Fantasy, thinks that HD graphics are too excessive for video games. In a recent interview which sees him talking about his latest escapade, The Last Story, he states that developers spend too much time trying to make games look as good as they can be and spend less time on what really matters.

His statement reads as follows:

"Now that high-quality graphics rule supreme, you can reproduce what you want to communicate visually, but at the same time, I don’t know how to put this, but there’s an element that’s slightly excessive about it all…You end up communicating too much to the player."

"This is why I now feel that we’re at a turning point. With this title, I pressed reset and returned to the basics of what a game is. I started by spending a lot of time considering just what it means to tell a story in a game. But it went beyond simply considering the story side of things – I looked again at the fundamentals on the system side too.

"To be honest, I think that the HD images which have become mainstream in the TV industry are, for me personally, still rather over the top for the world of video games. There’s a tendency for developers to allow all their energy to be diverted into maintaining the high quality of the graphics."

Maybe it was this view that lead Sakaguchi to develop The Last Story for the Wii instead of the Xbox 360 like previous Mistwalker releases. The Last Story hits European shores on February 24, with a North America release still unannounced.

Final Fantasy

About the Author

Jallen

Spends his days reporting on games, talking about games, thinking about games, watching videos about games and reading about games. So much so has little time to actually play any of them.