Motomu Toriyama - Career - PlayStation 3 Era

PlayStation 3 Era

After the public reveal of the Final Fantasy VII tech demo at E3 2005 and how critically well received it was, Yoichi Wada, president of Square Enix, decided to move development of Final Fantasy XIII from the PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3. As a result, all the PS2 work had to be discarded and Toriyama and his team had to start from scratch. Toriyama also began to plan a new Final Fantasy game for the Nintendo DS with his side team of scenario writers. However, while this project was still in early development, he was approached by Akitoshi Kawazu and asked to make it a sequel to Final Fantasy XII. This game would eventually go on to become Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings. While Final Fantasy XIII was in development for the PS3, Toriyama also lead his side team of scenario writers on projects such as the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles games for WiiWare and Dissidia Final Fantasy. He also made a spiritual sequel to Bahamut Lagoon which he called Blood of Bahamut.

Final Fantasy XIII was designed by Yoshinori Kitase and used a modified version of the "Interactive Movie RPG" game design he introduced in Final Fantasy X. However, Kitase decided to make alterations from the Final Fantasy X incarnation of this game design by making Final Fantasy XIII even more linear and streamlined. This was done by Kitase to add more emphasis to the story and character development which are the most important aspects of the "Interactive Movie RPG" game design. Kitase also decided to get rid of towns, shops, mini-games and other aspects not central to the story and character development. Before Final Fantasy XIII was released, Kitase made hints towards the game design changes he would be introducing by stating that players will say, "Is this really FF?" when they play the game. As with Final Fantasy X, Toriyama was the main director and responsible for every single event scene and also the pacing and flow of the entire game. He also created the personalities and back stories of all the playable characters. Daisuke Watanabe was the lead scenario writer and he was given very precise direction from Toriyama when writing the script. Toriyama was very specific on what he wanted the script to be like and Watanabe recalls that there were numerous times that parts of the script had to be redone as Toriyama was not happy with it. The theme for the story of Final Fantasy XIII was, "A dramatic story focused on the emotions of the characters." Toriyama wanted some scenes to show more emotion, and other scenes to show a more contrasting difference between the personalities of the party members involved.

When released, Final Fantasy XIII was met with a mixed reception due to the game design used. However, Toriyama defended Kitase's game design by stating that this was what a "Interactive Movie RPG" involves; the story and characters are the priority and not the gameplay and exploration. Toriyama has also stated that Western reviewers weren't judging the game by it's genre of "Interactive Movie RPG" and instead comparing it to open world RPGs. Kitase has stated that his game design was mainly influenced by FPS, which is his favourite video game genre. Though they defended the game design used in Final Fantasy XIII, Toriyama and Kitase decided to not use the "Interactive Movie RPG" game design for the sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2. They instead gave it a more open game design similar to Final Fantasy X-2.