FFVII 15th Anniversary Interviews: Yoshinori Kitase

Hey Hito, thanks for Translating this, it was a good read.

I recently stumbled upon a link to this interview on NeoGAF. First I’d like to thank you for translating the interview. I did too, in June 2012 already, but into German, and having an English version means more people could learn what Kitase had to say about FFVII.

Now that I compared your text to mine I noticed we ended up having different meanings in places. This is due to mistakes both on my and your part. I already fixed the mistakes I found in my text and wanted to give you a chance to fix yours as well.

I would have prefered to send you an email but comments seem to be the only option to communicate this so here goes:

1. “But around the time of “FFX” I was far too unreasonable and *had an unpleasent air about me, didn’t I* (wry smile).”

There is a problem with perspective here. Kitase (and Nomura) were too unreasonable but the sentence describes how it appeared to Kitase what Nojima felt. You’re missing the sasuga (even you) and misinterpreted the iya-sou: sou is used to talk about an appearance someone else is giving, typical third person marker.

Nevertheless I was considering your version could be right for a moment and asked my Japanese friend for confirmation. She agreed with my interpretation and explained by saying that mucha-buri has a passive component here, indicating that it is Nojima’s perspective who is experiencing this behavior. I guess that part was misleading you into thinking Kitase was the subject in the sentence.

So it should read:

“But around the time of “FFX” our unreasonable behavior (mucha-buri) was too much *even for you (sasuga)* and you had an displeased (iya-sou) air about you, didn’t you (wry smile).”

2. “Since the next generation hardware was said to have *a chip* that excelled at 3D graphics”

All the next gen hardware platforms (Playstation, Saturn and N64) had dedicated chips for 3D features whereas SNES and Genesis only had some basic 3D chips added in some games like Star Fox or as a addon for Genesis. So chip should be plural here because he’s not talking about one specific platform but all three of them.

“Since the next generation hardware was said to have *chips* that excelled at 3D graphics”

3. “Particularly, with the loss of the pixel graphics, the designer team such as Naora (*3) seemed to have felt *that was a risk*.”

The word used in Japanese is kiki/crisis and the meaning becomes clearer when you read the Nomura interview. He’s also part of the former pixel artist team and says at the time he was afraid that he might lose his job because that wasn’t needed anymore.

And both Kitase here and Nomura mention that the design team had to adapt, Naora by learning to make 3D models.

“the designer team such as Naora (*3) seemed to have felt *that their job was put at risk*.”

4. “And he made not only the scenario but *the* actual event scenes as well”

Nojima was one of the many event planners of FFVII and in his own interview he says he did the ones in Niebelheim for example. “The” sounds like he did all of them which isn’t accurate.

“And he made not only the scenario but *(some of the)* actual event scenes as well”