Game Development Giant

Jester was noncommittal about this change.

Compared with his original design, this kind of change can only be said to have its own advantages and disadvantages. After all, if it were made according to Jester's more free design style, it would be completely different from what it is now.

So Jester agreed to this change. He is the producer of this game, and it is he who has the final say whether it can be changed like this.

Sega mainly relied on Jester's reputation to release this game. After Suzuki Yu returned to Japan, Sega only tried it briefly and it immediately got their approval. The next step was to use Jester's reputation to officially release it. .

Jester's popularity has exceeded Sega's expectations. After the release of "King of Cooking", a game in which Jester was fully involved in the production and production, it caused a stir in the MS game console, which had been almost ignored before. There was a sales boom, and the number of items sold in one day was actually more than they had sold in the previous month.

In this game, which was jointly produced by Jester and Yu Suzuki, Jester finally quietly called Sega. He politely told Nakayama Hayao that during the development of this game, Suzuki In fact, Yu's contribution is much greater than his own. Therefore, if this game only bears his name, he would feel guilty. That's why Suzuki Yu's name is tagged with his own name. . This kind of gambling and the story of the gambling game is also very attractive to the Japanese. When they heard that if Jester lost, the console rights to American Cube would be Sega's bet. I can't help but marvel, because this game is too familiar to Japanese people.

Jester and his Mars Entertainment relied on this game as a starting point to reach their current status.

Moreover, the sales of the ported version of this game for home consoles are also extremely hot. In North America and Japan combined, at least 13.4 million copies have been sold.

It’s naturally impossible to reach a million copies overnight, after all. Sega does not have a huge platform share like Nintendo or Mars Entertainment, and the MS console does not have much advantage over F/NES or Dreambox, although "The King of Cooking" is very good. Coupled with the unique style of the game, for some players who like this theme, it is not surprising that this game is called a masterpiece. Therefore, in the first week, the market share of Sega's game consoles in Japan was only 30 Despite all the odds, it still sold an astonishing 80,000 copies.

To know. Almost a quarter of the players who own Sega's MS console have purchased this game. If Nintendo's games can have this kind of purchase ratio, then they have a share of 5 to 6 million in Japan. At the same ratio, 1.5 million copies could be sold in a week. Even their most popular "The Legend of Zelda" has not reached such a number.

After Sega's surprise and the stable sales of "King of Cooking" and the increasing shipments of his own MS console, Jester did not take this matter too seriously, because his "Reloaded" The development of "Jiwen" has also entered the most important stage.

Regarding the development of "Juggernaut", Jester feels that compared to the "Fire Emblem" period, although they are all RPG games, the team has accumulated experience and technology from "Fire Emblem". It's obviously a lot easier, although "Heavy Soldiers" is on top of the entire game system. It's more free and complex than "Fire Emblem".

About the plot of the game. After several discussions with several screenwriters, Jester did not adopt a pure American science fiction style. After all, this is a game production, so it has a fixed main line, a simple and clear plot, and a Japanese game script style story. , is much more appropriate.

After thinking about it again and again, Jester also felt that this was indeed the case. He was deeply influenced by the European and American RPGs of later generations. At that time, European and American RPGs paid more attention to the fun of exploration, rather than today, which focused more on giving players a It feels like reading a story book.

The progress of the game and players' understanding of the game are also a step-by-step process. If some good game methods appear at the wrong time, the result may only be failure.

Hironobu Sakaguchi also left the United States and returned to Japan. When he left the United States, he discussed with Jester for two months, integrating his thoughts on RPG games and the game world he wanted to design most. Thoughts, but more of an extremely detailed plan made by Jester based on his memory of the third generation of ff that was maturing.

From the initial shyness and embarrassment when Jester asked him to return to Japan to build his own development team, to the full confidence when he left, it only took more than two months.

For Hironobu Sakaguchi, what he learned during the more than a year that he followed Jester was of course of great benefit.

When discussing the name of this game, Sakaguchi Hironobu felt that the Final Fantasy name chosen by Jester was not very nice. It seemed to have a tragic atmosphere in it, which seemed inconsistent with his current ambitious mentality. His original intention was to change it to his original fantasy, but when he mentioned this proposal to Jester, Jester refused without hesitation.

"Sakaguchi, you have to remember that you have to treat every game as a legacy that you can never fail. Only then can you make every game without regrets. This is why I named it The reason for Final Fantasy." Jester said it seriously.

What surprised Jester the most was Yuji Naka, the youngest in his Japanese army.

Naka Yuji's new game plan was put together in a day after he returned to Japan. It may be that "Fire Emblem" had such a great impact on them that there was simply no way for them to recover from the epic experience they had just experienced. *The memories of development were easily shaken off. Not only Sakaguchi Hironobu, but also Naka Yuji unconsciously made RPG his first choice for making games alone.

The difficulty of making RPGs is the most difficult among all game categories. A person who has never had the experience of leading a team alone has to make a game that is not half inferior to Nintendo's "The Legend of Zelda" from a planning point of view. RPG games are also considered daring.

But more importantly, Jester felt Yuji Denaka’s talent and vitality.

In his hand was the thick new game plan that Yuji sent back from Japan. He knew which game it was after just a few glances. In fact, in his memory, in the original game In history, it was almost after the rise of the RPG trend that Yuji Naka, who was working at Sega at the time, completed the development of Sega's first RPG game as the main programmer.

This game is "Phantasy Star", which is known as one of the two evergreen trees in the segarpg series along with the Light series.

Jester carefully read the plan given to him by Yuji Naka from beginning to end. Regardless of the system and settings, because Yuji Naka was influenced by "Fire Emblem" at this time, this aspect was related to The Phantasy Star that Jester is familiar with is different, but in terms of the game script, it is the same.

This is why Jester was able to tell that this game was "Phantasy Star" at the first time, and Yuji Naka seemed to have thought of going with him. Instead of continuing to be immersed in the medieval style, it was better to get rid of it. came out, so Yuji Naka chose the same idea as Jester, the future.

The only difference is that Jester chose the post-apocalyptic wasteland while Naka Yuji chose the broader galaxy.

Moreover, Naka Yuji also thought of going with Gunpei Yokoi. In this game, he also proposed the idea of ​​​​what would happen if I let a woman be the protagonist of an RPG game, and turned it into a reality.

Yuji Naka also explained in this plan that he was not the only one to complete the plot outline of the game, but he and his friend named Rieko Kodama. According to Yuji Naka, the entire plot is After he proposed the main framework, it was completed by his friend.

This is not the most important thing. What surprised Jester the most was the new system mentioned by Yuji Naka in the plan. This system was something he had never thought of.

The game uses textures to disguise the pseudo-3D maze, and uses animation to express the monsters inside. Yuji Naka participated in the entire development of Dreambox. Perhaps among all the game designers of Mars Entertainment, no one is better than him. It is necessary to know the performance that this console can achieve, and after Yuji Naka's inference, the performance of Dreambox is sufficient to achieve what he wants to accomplish.

Jester is not sure whether it can be done. You must know that his "Fire Emblem" and Nintendo's "Legend of Zelda" still used scroll mazes when designing, and when fighting, The enemies or monsters are just fixed color blocks. If you want to complete 3D mazes and animations on an eight-bit machine, just thinking about it seems a bit incredible.

But what Jester knows is that all of these things for "Phantasy Star" were completed on Sega's MS, and his Dreambox is a machine that is several points better than Sega's MS in terms of image processing. It is certain that the console cannot do this, but that does not mean that its Dreambox cannot do this.