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February 7th, 2012, 20:11 GMT · By

Final Fantasy Creator Says High Definition Graphics Are Overrated

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High Definitions graphics have quickly become one of the most important selling points for modern video games, but at least one legendary developer hailing from Japan believes that game structure and storytelling are more important than looks even on modern home consoles.

Speaking to Satoru Iwata, who is the leader of publisher and hardware developer Nintendo, Hironobu Sakaguchi, one of the main developers behind the early success of the Final Fantasy series, stated, “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.”

Speaking of The Last Story, the most recent video game he has worked on, the developer added, “I was really averse to allowing the quality of the graphics to drop just because we were working on Wii, which doesn’t have HD graphics. I do really think that, in the end, what we’ve created can hold its own against other hardware.”

Hironobu Sakaguchi was initially the director and then served as the producer of the Final Fantasy series up to the tenth title in the series and he is currently leading developer Mistwalker, mainly working on titles for the Nintendo Wii.

The Last Story has been available in Japan since early 2011, but the game will only arrive in Europe in late February and does not yet have a date for a United States launch.

Nintendo has announced that the upcoming Wii U home console, which should be out before Christmas this year on all major markets, will offer support for HD graphics and roughly the same hardware power as the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.

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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: Eric on 07 Feb 2012, 20:46 UTC reply to this comment

Games like angry birds prove that graphics are not the most important thing for gamers; graphics are important to SELL games, and with giant corporate assimilation no *duh* graphics are the paramount concern for developers now.

Remember when EA didn't own EVERYTHING? Games were better then, simply because greed and marketing were less a factor. This is how things work: corporations like EA and Activision grow bigger and bigger until they own a huge portion of the game industry, and as soulless entities legally bound to only care about profit, of course they will only invest in games they can "market" easily, meaning a never-ending graphical race, because it is almost impossible to "market" something as abstract as game-play. Why take risks?

It is the same with games as it is with movies or television: as the medium becomes more mature, the capitalistic model means less and less competition and more and more content being owned by fewer and fewer people...so this should not be a massive surprise. In the same way that reality T.V. has overrun television thanks to its low cost and high profit, graphics dominate games over story or game-play.

Okay, rant over.


Comment #2 by: Dark on 08 Feb 2012, 10:36 UTC reply to this comment

Most of today's game developers/publishers tend to think that great and up to date graphics is the only requirement for a good game, but that's far from true. Graphics helps, but playability comes first.

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