The guys and girls over on Nova Crystallis’ sibling site RPG Site recently got time to sit down with Final Fantasy XIII series producer Yoshinori Kitase – and got him to reminisce and reflect about his time working on the series ahead of saying a final goodbye to it with this week’s Japanese launch of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

“When we’re talking about the FF13 series, I think we should separate the argument – separate the experience of making numbered Final Fantasy games and not,” Kitase explained to the site when asked about the difference between creating main-line numbered FFs and sequels such as Lightning Returns.

“When you’re making a new numbered Final Fantasy title, everything has to be created from zero, from scratch. The characters, the universe, the story – it all has to be completely new. The kind of flow you find yourself in is getting prepared for making the game and kind of… accumulating whatever you can come up with, making that world bigger and bigger and bigger, up to the point where it’s ready to be released. That cycle is right for making new, numbered Final Fantasy games.

“A game like this, or FF13-2 – it’s basically making sequels. The story is there. As such, a different cycle is applied. You release a game and quickly gather feedback from the users, take it on board, and reflect those changes in the new game. You also have to make it as quickly as possible and quickly send it on to the market. With the sequels, you should never let the old game go completely cold… you should work on it while it’s still warm. That cycle is the best choice for this game – and on this game I feel my team worked perfectly in that kind of flow.

“However, this second flow I mentioned… you have to gather feedback as soon as possible and reflect your response to that in a release as soon as possible… it’s not necessary now for sequels. What the user wants and what they’re looking for can change quite quickly these days.”

Kitase also briefly laments longer development cycles, noting how taking a long time on development can lead to the shifting of user expectations – meaning that what was perfect for what the users wanted when development begins is no longer relevant or what they’re interested in by the end – a potentially damaging scenario.

“The danger is that the longer you spend making a new game, the more you risk it being less in line with what the users may be wanting at the time of release,” he said. “In future, when we produce further numbered Final Fantasy titles, it may be a good idea to apply this short turn-around method into the game making.”

Anybody who has followed the development of Lightning’s adventures closely will know that Kitase, Toriyama and their team took fan feedback and the word of focus groups to heart more than any other development team during the FF series’ storied history. In spite of that, Kitase still explains that he considers himself aware of the dangers of focus groups – of the idea that people don’t really know what they want, thus making asking them sometimes fruitless.

“I think at some point we started to take them too seriously, and we changed direction in our next game because of it – and that was a mistake, sometimes,” he admits.

“I think even though we take the feedback from the fans fully on-board, we always have to find the right balance between that and what we want to implement in game design. As a result of that, we don’t just aimlessly gather feedback from anonymous fans, faceless people. That might suggest something that isn’t quite right. It’s vitally important for us to carry out lots of test play opportunities where we round up groups of trustworthy gamers whose voices will be more hands-on and on-point.”

There’s a little more from this chat with Kitase over on RPG Site. We’ll have more exclusive stuff from Kitase and the FF13 team on Nova Crystallis and its sibling sites as we near its Western release date in mid-February. If you can’t until then to play it, both the Xbox 360 and region-free PS3 versions plus the soundtrack are available for import with free shipping. Remember you can discuss the upcoming release of Lightning Returns on our Community Forum, Mognet Central!