Mistwalker
SEATTLE — The father of Final Fantasy has blown a lot of cash on free-to-play mobile games.
Hironobu Sakaguchi has, by his count, spent about 150,000 yen ($1,500) on Puzzle and Dragons, the mega-popular mobile puzzle RPG. “I thought, if I’m gonna spend money on it, I’m just gonna spend money on it until I’m happy,” Sakaguchi said.
Now the creator of one of the world’s best-known series of role-playing videogames is working on his own free-to-play mobile game, hoping some of that cash will flow in the other direction. WIRED caught up with Sakaguchi at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle last month, where he was promoting his upcoming game to legions of Final Fantasy fans.
Terra Battle , produced by Sakaguchi’s studio Mistwalker, plays like a mashup of puzzle games and strategy RPGs. You build an army of warriors, then drag them around a grid of squares, attacking enemies by flanking them. The concept, Sakaguchi says, is based on a simplified version of the classic Japanese board game shogi called hasami-shogi, in which you aim to sandwich your opponent’s pieces between yours.
Sakaguchi has spent most of his career making big, bold console role-playing games. After he split Square Enix and left Final Fantasy behind, Sakaguchi launched Mistwalker, securing a contract with Microsoft to create two big RPGs, Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, for Xbox 360. Later, he created The Last Story for Wii with Nintendo.
With opportunities to create huge console games drying up, Mistwalker’s focus is on mobile. RPG players used to paying a one-time fee and immersing themselves in Sakaguchi’s worlds for hundreds of hours at a stretch might balk at the idea of following him into the free-to-play realm, where you have to wait for an energy bar to refill before you can play again, where powerful characters are locked behind a randomized pay-to-play lottery system known as “gacha.”
Sakaguchi hopes Terra Battle won’t seem as stringent as, say, Puzzle and Dragons. “In some games, it’s really hard to get the rare characters; the percentage [of rare characters in the gacha lottery] is really low,” he says. In Terra Battle, he says he wants players have a significantly better chance of getting the rarer, more powerful characters added on to their teams.
A Little Help From His Friends
To get fans of Japanese RPGs to really, really want those extra characters, Sakaguchi is breaking out his Rolodex. After working with a veritable Who’s Who of game designers, artists and musicians over his long career, he’s calling on all of them to chip in with Terra Battle. Already on tap are Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, original character artist Yoshitaka Amano, Final Fantasy XII director Yasumi Matsuno and Sonic the Hedgehog character designer Naoto Oshima.
Hironobu Sakaguchi. Mistwalker
Sakaguchi is dangling the possibility of these collaborations in front of fans as stretch goals a la Kickstarter, but instead of money, he’s seeking downloads. As more and more users download the Terra Battle app, more new characters, music and more get added to the game.
“The console game business is more about make it, ship it, and forget it,” Sakaguchi said. “Mobile games are more like a festival: You keep adding, and adding, and adding. Just yesterday, I went on Facebook and asked someone, ‘Can you make me a character?’ through Messenger.”
And if Terra Battle reaches two million downloads—all but guaranteed considering the marketing blitz and Sakaguchi’s name recognition—he says he’ll start work on a console game set in the Terra Battle universe.
“I want an MMORPG,” he says, meaning a massively multiplayer online game. “I want to keep the essence of what’s going on in [the mobile version of] Terra Battle.” The basic gameplay of aligning your characters in rows and flanking the enemy, that is, only scaled up to 3-D for the console world. But, Sakaguchi cautions, none of this is set in stone yet.
Sakaguchi says he may add even more collaborators—game designers he’s never worked with before, fans who win art contests, even other characters from other franchises. “There’s an opportunity where you can get characters from outside the Terra Battle world and plop them in,” he said.
His dream collaborator, he says, is someone he’s worked with in the past: Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama. “Again.”
Laura Hudson contributed to this story.
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