War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius can be considered pretty much a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics.
The western release is getting close to passing its six-months milestone, and it’s a good chance to hear from the developers about their plans for the game.
Twinfinite asked director and producer Hiroki Fujimoto about a variety of topics, including the reception in the west and the possibility of expanding to new platforms.
Giuseppe: Now that we’re six months after the release of the game in the west, how would you gauge the reception among the western audience?
Hiroki Fujimoto: Our global players have all been playing with a lot of enthusiasm, for which I am very grateful and happy.
The players in the West are very direct when it comes to their requests and their feedback towards new events and units whenever they’re introduced to the game, and we use that feedback to make improvements and run new events. It’s very rewarding for us to have honest and genuine feedback from the players on the game.
Giuseppe: Can you talk about your plans going forward to further expand the game?
Hiroki Fujimoto: We always try to be mindful of creating compelling game content in order to keep our players engaged and interested. We are planning to have continued collaborations with mainline titles from the FINAL FANTASY series, so I hope that as many people as possible—FINAL FANTASY fans included—will continue to enjoy the game or start playing for the first time.
Giuseppe: As the developer of a tactical simulation RPG, how do you feel about the state of the genre nowadays?
Hiroki Fujimoto: I think the tactical RPG genre always has a certain amount of popularity and following. Even within the FINAL FANTASY series, FINAL FANTASY TACTICS (FFT) is a title that’s especially popular to this very day.
FFT also currently available on mobile devices as a one-time purchase app, so it’s not only a title that people have played in the past, but also one that many people still continue to pick up for the first time.
Giuseppe: A game like this necessarily needs an enormous cast of playable characters compared to traditional JRPGs. How does the team go about designing them while making them feel unique?
Hiroki Fujimoto: When designing any character, we treat each their unique qualities with care, but we also make sure to think about the fact that their roles may change depending on the combination of elements, jobs, and equipment used, and also the fact that strategies will shift depending on how that character is set up in a party. We design each character while considering the game balance so that the same character can fulfill different roles no matter the player’s strategy.
Giuseppe: Now that the game is out and active on mobile, are you considering expanding to other platforms? For instance, Square Enix has released some Mobius Final Fantasy on Steam before.
Hiroki Fujimoto: At this time, we are looking to encourage even more people to play WOTV FFBE on mobile devices and are looking into bringing the title to additional mobile download stores. However, we are not considering expanding to platforms beyond mobile.
That said, if we see a strong demand from many of our players, we may begin to consider something like a release on PC.
War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is currently available for iOS and Android.
If you’d like to learn even more, you can check out our previous interview with Fujimoto-san.