Read all of it, watched all the videos.
Highlights IMO
- FF7 didn't load all the sound individually, reducing the quality. Nobuo mentioned Suikoden as a series which did sound better... it makes sense they were familiar with other JRPG series, although I still thought it was interesting that Suikoden was picked out there.
- It's interesting to see the kinships and friendships, it seems like Nobuo and Amano are seemingly pretty friendly with each other, with Amano singling out Nobuo's music. Meanwhile, Kitase and Nomura seemed to be pretty good friends with each other. Basically, the seniority and paygrade, probably also age categories, meant for these kind of micro-relations which I thought was interesting.
- The insight into the localization/US side of things was pretty interesting. For instance, the team originally used game sharks to hack the data files out of the games since they didn't get them from the main office, plus at one point one person was doing all the localizing. It also makes the point that FF7 really made a huge headway for JRPGs in the US.
I also thought it was interesting how often they had like college students, like from UC Irvine, doing play testing or just in general the whole operation was very much not this huge planned out thing but just a bunch of people kind of getting together to help the games get done.
- They didn't get any bits from Sakaguchi when they got to the subject of the movie, wondering if he still has some strong negative feelings on the matter.
- I finally know who the translator is for all those other FF interviews and stuff I watched, Kyoko!
