Square Enix Talks WiiWare, ActRaiser Possibilities

The brains behind the FF:CC My Life as King have spoken on developing for WiiWare.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King co-creators Fumiaki Shiraishi and Toshihiro Tsuchida recently spoke to GamaSutra on developing the unique launch title for Nintendo's WiiWare download service.

On the whole, the duo were positive on working for WiiWare, allowing for games with a single focus. "You can tell from this game design that if it succeeds, it will probably succeed better with the Wii, as opposed to other platforms."

One of the main concerns from consumers and developers would be the system's storage space. Nintendo have kept quiet on the need for a hard-drive, or expanded memory capabilities. For WiiWare games a memory recommendation of 40MB is in place, which some have felt could dent the creative process. Shiraishi says otherwise, "It actually wasn't that difficult. I think we designed the game to fit in the memory space. It wasn't so much that we had a game and had to squeeze it down. If anything, I think the size restriction helped us. I don't think we would've had this game design idea if we didn't have the memory restriction to begin with.

Once we had the restriction, we had... all our artists are veterans, so if you tell them the size, they'll hit it right on. And once we started making it, in the beginning, a lot of people didn't think we could fit this game in the given size, but we were actually quite a bit under. It uses a little bit of compression, and a little bit of techniques. You can fit a lot of game in a small size."

A sequel to the SNES classic ActRaiser was also brought up, given the series' apperance on the Virtual Console and European mobile phones several years ago. Shiriashi commented: "I'd like to make an ActRaiser sequel. That would be kind of fun."

Via Gamasutra.