Im Defending Nomura.

So I really like KH, and I've been excited about ff15 since it got announced back in 2006, I've put a lot of my excitement behind Nomura as his concept of merging disney with ff was a left field idea that ended up working pretty well. I easily became a fan of any game he had part in.

Still having positive feelings about Nomura, these articles kind of make me sick to my stomach.

http://kotaku.com/the-man-who-saved-...1637142585/all
http://www.gameinformer.com/games/fi...antasy-xv.aspx

I have nothing against Tabata and I'm glad he took on the project. But these two articles make Nomura look bad

People are already saying "wow what was nomura doing these past 8 years" and immediately reacting negatively toward Nomura. I'm very saddened by these statements. If you go an reference his wikipedia page you can see the multiple projects he was working on during those 8 years on top of ff15, and the ff13 games, the kh games etc etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetsuya_Nomura

People need to cut him some slack.. I feel like he's being falsely accused in reactions for screwing up the development whens he's clearly a hard worker who got spread way too thinly...........

These articles also mention how the game is 50-60% done, and that completion is from tabata and his team in the past 2 years. Which is once again wonderful, but I have this gut feeling that ff15 is no longer the versus 13 game I fell in love with back in 2006. I feel like I'm really not going to be getting the game I had hoped for, feeling pretty bummed out.

I have nothing but respect for Nomura, and I will support him, because he works his ass off and doesn't deserve ridicule from something he could not control and did the best he could on with the time he had. I cannot imagine how much pressure there was for him doing multiple roles on 5 games at a time on top of being a director. He's the warrior of video game devs.

Does anyone feel the same way here or similarly? Curious to also hear opposing thoughts.

Yeah I was about to write an article about Tabata getting 55% done. Cause seriously.... it's been 8 years, what the hell was going on if Tabata comes in and gets 55% of it done.

It's not the same game. That should speak volumes though. That it wasn't far enough along that they could scrap it and change it to XV. That was 6 years into the project and it wasn't enough to not scrap?

I'm sorry but, no. I don't think Nomura deserves the support after the development hell he put that game through. They had to get someone who was working on multiple projects themselves to come in and get trout done.

Nomura was juggling too many projects it seems.

I imagine they got fairly far into it before they decided to switch to next-gen. The architecture of the PS4/One is a lot different to the dev kits for PS3/360 so there was probably a very stalled period where the switch over was occurring which likely meant assets had to be built from the ground up again.

A lot of things also happened during the time Versus XIII > XV was in development, like XIV 1.0 tanking etc which likely probably caused a lot of stock to be taken in regards to where XV stood.

Tabata came in, and the 2 year period of him as co-director was probably a transition period where the project was being handed off to Tabata before officially announcing him as director.

Just stinks of bad project management all around. There are likely multiple parties to blame for this.

I am a big fan of Tetsuya Nomura but being a director is a position that brings great power and so great responsibility. You need to be able to plan your projects properly. In all fairness I say it is a mistake that can happen to anyone, especially if so many things change but it should not happen so it is probably the best the way it is. The people I really see possible for the director position of the Final Fantasys are either Hironobu Sakaguchi who is no longer working for them, Yoshinori Kitase, Motomu Toriyama or Hajime Tabata. Directng Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy XV and i don't know what else he did plus partly writing scripts and being the Art Designer is just too much for so many things and you need to know how much you can expect from yourself and what is too much and while it is in the core the same Final Fantasy title all those changes might have caused a great delay as well, while that might not be the only reason.

Yeah a lot of people forget in the time FFXV was in "development hell," Nomura continued to helm the Kingdom Hearts franchise, created the Dissidia franchise, made The World Ends With You and who knows however many other projects. That's an impressive resume, not even counting his non-directorial contributions to XIII and the like.

Like other JRPG publishers, Square made the shift to mobile and Versus was not a focus for them. It clearly still isn't, with Nomura moving onto other projects, letting a second tier director finish the game.

That said, it does not look like the game they originally showed. Its initial trailers had such an insane level of image quality but the character models and jaggies look to make this the poster child for cross-Gen game development gone wrong.

Nomura was certainly overstretched and I think that was part of the problem, I also felt like he thought of FFXV/VersusXIII as more of a pet project as opposed to a real priority, hence why he was overstretched. If you go back to Nomura's early interviews for Versus XIII, it's obvious he approached the game as him being able to create whatever grand vision he wanted and he talked about changing the RPG landscape. He approached the game as an artist, which isn't a bad thing but sometimes you need someone to come in and keep a project grounded in reality. This is why I do like Tabata, because he cut his teeth as a director working on mobile and handhelds whereas Nomura cut his teeth on, at the time, a top of the line current gen console, so I feel Tabata is certainly better about looking at a project and saying no, when a concept is not going to be feasible in a timely/cost-effective/practical way for a project. Basically Nomura can't say no to a good idea whereas Tabata understand that you need to edit. I feel the biggest problem was that XIII received a lukewarm reception with sequels that didn't do much to improve that sentiment to some fans, as well as XIV initially tanking and SE dragging its feet concerning Type-0 that XV ended up becoming this mythological title that would herald an SE/FF Renaissance and thus before Nomura knew it, his pet project became something of a priority to the fans as opposed to him.

I don't feel Nomura is a terrible director, the KH games are strong games even if I feel the story has zig-zagged far too often from compelling to poor taste. Still I've always felt he treated XV as an art piece which is why it never seemed to make much progress cause you can't rush "artistic vision". Nomura is on the other end of the auteur director, whereas Toriyama is the whining "How dare you not love my masterpiece! You're obviously too stupid to understand its greatness!" Nomura comes across more as the "It will be done when it's achieved my level of perfection" and that is just not a way to approach any kind of project.

With that said, Nomura stepping down doesn't sound like it was due to incompetence, it sounds more like it was done to get him working on the rest of the backlog projects he's been putting off doing things no one asked him for. Yes, he worked on various KH games but ask any KH fan if they really wanted five side-story/prequel games across multiple platforms instead of just Kingdom Hearts III and see what answer you get. This is especially annoying when he mentions most of those games were made to tie over KH fans while his team labored over Versus XIII because they couldn't start KHIII until it was done. Nomura partially (I'm sure Wada and a few other SE execs were involved) created his busy schedule that kept delaying all his projects. Let's face it, Nomura was kind of thrust into the void Sakaguchi left when he quit the company, even though at the time he was more game artist than actual producer/director and I think SE caught wind of that and went along, placing him into a very awkward position he was most likely ill prepared for.

I don't think he's a bad guy in all of this but he has been sitting on a project for eight years and well someone has to take the blame and that is kind of the producer/director's job. It's kind of like when Hiromichi Tanaka was thrown under the bus for XIV 1.0 being made of utter failure despite not having a very good clue if he really was fully responsible for the game failing. Either way, Nomura is responsible for sitting on a lucrative IP that has been driving fans crazy for almost a decade so I feel he deserves some flak though I don't necessarily feel this means he's a bad director.