This week's Dengeki PlayStation issue featured an interview with the Dissidia: Final Fantasy's development team; producer Tetsuya Nomura, senior director Takeshi Arakawa and planning director Mitsunori Takahashi.

Takahashi: We've currently revealed about 20% of Dissidia as a whole. Aside from the battle system, there are a lot of elements that haven't been shown. I think fans who have played the Final Fantasy series will be comfortable with them.

The original games are RPGs, so conceptually we're aiming for "Action-RPG plus competitive fighting," with the balance being half action and half RPG.

Regarding the battle portion, we're pretty much finished making the main characters themselves. Now we've got to spend a lot of time fine-tuning the combat balance.

Q. Why Jecht over Seymour?

Nomura: Jecht may not have been the final boss (with Seymour being the mid-boss), but going with Sin would obviously not work. (laughs) I thought if we chose Seymour it would be hard to show a proper connection between him and Tidus, and we'd end up having to put Yuna in too. We decided the best choice with a solid relation to Tidus would be Jecht.

Arakawa: The scenes with Tidus and Jecht should be quite an interesting expansion. In the main Final Fantasy X story the two only got a chance to talk together in the final scene. This time we're telling the parts of that story that couldn't be seen before.

Q. Are you saying we'll be able to see events that weren't shown in the main stories?

Arakawa: There will be quite a few. But what we're doing is fine tuning the original story details behind the characters' births, relationships, interactions. Tidus has a connection with the heroes, while Jecht is tangled with the characters on the Chaos side.

Q. But there wasn't exactly much dialogue between the Light Warriors and Garland...?

Arakawa: To an extent there are understandable characteristics in Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy III. We really think it's important to give players a taste of our works, but basically if the story takes place in Dissidia we don't see [various series'] characters participating as strange at all. Smile and don't think too much about knowing the original stories.

Q. When you say RPG, do you mean controlling characters as they wander around areas?

Arakawa: The main focus is more on character building, with customisation as a key point. This game is to show our appreciation to players who've enjoyed previous Final Fantasy titles, so with their interest in mind even gamers who aren't into action gaming can enjoy [Dissidia].

This isn't like Kingdom Hearts, where you walk around locations and find yourself in combat. This also isn't that same mechanic of action-based fighting in continuous encounters. It's more like "Should I take this guy on next? Nah, maybe I'd better go with this one instead..."

Like a level 80 Squall fighting a level 20 Light Warrior, even if there's a difference in levels it's possible to pull an upset on the opponent.

Nomura: "Choice" is very important.

Arakawa: We're also thinking about a community around Dissidia. Going forward we're looking more and more to incorporate a lot of original ideas into a Dissidia-suited communication system. Things like battle strength/ranking will be included, but basically we want to include a system where countless users can participate in one imagined "Battling Community," a world not about wins and losses but simply being connected to others trying to discover their own merits. Players who got together and can be excited about Final Fantasy.

Takahashi: Where you can learn to pull off really difficult challenges, and feel like "Getting to level 100 is where things just get started!" (laughs)

Arakawa: Stories have their ends, but that's not necessarily true when you've played a game. After finishing one you can think "It's not over yet!", there's still this part of the game to do, still that to do...

Mr. Nomura has been at all the voice recordings, and the script is double the length of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII.

Nomura: We have a release time in mind, so now we've just got to work hard on the development. I'm positive it's not far off, so please keep an eye out in anticipation. We plan on giving a solid release date at an event in August.