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| - Despite having developed many games on portable platforms, Tabata has got an affinity with more traditional console fare. He has said in an interview that in Japan more and more gamers lean towards games that can be played casually, but he personally enjoys and grew up with core-centric standalone games, and wants to preserve the integrity of them, and leave a legacy of these types of games. There's a physicality to Tabata's games, as seen in the more grounded fantasy of Final Fantasy Type-0 and Final Fantasy XV. "When we were making the transition, we sat down and I discussed with Nomura the game," he says. "I felt that I wanted to shift it more to be more realistic. For example, when you're battling a really strong boss like a behemoth, if you go at it from just the front you're going to get hit with his counter-attacks. You have to think about baiting it to attack forward, but then break its stance and attack it from the side. I wanted to make it so you're fighting a real animal, but with easy-to-manipulate controls as well as dramatic effects. My basis was to keep it grounded in reality." Tabata's personal taste leans towards western games and open worlds. He thinks one of the strengths of Japanese game development is a strong ethos of making a game right from start to finish, and getting everything solidly down and having a good plan, not letting any single element of the game slip. He describes being the same way, trying at every level to push the game to be the best it can be and keep striving to improve it. Tabata mentions Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura as his biggest influencers at Square Enix, saying that the passion the two worked with gave him a good sense of what series' creator Hironobu Sakaguchi expected from a Final Fantasy title.
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