"That's Amazing!" - Final Fantasy Creator Approves Of FF6 Video Created By AI

Under no circumstances you gotta hand it to AI.

We forget these guys are all old now. Plenty of older folks getting fooled by AI.

It does actually impress to be honest lol

For an AI video it does look really good tbh. I'd love to see a full 3D version of this classic.

Sabin lifting the train might be the most AI created thing I've ever seen.

I hate the way girls run in many Japanese games. It's just so goofy 😭

FFIII (That's my FF6) needs no remake. It is a perfect game warts and all. All I need is the original ROM added to a platform or as a bonus/DLC to the remasters.

Not watched the video, just came here to dump on AI and Sakaguchi’s take.

Putting aside how disgustingly obvious it is that this was created by AI, I will admit that I would kill for a FF6 remake with an art style like this.

Wait, Sakaguchi's a fan of soulless computer imagery? Whoof, slow down...

(I still hate the AI video more though.)

I know nothing about this guy but he’s gotta be pretty old by now. You have to give old people some slack. They aren’t terminally online and don’t know about 90% of the stuff we’re aware of. And even if they’ve been made aware of ai videos by now, they almost certainly aren’t aware of all the moral grandstanding against it.

Yeah a guy cant like something nowdays just because its made by Ai , the only bulls*#t thing is how you all look for validity by repeating each other. Yeah we get it you gonna lose your jobs eventually to the machine and its gonna be a slow painful burn , so just enjoy the ride.

AI should be purely for memes and POC / getting ideas.

Like it's good to ask it stuff or get some ideas bout shiz or to bring an idea to life so you can sanity check, but otherwise nah man.

Ha ! This kind of old guy would be ecstatic in front of a remake of Starfox with realistic textures instead of polygons, and where Slippy Toad seems actually slippy with its wet skin !

We are not that kind of people, sir !

Wait...

I mean, I don't hate the look and would buy a version of FF6 that looked and played like that in an instant (as long as the AI was used for things like this, fun and inspiration)

Well, yup, the small x second clips showing each character watching the camera and doing some stuff, smiling whatever are typically the kind of AI generated content you can see everywhere and are mostly fine, even tho I'm not fond of it but I must admit that the gameplay segments are quite impressive, that I wasn't expecting

@Automated_Unit_4937 dudes run goofy in anime and Japanese games too

It does look good. But it's AI so I want to kill it with fire. Both things can be true.

I’m gonna assume he didn’t thoroughly look at the video to know it was AI or he isn’t knowledgeable in what AI videos look like.

@PtM The creator of the Final Fantasy franchise has more authority on this topic than you do. Are you even a developer?

@StyrofoamCup All I need is the original ROM, plus a bugfix patch so that the evasion mechanic actually works and Sketch doesn't crash the game. And a retranslation patch so that the characters don't have their names in all-caps throughout the game by default. And also the extra content from the GBA version.

@Bluelink45 Well it's a major important thing that's happening in society right now and in gaming specifically. And people have some strong opinions about it, both good and bad. You're not obligated to read or post in these comment sections.

@Olliemar28 Nintendo Life has an editorial section. That would be a better place opinion pieces like this.

I just hate how hollow and insubstantial AI is. Even if parts look interesting its still a mockery, and will never be anyone's expression and has very little intrigue or value.

Like why would you bother reading a book that nobody actually wrote? Why would you play a game that nobody actually designed?

I like the FFVI that Sakaguchi produced, Kitase directed, the characters that Amano and Nomura drew and the sprites Shibuya made. I don't think you can replace that with A.I. and ever make the same impact

If only Sakaguchi know that AI is just artificial imitation and nothing more.

Ok, I'll be blunt. Stop treating Sakaguchi-San like a child! Did you even consider that he recognized it for what it is. Just a pitch that should give you an idea what FF VI could like like.
Maybe he simply isn't as dismissive as most people on social media.
Also we all have seen our fair share of fan made mockups of potential remakes of video game classics. Those looked weird as well. Still I respect the work they put into it.
But there are people who don't have the skill or are less talented. I think it is totally legitimate if they use AI to pitch their vision.

Dont give me hope ….

Btw, I’ve recently been playing OG FF7 for the first time, and while it is great, I can’t believe how vastly superior 6 is over 7.
6 was peak FF

We need a 6 remake

Well SquareEnix, remake it properly already

FFVI has no remake. FFVI needs no remake.

The environments here look pretty good but I don't like the overly-detailed character designs and especially the garish, crazy costumes that definitely look in-line with early 2000's Square-Enix games. To me these characters have a simple cartoony charm that isn't enhanced with a hundred weird fashion accessories.

Just to add to the discussion.
Hilarious that the only part she runs fast is on the sand, the one part where you'd expect her to move slow.

@Bluelink45 I guess I can sympathize. But hey, people (including me) just want to be heard, I guess. They will use the outlets available to them to make their feelings known. In this age of crumbling democracy and rampant oligarchy, sometimes that's all that's left to us.

The AI hate is getting overblown again. The trailer genuinely wasn’t bad at all.

At some point, criticizing anything AI-related stopped being about the actual quality and became a matter of principle.

Ha ha if this had been an official trailer people would be going nuts for it, just like the FF7 remake!

Fickle audience.

@Dr_Lugae "Like why would you bother reading a book that nobody actually wrote? Why would you play a game that nobody actually designed?"

Because most people care very little about how the sausage is made as long as they, personally, like the taste of the sausage. We live in a self-centered and over hedonistic world now, so "who made what" matters little compared to "am I getting pleasure from this."

My favourite FF! Omg I want a remake so bad now

I have seen AI do some good work and of course I do see benefits of how it can be used but I don’t think it’s worth the cost of what we could lose. I think we’re losing a lot of originality with it and job security also.

I will say the best thing I have ever seen was a movie trailer for final fight. Us humans just can’t grow em big enough to be an Andor or Abigail.

@Aquinas "Official trailer" would imply the product in question actually exists, is in development, and will be playable in some capacity eventually. There'd be something to actually look forward to.

And this isn't to say a fan created trailer isn't cool IN THEORY... But using genAI to do it more speaks to the pure cynicism of it all; especially when it comes to nostaliga. When you get past the technologically impressive aspect of it (and ignore the laundry list of ethical issues), it's basically JUST jingling keys: A quick and easy way to get undiscerning people to "go nuts".

It's kinda insane to write an article like this. Are we actually obsessing about a comment from an individual like we are on a witch hunt? You guys might want to reconsidered how you approach this topic in the future. No one is obligated to adhere to whatever ideas you have about the world. When they say something you don't like, it isn't reason to write a hate article about a single person. Lost respect today for this site. To be clear, I am not pro AI.

The "pearl clutching" over AI generated media is getting a little cringey. I think as long as it's tagged as such, it's a little tiresome to keep hearing "AI bad!".

@turmeric16 But all the cool kids are doing it!

AI is useful at a lot of things but it’s not that good at generating videos from scratch yet. Still and all, the AI-ness of the video hardly matters, the real problem is that this open world third person action game thing that has taken over final fantasy and nearly all other game design is terrible, so I think THATS what we need to kill with fire. A real game that can played the way this looks would be a travesty.

My fave part isn't even the whole clankership but the prompt evidently reducing the party to three characters a la VII and (mostly) onward, perhaps because the prompter can no longer picture a modern FF game otherwise. Demake much?😅

IA gratious hate is weird.
Its a totally believable video. Not GREAT, but it looks kinda good (except for a few scenes).

@tseliot It's tiring to hear people say the truth? lol
Nothing against AI as a tech, but GenAI itself is pretty much bad at its job in the eyes of someone who really cares about art

So disappointing. Truly. And more and more fall for this junk. Recently I found out my favorite band (Within Temptation) also dabbled into AI with some music clips and, having been a fan of them for a good 20 years, that felt rather devastating to the point I can't even listen to their music anymore without getting sad.

At this rate, I don't know if I can continue to enjoy final fantasy games anymore either. It's all gonna be AI slop soon.

@Yosher within temptation 🤟

This is an overreaction.
A graphically overhauled newly realized 3D version of old 2D games is always an intriguing possibility. Don’t use AI in the development of the actual game if this were to inspire one.

We’re not allowed to be momentarily impressed by something just because it’s AI? It’s also likely he was just being polite to whoever shared it with him.

Let’s cut the man who helped deliver hundreds of hours of timeless entertainment to millions of people some slack, shall we?

It looks pretty good at times, just others you get that unmistakably soulless and generic look to the faces etc that you get with AI. Also the motion can be unusually uncanny valley or something, like when your new 'smart' TV does too much motion smoothing.

I won't dunk on the Final Fantasy guy himself as I suspect he's just an older gentleman who probably genuinely had no idea what he was seeing and thought it looked cool.

AI fearmongering so bad you got articles now lambasting the opinions of talented, LEGENDARY game creators just because they praise an AI-created concept.

@Dr_Corndog 100%.

No Ultros. 0/10.

Who the heck cares? This feels like an excuse to harvest AI hate points. Not everyone analyzes every millisecond during a video to catch any signs of AI. He probably just wanted to make someone happy without realizing it wasn’t a person at all.

Looks cool to be fair, and I don't care for going all in on any one side of this debate.

For concepts, which this is, it is fine.

If SE released that exact same trailer, sans edge case errors and the odd facial expression, I wonder what the reception would be!

It seems like the western audience is more against ai than the east. The eastern audience just seems more indifferent to it.

Look, I dislike the commercialization of generative AI as much as the next guy. But dunking on somebody for sharing a post that was made with AI when they didn't profit a penny off it? That's just tacky. At best, this is a nothingburger that hardly qualifies as "news," and at worst, it's a deliberate attempt at engagement farming which I am negatively contributing to by commenting.

I've never played a Final Fantasy game, so I have no affinity for this person whatsoever. So I think I'm being pretty objective and not just an overzealous fanboy when I say, it's sad to see peopoe disparaging the creator of one of the most prolific video game franchises of all time because of one benign thing. As prominent games journalists, Nintendo Life should know better; this is a great way to burn bridges and lose out on future developer interviews.

Again, I strongly dislike when people use generative AI to generate a profit. I hate when people pass it as their own original work when it pulls from countless other assets made by human hands; it is, in essence, theft. But, if they're not making money from it, and they're upfront and honest about it being made with AI, I really don't see a problem.

People will say that generating an AI image/video has a negative impact on the environment. Sure, but so does your phone, your car emissions, the plastics you don't recycle, your hair spray. People love looking for reasons to shame others without ever looking inward. They also lack the nuance to understand that not everything is black and white.

A lot of the same people clutching their perils over someone sharing an AI image probably also laughed at the older folk who took the "Satanic panic" and "the Red Scare" too seriously. It's literally the same kind of paranoia and fear mongering, and this kind of over-reaction does more to hurt the cause against generative AI than help it.

There are real evils in the world to get upset about. There are predators in high positions of power who walk freely among us. Channel your energy on those things instead of making up problems.

@Dr_Lugae I think you don't really understand AI. You can use AI to generate something from a single text prompt, but it will just be average and fail when it comes to higher-level issues like discourse continuity and subtext. It takes a lot more effort to make something good with it. It still requires designers to create games, novelists to write books, and so on.

Hey, if the man likes it, let him like it. He’s entitled to his opinions, as you are yours. We don’t need to redirect him for wrongthink.

I mean do you blame NL’s blatant anti AI bias undertones bleeding in all their articles whenever the subject comes up?

With the way their last few articles have been going in a downward spiral (with this being latest addition to that pile) I wouldn’t be surprised if the growing AI apparatus is a feared outlet to take their journalist jobs too at this rate.

As someone here already said in the comment section about the cold hard reality: Most people don’t care about WHERE X came from as long as X gives them pleasure.

People that enjoy eating chicken, steak, eggs or drinking chocolate milk don’t care about the less then happy source all that came from as long as they can continue to consume and enjoy. That fact won’t change for the foreseeable future and applies to any conceivable area whether it be food or technology

You already got people that can’t tell the difference between a real painting and an AI painting where the latter won an art contest unless someone slaps “AI” under one of them.

Give it a few more months, and I fully expect we'll see an article about AI-generated Game Key Cards. Screw the logistics, it'll happen.

Sakaguchi fell to the dark side.

@MyUsernameWasTaken GOD NO!

I think Ollie is getting it wrong. I don’t think about this about AI appraisal or anything.

If we’ve never seen a 3D remaster of FF6 so far (akin to the FF7 one), I firmly believe it’s because the director was not inspired enough about where to start, or if it could actually be done. It’s hard to translate from 2D to 3D and do it right. Metroid Prime did it on first try, but such feats are generally quite rare.

I feel that this video made something click in the director’s head. It gave him a glimpse of what a 3D FF6 remaster could look like, and that is like music to my ears. It showed him that it was FEASIBLE.

We, finally and at long last, may have a shot at getting a 3D FF6 somewhere in the next 5-10 years. That’s really exciting!

@Yoshi3 Well I USED to love them. Their music is great. Then I found out about their AI usage. :/

...if their next album is devoid of AI I'll get back to being a fan, but Bleed Out will always be the black sheep album for me.

I had to look at who wrote this human generated slop of an article after reading it.

To be fair, it IS pretty amazing that something that runs on a combination of minerals and metals and is powered by electricity can produce something like this from us feeding it written human language and visual images.

However I understand that people are afraid of "AI slop" making it's way into majority of games.

We need to understand that we have just about begun this AI revolution and while it's pretty incredible that it can generate a few seconds of video it still has a long way to go.

It's not like the first people making polygonal 3D in the early 60's thought "Heck yeah! Let's make a feature length movie with this!".

But today you see CGI everywhere.

It's the same with generative AI. It's getting better almost every month.

It won‘t be long until these weird AI artifacts like the repeating camera angle will disappear. One might even type „make it less soulless“ in their prompt and suddenly it will have us in tears.

Cold Fusion recently talked about this animated short and honestly without anyone telling you you could easily mistake it for being man-made:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PlfOoKTFcAE&pp=ygUgQWkgYW5pbWF0aW9uIHBpZ2VvbiB0aW1lIG1hY2hpYmU%3D&ra=m

That said, I am not pro AI because it will make a lot of artists lose their jobs and everything we see of AI was trained on the hard work of humans who get paid nothing for it. It’s hard to deny the truth though because at the end of the day it will be about money. And if it‘s not for some producer’s passion project there will be less art solely made by humans that will actually get funded.

The video looks brilliant, but I'm still not feeling the hype. The graphics are great, sure, but it doesn't really show what the gameplay would be like or whether it would actually be fun. That's kind of key for me lol

That said, FF VI is already fine as it is.

@turmeric16 Well thanks to your comment, I've lost respect for you. And I don't even know you. Funny how that happens, huh?

Nah, Nintendo Life is absolutely in the right to criticize Sakaguchi on this. He's one of the greatest artists of our medium, borderline Miyamoto levels of importance to gaming history, so this is at the level of Miyamoto saying games are "just a product". People lost their minds over that, and frankly, rightfully so.

The idea of games as art is reserved for indies only now. AAA has truly lost themselves.

@ShadLink yeh i wish people weren't such absolutists about genAI and expect everyone else to fall in line too. It can at least be used to show a proof of concept... as it does well here to do! There are uses for genAI but the luddites have the loudest voices sadly.

@turmeric16 i saw the above guy castigate you, so i had to scroll up... only to read a very sensible comment from you pushing back against the consensus stream. I respect what you say and agree with it. I dislike what social media has done to all of our brains, we are sold to all have the correct opinion on a thing. This man simply found the video inspiring and everyone else made it a war over genAI. Thank you for standing up for a minority opinion: common sense

@SirLink its function is a proof of concept video, its not really happening... if it looks like it has some promise to yiu then its done the job it needed to

Sakaguchi, please shut the heck up.

@dratsab Honestly I get why people hate (Gen) AI. It's taking real people's jobs and it's increasing RAM and storage prices because of pure demand. But when used tastefully I personally think AI can help a lot, especially for creating concepts.

Man finna get Chrono Trigger remake cancelled

"Download X and never miss what's happening"
Brother, I'm okay missing out on whatever forest fire is happening in there.

People love to overreact over anything AI. It's ridiculous. They also dont see the irony in regurgitating the phrase "AI slop" verbatim.

Yes you can tell it's AI because of the weird slow movements but the video still looks cool overall.

I saw it first-thing in the morning while drowzy and on a small iPhone-screen, so my first impression was that the clip does what AI does best; vibes. It looked neat. If you ignore the AI foibles that haven't been ironed out yet, and don't look or think too much about the details, it very much reminded me how I'd like a FFVI remake with the production values of the FFVII project. Basically, I understand why Sakaguchi commented positively on it.

But I'm thoroughly in the camp that I'd really prefer if we didn't have the environmentally-disastrous, job-stealing plagiarism-tech that is so fiercely championed by talentless hack CEOs who only want it in order to eventually fire those pesky workers who want stability, protections and a fair wage.

Nothing AI gives us is worth the cost.

If AI made a perfect 10/10 masterpiece recreation of FFVI in 3D you wouldn't want to play it?