Last week we sat down with the Final Fantasy XI development team on the eve of the latest patch release to their current expansion, Wings of the Goddess, and talked with Koichi Ogawa (FFXI planner), Mitsutoshi Gondai (FFXI job planner), Mizuki Ito (FFXI battle planner), and Hiromichi Tanaka (FFXI producer) about the state of the game and its future. A good bulk of these questions were farmed up from my occasionally-updated My Life in Vana'diel blog and from other user submissions, but since my interview time was limited to 60 mana-burned minutes, I wasn't able to get in a bunch of the questions I still had on my plate, like those regarding BLMs and THFs and other burning topics. Don't despair, though. I'll be back in Japan soon enough, and whatever wasn't answered to your satisfaction here, you ungrateful bastards, will be answered in the near future. In the meanwhile, check out what the good folks in Shinjuku had to say about your favorite Japanese MMO.

1UP: Since Final Fantasy XI is the only majorly successful MMO to ever hit a video game console and to survive for seven years, can you tell us what you think has attributed to FFXI's long-lasting success?

Hiromichi Tanaka: Actually, that's a mystery to us as well, why it's been so successful with the players. But the fact that the users have stuck with the game for so long is...well, it gives us something to build off of. And the opinions that we get from the players, we take that and then we try to give something back. And it's that constant back and forth with the players, and the success that we've had with that, it's what's helped us continue for so long.

1UP: How do you feel about the state of Japanese game development? Nowadays, it seems like only the top-tier Japanese game developers are able to survive, while most of the lower-tier developers seem to be going the way of downloadable games only. And I guess, compared to western development, which has really grown in the last five or six years with PC developers crossing over. How do you think that the game market has changed, if at all, and how does that affect your future plans?

Koichi Ogawa: Yeah, this is something that our president, Mr. Wada, seems to be touching on a lot lately. What Mr. Tanaka-san said is that the Japanese market really hasn't changed that much. It hasn't gone up or down. Whereas, especially over this time, switching to the next-generation machines, it's that there's more and more users in the European and U.S. markets. And because there are more users over there, that's why that market seems to be getting bigger. And while the Japanese market's not getting smaller, it's just not moving like the other two markets are.

1UP: Okay, well, I'll jump into this user-submitted list then. Recently a number of changes have gone into the game, such as bringing Nomad Moogles into areas like Mhaura and Selbina, which players have been wanting for years. I think for at least five years, people have been wanting Nomad Moogles in these places. So why, after all this time, are you guys adding them now? Is it a kind of way to hold onto people who might otherwise leave? Or do you have another rationale as to why it's time to add these? Do you plan to address player requests like this a little more promptly in the future?

KO: Well, we're always listening to what the players have to say, and what they want. We're always considering the certain things that they ask for. There are several reasons why we can't do things right away all the time. Sometimes it's technical limits, sometimes it's time limits, and resource limits on our side. But the reason we've started releasing all of this stuff now is that the Aht Urhgan story is pretty much wrapped up, and that's calmed down now. And all of the work that went into the Wings of the Goddess expansion, now that it's released, has calmed do