JRPG gamers have waited a very long time to play this game. 10 years is an impossibly long development cycle for a single game. The development cost for that game must be stretched thin right now after 10 years. We wonder how many copies of the game they need to sell to make up for the cost.
LEPAKING IN LESTALLUM
Are those...sekolah rendah chairs?!
Anyway, back to the
lepak-ing culture that is apparently rampant in the game. The blasé attitude that pervades our culture will be present and accounted for in one of the towns in the game, Lestallum. Wan Hazmer is the lead game designer for environments in the game and is one of the only Malaysians to make it into the Japanese game development. In charge of creating the 'culture' in the game, Wan Hazmer tried to introduce as many Malaysian elements as he could including
orang minyak and
pontianaks as in-game enemies but was shot down.
I'm all about that tarik life.
What
did make it into the final iteration of the game is our food like teh tarik, roti canai, and satay. Not only that, Wan Hazmer speaks
in an interview that
lepak culture is very much a part of the town Lestallum. And when he says lepak, he doesn't mean the culture past time of doing nothing. He means the laid back, peaceful culture that Malaysians are all too familiar with. In the interview, he appreciates the slower-paced benefits of the
lepak-ing in our DNA – especially after working in Japan for so long.
TAIPING IN LESTELLUM?
Image: Flickr @ Geoff-inoz
In an interview with
The Star, Wan Hazmer also said that there's a hotel in the game that looks like something you might find in Taiping, Perak. It's based on Cuban architecture, and has colonial influence. We Googled "colonial hotel Taiping" and got this hotel. So this is our best guess for what it might look like in the end game.
Final Fantasy XV launches 29th November and this writer will mysteriously be absent from work for the next month. Tentative excuses include "There's a problem with my left phalange, so I need to get it fixed at the phalange store" and "I'm in trouble with some bird feather manufacturers and I'm going to lay low in Simpang Ampat for a bit. I'll be working remotely for four weeks." Fingers crossed, this works.