Final Fantasy 7 writer says Dragon Quest taught him that protagonists should be “self-insert for the player”, but realized “I shouldn’t be so set on the idea that a silent protagonist is the only way”

Responding to legendary Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii’s comments that Final Fantasy‘s protagonists “speak a lot”, series writer Kazushige Nojima says that the advent of character animations opened his eyes to the possibility of chatty characters.

In an interview with Game Informer, Horii says, “There’s one key difference that I really saw back then: the protagonists in the Final Fantasy titles, they speak a lot. Whereas for Dragon Quest, the key objective for [the games], or the experience it offers for the player, is that the player becomes the protagonist themselves.”