The 3rd Birthday Has Skippable Event Scenes

Cloud and Zack in Crisis Core. Read below for some development trivia.

Good news for those who just want to get Aya Brea as naked as possible as quickly as possible. You'll be able to skip event scenes in The 3rd Birthday. Director Hajime Tabata revealed this little bit earlier today at The 3rd Birthday official Twitter.

Skippable event scenes normally wouldn't be news, but in Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII, the event and limit skill scenes were not skippable. According to Tabata, by the time the development staff realized that they'd omitted the skip feature, it was already too late to put it in. This ended up being one area of Crisis Core that they greatly regret.

The 3rd Birthday Twitter has seen somewhat of a surge in Crisis Core posts of late as Tabata compared its development with that of The 3rd Birthday.

Crisis Core was originally imagined as a full action game, Tabata revealed. However, because the staff was more skilled with RPGs, they changed the design to have more RPG-like battles. In the end, Tabata feels the change was good.

When moving on to The 3rd Birthday, Tabata assembled people who seemed more capable in the action genre. He believes that The 3rd birthday has turned out according to its original image, although the quality is even greater than expected.

Getting strictly into Crisis Core's development, Tabata revealed a bit of trivia about the early Square Enix PSP title. One parts of Crisis Core ended up having to be cut because the game went beyond what could fit on a UMD. The area that was cut was the period when Zack and Cloud escape the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim and flee to Midgar. While Tabata felt that by showing the drama as Zack and Cloud fled to Midgar they could better show the ties between the two, they decided that it would instead be better to focus on Zack's activity as a soldier.

In other The 3rd Birthday news, this week's Jump has a one page report on the game. As detailed in this week's flying get column (see the weekly column for all the breaking Japanese magazine stories), Jump has profiles of Gabriel Monsigny and Kyle Madigan, along with a look at an orbital weapon called "Satellite Cannon."

If the usual publicity cycle holds, Famitsu should have a more detailed report next week, with official online media appearing shortly thereafter.