This has already been splattered all over the Interweb, but thought I should point it out too - big sister site Gamasutra has an in-depth interview with FeelPlus president Ray Nakazato, the chap who's currently executing on Lost Odyssey under the direction of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi - and it's an absolutely fascinating piece.

This is mainly because Nakazato talks incredibly frankly about the biz, from his time at Microsoft Game Studios Japan working on Ninety-Nine Nights ("It was just going so wrong. So I was there [in Korea], Mizuguchi was there, to kind of sort it out") to previously unknown Xbox 360 titles ("Then one project that we were doing with Mr. Okamoto (and Game Republic) was canned... It was a third-person shooter game with a Japanese samurai. Kind of half historical, half sci-fi.")

He also talks about the challenges of developing Lost Odyssey with Unreal Engine 3: "It was hard, because it was a new platform, and Unreal Engine 3 itself was in development, so we had to deal with incomplete middleware. We actually released a Lost Odyssey demo in Japan in November, though we finished it in June of last year. Back then, the Unreal Engine was still incomplete, so we had to release something on incomplete middleware... Now that they've done Gears of War, the engine itself is much more stable." There's oodles more in there (Matsuno references!), so feel free to check it out in detail.