since we are talking about Ito, can i request an Ito interview? lots of final fantasy fans wants to know whats up with him, its been a long time since we heard of him
Yeah, I know people wanna know. I'm the same.
The main problem imo, to peek behind the curtain for a sec, is there are two types of interview with most Japanese developers:
1) You get an interview through email, and it goes through multiple layers of PR, Marketing and Branding people in multiple countries, plus translation, before it reaches the subject - they might tweak phrasing, they might take a question out entirely because they don't like it, etc. Then when the person answers, they write an answer and it then goes through a translator again, and the answer winds its way back through the same system (and god knows if it gets changed, too).
2) Or there's an event, meaning the person you're after is either flown out to the SE offices near you or you happen to be in town somewhere they are, like TGS or E3 or whatever and you can have a chat face-to-face. Obviously PR and stuff is still involved, but you can have a more natural back-and-forth this way.
This varies from company to company if I'm honest - like, with Capcom, in my experience it's a touch easier generally to say "yo, I have a couple of questions for Ono" and get them sent and back within like a week with seemingly very little interference (but of course their PR and marketing are going to be looking along the way). With Square, again, being honest, I've had relatively low-impact interview questions to Yoko Shimomura yanked just because they didn't like the sound of them. It's just part of the PR/media dance, you have to find a way to get the information you want through whatever artificial barriers are raised. It's no bad blood, it's just part of the game and people doing their jobs. This exists with Western developers too, but obviously when you have a shared language it's easier to trade business cards at an event and then reach out to them directly (which PR dislike intensely, but I digress) if you want to talk about something that's not a specific topic.
The problem is, #2 only really happens if that subject has a big enough project for a pub like SE to put them out there. You can reach out and ask for an Ito interview, but given that he's not working on a currently announced project there's no guarantee it'd be accepted anyway - but it also means if it was you'd almost certainly be limited to an email Q&A (which what I'm getting at is always lower quality/less interesting/raw/honest), the chances of catching up with him in person are minimal.
I did try to get a chance to chat to him around FF12 and FF9 re-releasing back when both those first hit PS4, but no luck on either front, sadly. I'm the guy who asked Shinji Hashimoto if Ito was still at SE in 2015, though, and at that time Hashimoto-san said he was still there and was working on a proposal for a new project. I don't think that's FF16, though, before anybody jumps to conclusions.
So yeah. That's it. That's the thing.