Wasn't there some info a while ago where Kitase said he was in charge of certain floor in the Shinra building?
I am assuming Kitase is a lot more heavily involved in producing this game compared to other games such as FFXIII trilogy since he was the one who directed the orignal. I feel Nomura and Hamaguchi would consult Kitase regarding a lot of the aspects.
I always took impression that Kitase was laid-back and not too deep into actual game development when he was producing XIII, and was more of PR stuff.... I mean there was famous diss from Sakaguchi about Kitase's roll as a producer.
Like you said, I feel Kitase doing a lot of PR stuff is mainly because Nomura doesn't like public appearance, and only shows up when he absolutely has to (like at E3).
Didn't know about the Shinra Building stuff, but yep, I found
this: "...Kitase will be in charge of designing and planning of floors 69 and 70 of the Shinra Building in the game, apparently because he has a fondness for the content in question".
For those who don't remember, they're specifically the last two floors: the highest office space and President Shinra's personal office:
We've already seen the latter in concept art and a little bit of its in-game appareance:
Even beyond this fact, it does seem like he's comparatively more involved with this game indeed. That anecdote with Nomura surprised after finding out he was the director in an early internal meeting tells me that he was under the impression Kitase was the director for a good reason.
And yeah that Sakaguchi dig is hilarious. Honestly, while not bad games, I
really didn't care for any in the XIII trilogy (and I hated with a passion that we were stuck with them for so many years. The late 2000s and early 2010s were a dark time) and all of that kinda made me forget just how amazing Kitase is at this stuff. Hopefully the VII Remake experiment turns out to be good, it seems like they're on the right track.