was director of the project. The game was officially unveiled at the July 2005 PlayStation Meeting in Tokyo, where Hino said it had been in development for the past two and a half years, with its development time overlapping that of Dragon Quest VIII. He also revealed the game was the biggest project Level-5 had ever worked on, both in terms of production length and the number of staff working on the project. In an August interview with Famitsu, Hino explained the gameplay involves the player travelling the galaxy and visiting various planets, each of which has its own unique visual theme. He claimed the total volume of areas to explore in the game would surpass any RPG to date. Originally, he had planned to feature a "virtually uncountable number of planets", which would be procedurally generated as the player explored them, but this concept was later modified to a smaller number of planets, each with multiple locations. He revealed a major selling point of the game to be no loading times between exploration and combat, or when moving from one location to another, something which had never before been accomplished on a disc-based RPG, and something which had been a long-time personal goal of his. He also went into detail about the backgrounds of Jaster, Kisala, Zegram and Lilika, and he explained the basic combat system (a hack and slash system using three party members, with the player able to issue commands to the two NPCs), the Revelation Flow system, and some basic information about the Factory system. A trailer for the game was released on August 5, as was basic plot information. Also on August 5, the game's website went live. A playable demo of the game was made available at the 2005 Tokyo Game Show in September. IGN's Anoop Gantayat was impressed with the "seamless" gameplay, and the absence of load times, although he did note the frame rate was lower than Dragon Quest VIII. He was also impressed with the graphics: "The game doesn't hide the vastness of its world, with plenty of distant views as you explore the complicated landscapes. One may actually get the feeling of existing in the expansive world of a massively multiplayer online RPG rather than the limited world of standard RPG". Playstation Underground sent Demo disk packages that came with a small poster of the game and pirate flag on