Final Fantasy X marked a notable point in the RPG franchise’s history for several reasons. It was the first entry on the PlayStation 2. It included fully voiced characters. And it was released alongside the fateful flop of Final Fantasy: Spirits Within at the box office, which would drastically change Square Enix in the future (including the merger that led to its current name). On the occasion of the game’s 25th anniversary today, veterans of the series reflected on its development and some of the main considerations that helped shape it.
“It began with [writer] Mr. [Kazushige] Nojima wanting to explore a fantasy atmosphere that wasn’t rooted in medieval Europe, but instead drew from more Eastern influences, since both FFVII and FFVIII had maintained a sci-fi tone,” the game’s director, Yoshinori Kitase, said in a new interview on the Square Enix website. In fact, it was the upcoming release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring would be released in December 2001) that inspired the team to eventually focus on a fusion of those Eastern influences with a traditional fantasy adventure.
“During development, we initially took a more sci-fi approach at first, but when we thought about what would be trending in Hollywood around the time of FFX’s release, we learned that The Lord of the Rings was in production,” Kitase said. “So we thought fantasy was going to be the next big global trend, and that was one of the reasons we decided to go with fantasy rather than sci-fi.”
Unlike previous Final Fantasy games, which took place primarily on large continents, Final Fantasy X took players into a world filled primarily with water and only small pockets of land. “There was also the desire to tackle the challenge of creating realistic water rendering and simulation, now that fluid simulation was possible because of advances in CG and hardware,” Takashi Tokita, who was directing The Bouncer at the time, recalled.
In addition to the role water played in cutscenes and backgrounds, Final Fantasy X also allowed players to fight turn-based battles while diving underwater. “It wasn’t as easy as it seemed,” Kitase recalled. “We wanted to include battles both on land and in water, but there had to be different animations because of the different movement patterns, so we were only able to include them in certain locations.”
But the biggest challenge facing FFX was the move to the PS2 hardware. It provided lots of opportunities to push game making forward, but choosing which features to optimize around was a gamble. “The tricky part about making games for next-gen consoles is figuring out which new features and specs to take advantage of, like higher resolutions,” Kitase said. “Especially when companies keep releasing more and more of them.”
Initially, the development team wanted to prioritize the number of colors that could be displayed to make the game’s world look as bright and vibrant as possible. But as competitors’ games for the PS2 focused more and more on leveraging its capabilities for increased display resolution, the team shifted gears.
“There was a challenging moment that has nothing to do with debugging when, like FFIV, we found ourselves at a turning point,” Kitase said. “We had to choose between keeping the same resolution and number of scanlines while using more colors, or increasing the resolution to make it look sharper but only having half as many colors. Initially, we decided to keep the same resolution and add more colors to make the world feel more vibrant, but when other companies began releasing high-resolution games, we realized we needed to make a change.”
Another growing pain was around voice acting. There was no established process at the time for auditioning and recording acting talent. “Nowadays, we hire a company to handle all the recording-related work, like booking studios and voice actors, but back then, we didn’t know what to do, so we had actors come in to audition at the company.” Kitase said. “It was very amateurish.”
But ultimately, the result was a Final Fantasy sequel that would prove the blueprint for everything that’s come after in terms of how the series looks, feels, and tells its stories. “When I first saw FFX on screen, I didn’t feel that we needed anything beyond that,” Tokita said. “Later, I came to think that although consoles would continue to evolve, we had reached a point where this level of 3D rendering was sufficient.”
