Final Fantasy X - Development

Development

Final Fantasy X's development began in 1999, costing approximately ¥4 billion (approximately US$32.3 million) with a crew of over 100 people, most of whom worked on previous games in the series. Executive producer Hironobu Sakaguchi has stated that although he had concerns about the transition from 2D to 3D backgrounds, the voice acting, and the transition to real-time story-telling, the success of the Final Fantasy series can be attributed to constantly challenging the development team to try new things. The development of the script was much longer than the ones from previous games, due to the addition of voice acting. Scenario writer Kazushige Nojima was particularly concerned with establishing a connection in the relationship between player and main character. Thus, he penned the story such that the player's progress through the world and growing knowledge about it is reflected in Tidus' own understanding and narration. Nojima collaborated with three other staff members on writing the scenario for Final Fantasy X, the process of which took about three to four months. Daisuke Watanabe acted as the assistant scenario writer and Motomu Toriyama was the scenario supervisor. The game was initially going to feature online elements, offered through Square's PlayOnline service. The features, however, were dropped during production, and online gaming would not become part of the Final Fantasy series until Final Fantasy XI.

Map director Takayoshi Nakazato wanted to implement a world map concept with a more realistic approach than that of the traditional Final Fantasy game, in-line with the realism of the game's 3D backgrounds, as opposed to pre-rendered backgrounds. As a player of the games in the Final Fantasy series, battle director Toshiro Tsuchida wanted to recreate elements he found interesting or entertaining, which eventually led to the removal of the Active Time Battle system, and instead, incorporated the strategy-focused Conditional Turn-Based Battle system. Originally, Final Fantasy X was going to feature wandering enemies visible on the field map, seamless transitions into battles, and the option for players to move around the landscape during enemy encounters. Battle art director Shintaro Takai has explained that it was his intention that battles in Final Fantasy X come across as a natural part of the story and not an independent element. However, due to hardware and system limitations, these ideas were not used until Final Fantasy XI and XII. Instead, a compromise was made, whereby some transitions from the field screen to battle arenas were made relatively seamless with the implementation of a motion blur effect. This also led to the implementation of the new summoning system seen in the game. Yoshinori Kitase has explained that the purpose behind the Sphere Grid is to give players an interactive means of increasing their characters' attributes, such that they will be able to observe the development of those attributes firsthand.

Kitase decided to make the world more linear so that the player would constantly move forward and see event scenes. This was inspired by the well received initial events of Final Fantasy VII that depicted a more linear gameplay. Kitase remembered that it was Toriyama that was responsible for the Midgar sections of Final Fantasy VII and so wanted him to work in a similar capacity on Final Fantasy X.

Character designer Tetsuya Nomura has identified the South Pacific, Thailand and Japan as major influences on the cultural and geographic design of Spira, particularly concerning the geographic location of the southern Besaid and Kilika islands. He has also said that Spira deviates from the worlds of past Final Fantasy games in the level of detail incorporated, something he has expressed to have made a conscious effort to maintain during the design process. Producer Yoshinori Kitase felt that if the setting went back to a medieval European fantasy, it would not seem to help the development team advance. While he was thinking of different world environments, Nojima suggested a fantasy world that incorporated Asian elements. Sub-character chief designer Fumi Nakashima's focus was to ensure that characters from different regions and cultures bore distinctive characteristics in their clothing styles, so that they could be quickly and easily identified as members of their respective sub-groups. For example, she has said that the masks and goggles of the Al Bhed give the group a "strange and eccentric" appearance, while the attire of the Ronso lend to them being able to easily engage in battle.

Final Fantasy X features innovations in the rendering of characters' facial expressions, achieved through motion capture and skeletal animation technology. This technology allowed animators to create realistic lip movements, which were then programmed to match the speech of the game's voice actors. Nojima has revealed that the inclusion of voice acting enabled him to express emotion more powerfully than before, and he was therefore able to keep the storyline simple. He also said that the presence of voice actors led him to make various changes to the script, in order to match the voice actors' personalities with the characters they were portraying. The inclusion of voice, however, led to difficulties. With the game's cutscenes already programmed around the Japanese voice work, the English localization team faced the difficulty of establishing English-oriented dialogue and the obstacle of incorporating this modified wording with the rhythm and timing of the characters' lip movements. Localization specialist Alexander O. Smith described the process of fitting natural-sounding English speech into the game as "something akin to writing four or five movies' worth of dialogue entirely in haiku form of course the actors had to act, and act well, within those restraints."