It turns out that getting a development team together for Final Fantasy 10 was trickier than you might expect, all because of a completely separate game – Kingdom Hearts 1.
Final Fantasy 10 producer Yoshinori Kitase (who also directed Final Fantasy 7, 8, and more) discusses this in a recent interview to celebrate the JRPG's 25th anniversary.
"First of all, assembling the FF10 team was difficult," he begins. "Tetsuya Nomura and I worked on FF7 and FF8 together, but then he was assigned to Kingdom Hearts. He was involved with FF10 as a character designer, of course, but his main project was Kingdom Hearts, and some of the other staff were assigned there too."
As the director of Kingdom Hearts, it's little wonder that Nomura didn't have as much time available for Final Fantasy 10. The two games only released a few months apart, too, so there was a lot of crossover in their development times.
His absence, along with the other staff members who were shifted onto the RPG, meant that "the first thing we needed to do was to find people who could lead teams to handle core 3D elements like 3DCG motion graphics, backgrounds, and character models" for the Final Fantasy entry, Kitase says.
To handle that, a number of new staff members were brought onto the team, but Kitase says that "mostly we promoted people we had worked with before to handle key aspects of the project."
And, of course, the team still had plenty of veterans to support things, too – Kitase gives the example of Yusuke Naora, the JRPG's world art director, who'd already been credited on multiple Final Fantasy games including 3, 7, and 8.
Flash forward to today, and Nomura is still splitting his time between Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. As well as having Kingdom Hearts 4 on the horizon (though how far away that is is another matter), Nomura is also one of the creative directors on Final Fantasy 7 Revelation. He's clearly a busy guy.
