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Frequent Final Fantasy developer and Kingdom Hearts co-creator Tetsuya Nomura was actually inspired by a very different type of game when making the transition to three whole dimensions: Super Mario 64.
The iconic character designer and game director says as much in an interview with Famitsu magazine when talking about the games that have had the biggest impact on his career. (Thanks for the translation, Genki!)
"It differs from era to era, but the game that truly shaped my current guiding principle 'to be able to move freely in full 3D' is Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64," Nomura says.
Super Mario's very first 3D adventure actually came out a few short months before Final Fantasy 7 made the same transition on the PlayStation 1, but both games handled a new generation in totally different ways.
"At the time, the Final Fantasy game I was working on had also become 3D, but only the characters were 3D data, the backgrounds were made in 3D but rendered as a single image, so it was not yet possible to move around freely in 3D space," he explains. The PS1 Final Fantasies had players moving polygonal characters around pre-rendered, painterly backgrounds, usually from fixed camera angles – as opposed to Super Mario 64, which had a camera following the iconic plumber across entire worlds.
"I felt the sensation of running around freely, like Mario, was the thing that I wanted to create," Nomura notes.
Of course, that free-form movement and fully-realized levels are ideas that eventually showed up in Nomura's next project, Kingdom Hearts on the PlayStation 2, a game that still feels really unique in how it mixed sometimes-wonky action-platformer elements with traditional JRPG progression.
In Kingdom Hearts, you'd have to carefully swing between trees in a world themed after Tarzan or hop around rooftops in Agrabah from Aladdin, but that was in between battles where you'd fling out classic Final Fantasy spells and swing a bulky Keyblade like it was the Buster Sword. It's still a really unique mix even in its own franchise.
The Super Mario 64 inspiration is probably unsurprising, though. Nintendo's first proper foray into 3D platforming is one of the most impact games ever released, and countless games looked to it as the standard from then on.
