The Lord of the Rings Influenced Final Fantasy X’s Shift from Science Fiction Toward Fantasy
- ⚡Xe⚡
- 1 minute ago
- 3 min read
Final Fantasy X celebrated its 25th anniversary on July 19, 2026. In an anniversary interview together with Final Fantasy IV director Takashi Tokita, Yoshinori Kitase discussed the game's early creative direction, the development team behind it and the original plans for underwater battles.
Final Fantasy X's early development went through a major change in direction, with the project eventually moving away from its initial approach. The shift was also connected to the team's expectations about what kind of fantasy might appeal to an international audience at the time.
“It began with 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. 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. 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.” — Yoshinori Kitase
The project also had to be staffed around the demands of a new console generation, while several members of the wider creative team were working on another major Square project at the same time. The resulting changes affected how leadership for several core production areas was established.
“First of all, assembling the FFX team was difficult. Tetsuya Nomura and I worked on FFVII and FFVIII together, but then he was assigned to KINGDOM HEARTS. He was involved with FFX as a character designer of course, but his main project was KH, and some of the other staff was assigned there too. And so, 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. There were some, but mostly we promoted people we had worked with before to handle key aspects of the project. There were also veterans like [Yusuke] Naora who remained on the team.” — Yoshinori Kitase
The developers also wanted to use the PlayStation 2 to push the presentation of water beyond what had been possible previously. The plans went beyond visual effects and included gameplay in the water, but the different requirements for character movement made the idea difficult to implement across the entire game.
“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
“Yeah, but it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. [laughs] 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.” — Yoshinori Kitase
“But you made up for it with blitzball.” — Takashi Tokita
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