The four people responsible for bringing FINAL FANTASY TACTICS A2: Grimoire of the Rift to life shares secrets about the project’s development, the difficulties they faced, and behind-the-scenes details they can only tell us now that the project is complete.
— When did development for the game begin?
Akitoshi Kawazu Planning started quite a while back, but actual work didn’t begin until sometime around April of 2006 because the director, Yuichi Murasawa, was still busy with other projects.
— Tell us what made you start thinking about making a sequel to FINAL FANTASY TACTICS ADVANCE.
Yuichi Murasawa The reception of the previous title and the desire of fans to see a sequel were the biggest factors. Also, since we developed FFT-A in such a short amount of time, a lot of us on the development team still had things we wanted to try. So even though we weren’t sure what form it would take at the time, we really wanted to make some sort of sequel or continuation.
— Did you originally plan to develop the game for the Nintendo DS?
Akitoshi Kawazu No. In early talks, we decided to develop the game for [Nintendo's] Game Boy Advance in as little time as possible, but shortly after we started development the DS met with a level of worldwide success we hadn’t anticipated. We realized that we couldn’t release the game a year later on the GBA, so we immediately shifted development to support the DS.
— Did the change to the DS cause any difficulties?
Yuichi Murasawa No. The DS enabled us to have better graphics, and the team was eager to work with new hardware, so it was a welcome change.
Hiroaki Kato When the hardware changed, people started thinking of new ideas, new things to try. It had a very positive impact on morale. I think developers are fundamentally drawn to new things.
— What was the concept behind the game?
Yuichi Murasawa The main concept was to make a character-building game with a twist. We also wanted to have a greater variety of ways to develop your characters. This is why we carefully worked on the ways characters learn abilities, and included a variety of quests players can undertake to develop their characters.
— There certainly seems to be a great variety of quests.
Yuichi Murasawa Yes, there are about 400 quests in total. As you go through the quests, the variety of things you’re tasked to do gradually grows, enabling players to explore the unique characteristics of all the units. The previous game had a lot of quests, but many of them followed the same pattern of completing the quest by winning a battle. So this time we put effort into increasing the variety of quests from the very beginning of development. The broad objective of completing the quest remains, but we knew they needed to have story elements and ways to complete them that didn’t involve battle. From the beginning we made this clear to the staff in charge of designing the quests, we increased the number of developers, and we laid a foundation that would make a variety of quests possible.
— Thinking up stories to go along with all these quests must have been a challenge.
Yuichi Murasawa We were able to meet that challenge thanks to the hard work of the many people on our team. In fact, some of the people who worked on FINAL FANTASY XII helped us with ideas. When they weren’t busy with other things, we received a huge number of ideas from FINAL FANTASY XII’s map system designer, quest designer, and event designer, just to name a few. We’d ask for a hand anytime they were free, and they were always very enthusiastic and gave us a variety of ideas. We picked up ideas for some of the most interesting features from these exchanges, so I really want to express my gratitude to the team and everyone who helped.
Hitoshi Sakimoto This idea free-for-all even reached me, the composer. They told me to let them know if I had any suggestions. Unfortunately I never submitted anything to them, but I had the sense that the scope of the quests had really grown since the last title.
