page_title: Final Fantasy X
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Final Fantasy X / Development / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Real-life motion data (left) is acquired on a motion capture platform (center) and used to determine the posture of the CHAD phantom (right)
context_page_description: Final Fantasy X is a role-playing video game developed and published by Square as the tenth entry in the Final Fantasy series. Originally released in 2001 for Sony's PlayStation 2, the game was re-released as Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita in 2013, for PlayStation 4 in 2015, Microsoft Windows in 2016, and for Nintendo Switch and Xbox One in 2019. The game marks the Final Fantasy series transition from entirely pre-rendered backdrops to fully three-dimensional areas, and is also the first in the series to feature voice acting. Final Fantasy X replaces the Active Time Battle system with the "Conditional Turn-Based Battle" system, and uses a new leveling system called the "Sphere Grid".
  Set in the fantasy world of Spira, a setting influenced by the South Pacific, Thailand and Japan, the game's story revolves around a group of adventurers and their quest to defeat a rampaging monster known as Sin. The player character is Tidus, a star athlete in the fictional sport of blitzball, who finds himself in Spira after Sin destroyed his home city of Zanarkand.
context_section_description: 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 noted that they had to keep the localized sound file within the duration of the original Japanese, as longer files would cause the game to crash. He 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 [and] of course the actors had to act, and act well, within those restraints."
  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 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 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 limitations, this idea was not used. Instead, a compromise was made, whereby some transitions from the field map to the battle map were made relatively seamless with the implementation of a motion blur effect that would happen at the end of an event scene. The desire for seamless transitions also led to the implementation of the new summoning system seen in the game. 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. The developers experienced difficulty with the scene of Tidus and Yuna kissing, as they were not used to animating romance scenes. Visual Works director Kazuyuki Ikumori stated that this was due to the use of 3D models in the scene. Because of the negative response from female members of staff, the scene was remade multiple times.
caption: Final Fantasy X used motion capture similar to this image for character animations
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