Development team pivoted Final Fantasy 10 towards fantasy after Lord of the Rings news
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Square Enix has offered fresh insight into why Final Fantasy 10 shifted from the series' earlier science-fiction leanings towards high fantasy. Producer Yoshinori Kitase revealed that the change of direction followed the development team learning that The Lord of the Rings was being adapted into a film trilogy, prompting them to bet that fantasy was poised to become "the next big global trend" in popular entertainment.
The comments emerged as part of new interview material released to mark Final Fantasy 10's 25th anniversary, in which senior creative staff reflected on how the game's design evolved during production between 1999 and 2001. The wager proved well-timed commercially: Final Fantasy 10 launched in 2001, just months before The Fellowship of the Ring reached cinemas, allowing it to benefit from the surge of mainstream interest in fantasy that the films subsequently generated.
- Devs pivoted FF10 to fantasy after hearing Lord of the Rings was filming
- Producer Kitase revealed this in 25th-anniversary interview material
- FF10's 2001 launch preceded Fellowship of the Ring's cinema release
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Final Fantasy is a long-running Japanese role-playing game series made by Square Enix. Each numbered game usually tells a separate story, often mixing magic, imagined worlds and technology in different proportions.
Final Fantasy 10 follows Tidus, a young sportsman, and Yuna, a summoner travelling to confront a destructive creature threatening their world. Its setting, Spira, uses fantasy elements such as temples, monsters and magic, while also drawing on modern and futuristic ideas.
The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy story by J R R Tolkien that was turned into three major films from 2001. The films helped bring fantasy to a wider global cinema audience, making the genre a major commercial focus for games and other entertainment.
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Originally published by GamesRadar+ as “Final Fantasy 10 leaned into the fantasy genre after devs “learned that The Lord of the Rings was in production” and thought it would be “the next big global trend””.
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