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Kingdom Hearts made assembling Final Fantasy 10’s dev team “difficult” after Tetsuya Nomura and other JRPG veterans were assigned to the Disney crossover, lead says
A developer who worked on Final Fantasy 10 has said that assembling the game's team was made harder because Kingdom Hearts, Square's crossover with Disney, had already claimed director Tetsuya Nomura and several other experienced JRPG staff. With many of the studio's veteran talent tied up on the new Disney-themed project, Final Fantasy 10's production reportedly had to lean more heavily on less experienced or newly recruited developers, shaping how the team came together for what became a landmark entry in the series.
The remarks highlight the internal competition for staff at Square around the turn of the millennium, when Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy 10 were being developed in parallel and both needed experienced RPG creators. Nomura, best known for character design work on the Final Fantasy series, became a key figure on Kingdom Hearts rather than Final Fantasy 10, illustrating how the two high-profile projects effectively competed for the same limited pool of veteran developers within the company.
In short
- Kingdom Hearts pulled Tetsuya Nomura and veteran staff from Final Fantasy 10
- This reportedly made staffing FF10's development team difficult
- Highlights internal talent competition at Square around 2000
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The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
The decision to assign top talent like Tetsuya Nomura to Kingdom Hearts represented a strategic investment in a transformative partnership with Disney. At the turn of the millennium, establishing a successful crossover with such a major entertainment company was a rare opportunity that required experienced leadership to navigate the unique creative and business challenges. Kingdom Hearts proved to be not merely successful but historically significant, and deploying Square's best talent was necessary to achieve the quality and vision that made this possible. FF10's development, whilst resourced differently, ultimately produced an acclaimed and landmark entry in the series, demonstrating that the allocation proved sound.
The case against
Final Fantasy 10 was an established flagship franchise deserving of Square's experienced leadership, yet key figures like Tetsuya Nomura were redirected to Kingdom Hearts, a new and unproven crossover concept. This decision prioritised a speculative venture over the studio's core series, forcing FF10's team to rely more heavily on less experienced developers when it should have received comparable top-tier talent. The difficulty in assembling the team was a direct consequence of this misallocation of resources, and whilst FF10 succeeded despite these constraints, a better approach would have ensured adequate veteran leadership for both projects.
Explained simply
Around the turn of the millennium, Square was developing two major games simultaneously: Kingdom Hearts, a crossover with Disney, and Final Fantasy 10, an entry in one of gaming's longest-running role-playing series. Both projects required experienced developers but the company had a limited pool of veteran staff. This created internal competition between the two games for talent.
Tetsuya Nomura is a veteran character designer and artist who had shaped the Final Fantasy series' visual identity since the late 1980s. He was assigned to direct Kingdom Hearts rather than Final Fantasy 10, and several other veteran developers accompanied him to that project. This meant Final Fantasy 10 had to assemble its team with fewer veteran staff members than might otherwise have been available.
The situation illustrates how resource allocation decisions within a studio can affect the composition of teams working on different games. When major projects run in parallel, the assignment of veteran personnel to one can influence how another is staffed and developed. This internal competition for staff was a significant factor in how Final Fantasy 10's team came together in the early 2000s.
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