Episode Details

Final Fantasy XII began development in the year 2000, after Final Fantasy Xi's announcement, and would become the game with the longest development time in history when it was finally released in 2006. The development was a tumultuous one as well as an expensive one, costing 35 Million USD to create, an estimated 12 million more than FF10.

The game was to be co-directed with Hiroyuki Ito (of FF6 and FF9 fame) and a man named Yasumi Matsuno, who had previously helmed and penned the very popular game Vagrant Story as well as Final Fantasy Tactics. It was Matsuno who had come up with the story of FF12, and Ito, along with battle designer Hiroshi Tomomatsu, was well underway with the creation of his new FF battle system called the "Active Dimension system", drawing inspiration from the plays in American football.

It was to be a truly glorious combination of Square's creative teams.

And Square-Enix spared no expense. The art team was shipped off to Turkey to draw up design ideas for the game, and much of the early development of FF12 was based upon custom-creating the tools used to make the game, drawing upon the same game engine as FF11 to create a type of MMO experience in a single player game.

A couple things about the early iterations of Final Fantasy 12:

• There was a planned 2-player mode.

• There were plans to allow for recruitments of non-player characters to join in mob hunts.

• There was a job system.

• Basch was initially meant to be the main character of the story.

But, as I said before, FF12's development was a troubled one.

Halfway through production, Hironobu Sakaguchi, series creator, quit Square-Enix altogether, taking a huge chunk of the Final Fantasy XII development team with him to his new company, Mistwalker. Devastated by this blow to the project, co-director Yasumi Matsuno refused to come to work for a month after the split.

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