Final Fantasy Characters Design Is Not Focused on Looks

The Final Fantasy series is well known for the way its characters look, with fans paying special attention to the design of the female cast, but one of the main developers working on the video game series says that the team always began the creation process with the personality and not the looks of the character.

Motomu Toriyama, who is the director that has worked on Final Fantasy XIII and is now handling the expansion for it, has told the Japanese Famitsu magazine that, “With Yuna from Final Fantasy X, we started with the back story of a summoner that fights against Sin. But for Lightning in FFXIII, our initial concept was just for a ‘strong woman’ - it was personality-based instead of plot-driven.”

He added, “Then we consider the heroine’s ‘job,’ her position in the story and duties in battle. … Since there are so many games in the series, it’s always a trial to ensure that new characters don’t overlap with previous ones.”

Both motion capture and voice acting are added to the character towards the end of the design process, once the team is sure about how he or she will approach a situation and how they will react to the most important events in the game narrative.

Lightning is set to return in Final Fantasy XIII-2, a new experience that takes place after the events of the main game, further exploring the themes and the concepts players have already encountered.

The developers are also promising an evolved combat system which makes the player feel more in control of the experience, with an included difficulty tweak and possible rewards for those who completed the first XIII game.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is planned for release in Japan on the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft towards the end of the year and no dates have been confirmed for Western markets.