"Let’s see… after the cyberpunk and “near-future” settings of VII and VIII, we returned to our roots with FFIX. So the question became, what should we do next…? And to be honest, that question vexed us. Around that time, I happened to be looking through some books and travel pamphlets and randomly thought to myself, “you know, Asia is really nice too…” There haven’t been many fantasy games in that kind of setting. There have been games set in China, or with a Chinese atmosphere, but nothing with a Southeast Asian or similar setting. So I thought I’d try drawing some pictures to flesh out this vision I had, when lo and behold, I read Kazushige Nojima’s script and by chance it turned out to have the same feeling. Then it was like, OK, now we’ve got to do this. We all brainstorm ideas on our own, but when we meet up and share them, the ideas that happen to be similar to each other are always good ones."