"We started around the beginning of last year. During a business meeting with Nintendo, the topic came up of us working on something together. Nintendo has Mario, and Square has RPGs… well, why not simply stick the two together? Being entirely different things, we had no idea how this would turn out… but that’s actually what made it so exciting."

"Getting everything straight during that first phase of the development really took a long time. Mario is Nintendo’s character, so there was a lot of back and forth with them, searching for a way forward that would satisfy both Square and Nintendo. Miyamoto is also on the main team, so yeah, I mean it just took a really long time before we could get down to brass tacks."

"Yeah. With regard to the graphics, Nintendo has a certain style they like. It was the kind of thing where you think you’d get it perfect, only to realize, “oh, wait, this is wrong…” Our graphics team cried a lot. (laughs)"