Hironobu Sakaguchi had intended to make a role-playing game (RPG) for a long time, but his employer
Square refused to give him permission as it expected low sales of such a product.
[9] However, when the RPG
Dragon Quest was released and proved to be a hit in Japan, the company reconsidered its stance on the genre and approved Sakaguchi's vision of an RPG inspired by
Ultima and
Wizardry.
[9] Only three of his colleagues volunteered to join this project headed by him because he was thought of as a "rough boss" in spite of his unsuccessful creations.
[10] Eventually,
Final Fantasy was developed by a team of seven core staff members within
Square referred to as the "A-Team".
[11][12] Sakaguchi convinced fellow game designers
Koichi Ishii and
Akitoshi Kawazu to join the project. Kawazu was mainly responsible for the battle system and sequences, which he based heavily on the tabletop game
Dungeons & Dragons and the RPG
Wizardry. For example, enemies' weaknesses to elements such as fire and ice had not been included in Japanese RPGs up until that point. Kawazu had grown fond of such aspects of Western RPGs and decided to incorporate them into
Final Fantasy. He also advocated the player's option to freely choose their own party member classes at the beginning of the game as he feels "the fun in an RPG begins when you create a character".
[9]
The scenario was written by freelance writer
Kenji Terada, based on a story by Sakaguchi.
[4][12] Ishii heavily influenced the game's setting with his idea of the crystals.
[10] He also suggested illustrator
Yoshitaka Amano as character designer, but Sakaguchi declined at first as he had never heard the artist's name before. When Sakaguchi showed Ishii some drawings on magazine clippings and told him that this was the art style he was looking for, Ishii revealed to him that these were actually created by Amano, hence leading to his involvement in the game.
[10] The
music for Final Fantasy was composed by
Nobuo Uematsu and marked his 16th video game music composition.
[6] Iranian-American programmer
Nasir Gebelli was hired to code the game. He initially tried to understand all aspects of the gameplay but was soon advised by Sakaguchi to just program the design concepts so he did not have to explain everything to Gebelli in detail.
[10] Gebelli was also responsible for creating what is considered to be the first RPG
minigame, a
sliding puzzle, which he added into the game despite it not being part of the original game design.
[13] Among the other developers were
graphic designer
Kazuko Shibuya, programmers Kiyoshi Yoshii and Ken Narita, as well as debugger
Hiroyuki Ito.
[14][15][16][17][18] When the project started to show promise, designer
Hiromichi Tanaka and his "B-Team" joined to aid development.
[10][11] The lack of faith in Sakaguchi's team, as well as its unpopularity within the company, motivated the staff members to give their best.
