Thread by @Dreamboum

The FF12/Ivalice book is an excellent book.

I hope it gets translated in English because you learn about things like how Hironobu Sakaguchi was driven to tears at how amazing Vagrant Story was to the point Matsuno was given the Final Fantasy XII project as a result.

https://twitter.com/cyan_colour/status/1371019852060712960

mATSUNO got the idea of making Vagrant Story a full 3D game because it was the future and his team didn't have experience in 3D. To think they ended up making what is arguably the most beautiful game on the PS1.

Vagrant Story was the first game from Matsuno at Square where he was director, game designer, and writer whereas he mostly stuck to writing in FFT.

Matsuno would say Vagrant Story is the only game he made at Square as a kind of "gentle dictatorship" instead of democratically.

Both Vagrant Story and FFXII were first envisioned with SD chibi characters with backgrounds similar to the Moomin show but ended up becoming more realistic and skewing to a darker kind of fantasy.

It also says that with this shift, Ashley Riot was badly received in Japan because he stood out from the canon of JRPG hero. I think this context is very important because today we would think that this is exactly the kind of character we want to see in the genre.

The inspiration of Vagrant Story came from Chirs Carter's TV Shows "X-Files" and most especially "Millennium" since Matsuno was fascinated by them.

Even further, Matsuno wanted the cutscenes of Vagrant Story to not last longer than two hours, like a Thursday night suspense movie

Obviously, Metal Gear Solid was also an inspiration for Vagrant Story, but Matsuno wanted to push the cutscenes further by allowing facial expressions (MGS1 didn't have them), which they managed through optimizing and methods like sub-pixel shading

The lack of voice acting was because of Matsuno's willingness to make the whole game fit in one disc, because Vagrant Story allowed for backtracking, he didn't want players to juggle with discs. However, it allowed for comic-book style speech bubbles instead.

While Yasumi Matsuno said that he only managed to put 50% of his script in Vagrant Story, Hitoshi Sakimoto joked in 2013 that he only put 10 to 20% of what he wanted to put in the game. Though no one knows if it really was a joke or not.

Matsuno's game design philosophy in Vagrant Story is that every enemy the player encounters HAD to be stronger than Ashley Riot. The reason for this is that the player wouldn't use every tool at their disposal in order to fight enemies if they weren't strong enough.

When it comes to Vagrant Story's localization, the book says Alexander O. Smith was given the script full of annotations about the background and past of characters.

In contrast, for FF8, O. Smith was only given a copy of the game, and he had to access the data through gameshark