The PlayStation era had seen the proliferation of the Final Fantasy series all over the world, and launched Square into a new golden era. While series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi would only be a distant producer for Final Fantasy VIII while we was directing the Final Fantasy movie in Hawaii, he knew that he wanted to oversee another game in the series. The "fantasy" was falling by the wayside, and he wanted to use the technology used for VII and VIII to fully realize the classical style of earlier installments. But with the PlayStation 2 beating the game to market, and international players having a specific idea of the series in their head from VII and VIII, or being feeling let down by the latter, the deck seemed stacked against Final Fantasy IX...