A new interview with Final Fantasy X’s scenario writer Kazushige Nojima has revealed that Tidus was originally set to be a plumber.
As reported by Siliconera, this interview comes from Famitsu and features commentary from many key staff members of Final Fantasy X, including Tetsuya Nomura, Motomu Toriyama, and Yoshinori Kitase, but Nojima’s words are the ones that reveal Tidus and Mario may have had much more in common than ever previously believed.
He began by sharing that a trip to Okinawa was one of the real-world inspirations for Spira – the world where FFX and FFX-2 take place – and continued to say that the original concept for Tidus was to be a plumber, as this “served as a reason to have characters get into and under water.”
This was obviously scrapped, and instead Tidus became an athlete to “set him apart from other Final Fantasy protagonists.” The water theme was still very much present, however, as Tidus was a star Blitzball player and that fictional sport takes place entirely under water.
Nomura also revealed that the overalls Tidus wears are actually part of the original design when he was still destined to be a plumber, but his look was also modified to reflect his status as an athlete.
Elsewhere in the interview, we discover that Auron was at one point a silent character, but this was changed after he was cemented as Yuna and Tidus’ “Guardian” throughout the story. Auron’s age also changed a ton in development, which is a common occurrence when building out characters, and Nojima reflected that Jecht’s writing may have been different had he been a father twenty years ago.
Lastly, Nojiima confirmed that he read cryptography books during the development of FFX, which inspired the Al Bhed language that is heavily featured in the game. Also, he said that the version of the language that made it into the game was much simpler than he envisioned it to be.
This news follows Toriyama and Nomura sharing that Nojima has a synopsis written for a potential Final Fantasy X-3, although “it’s sleeping now.” Toriyama himself said that “the probability is not zero,” but that, “we are not in a phase where we can talk about it, unless we have finished producing FF7 Remake.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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