Asked at the Lucca Comics & Games Festival about a hit new RPG that wears its Final Fantasy inspiration proudly, longtime series producer Yoshinori Kitase traced the line of influence back one step further — to Star Wars. His answer came with a confession classic fans will love: one of Final Fantasy X's most memorable creations was borrowed directly from a galaxy far, far away.
Kitase was speaking with IGN about how he felt seeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 draw so openly on Final Fantasy, and he made clear he takes it as a compliment. "To be honest, I know the game," Kitase said of Expedition 33. "I spoke with the creators and I'm actually very happy about the fact that they have been so inspired by Final Fantasy and they created a new game from that. And also, I was inspired by movies and in particular by Star Wars when I was young."
Far from guarding his influences, Kitase described that borrowing as the natural order of making games. "I took inspiration from many things I was interested in when I was younger, and I used that inspiration to create my games," he said. "I think it's beautiful that there's this kind of cycle where we inspire each other and we take things from each other's games. I think it's something beautiful, and it should be like that."
In practice, Kitase has generally been careful not to lift directly from Star Wars, wary of crossing the line from inspiration into copying. One famous exception slipped through anyway — and it lives in Spira.
Blitzball, the underwater sport that anchors Final Fantasy X's world and its most obsessive side activity — a full league with recruitable players scattered across Spira — grew out of the podrace sequence in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. "One more that came to my mind is from Final Fantasy X, where I had to create [Blitzball] for the game inside the fantasy setting," Kitase said. "And I used an idea from Star Wars Episode 1 where there's this [pod] race and the fact of using sport inside a fantasy context, I took this idea directly from Star Wars."
The chain Kitase describes now spans three generations of games: Star Wars fired up a young developer at Square, Final Fantasy became the template a French studio rebuilt into Expedition 33, and the admiration is flowing back the other way. The next chapter of Kitase's own series, Final Fantasy VII: Revelation, closes out the remake trilogy when it launches on April 8, 2027.
