Loading...
Loading...
Development and Staff
August 26, 2026 at 05:31 AM
Added the full published romanizations for combat director Takashi Shiraga and art director Masahiro Saito and softened the note that their given names were unpublished, since all four senior staff were interviewed by name; added the five credited composers to the sound credit
FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE is developed by Square Enix together with LANCARSE Ltd. and published by Square Enix. The project took shape inside Team Asano and its Creative Studio V division, the part of Square Enix behind the company's other HD-2D titles, and is staffed at a scale comparable to those projects. The senior team is Keisuke Nakashima producing, Hiroto Furuya directing, Takashi Shiraga on combat, and Masahiro Saito on art. All four sat for English-language interviews under those names, which is where the romanizations used here come from; Square Enix itself has still not published an official English staff list.
Role | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Executive producer | Tomoya Asano | Studio head whose division hosts the project; gives the team its standard that pixel sprites must never float against their backgrounds |
Producer | Keisuke Nakashima | Previously an assistant producer on FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS; pitched this project |
Director | Hiroto Furuya | Pushed for the return of the walkable world map as an essential piece of a console RPG |
Battle director | Takashi Shiraga | Oversaw the combat design; the full name comes from English-language interview coverage rather than an official credit list |
Art director | Masahiro Saito | His department includes veterans of earlier HD-2D projects, whose experience the team drew on while polishing the visual style; the full name comes from the same interview coverage |
Scenario | Yukinori Kitajima (Synthese Co., Ltd.) | Wrote the mobile game's scenario and rewrote the script for this game; the story is his retelling of its first arc |
Sound | Elements Garden, led by Noriyasu Agematsu | Same composer lineage as the mobile game; Japanese edition material credits five composers, Noriyasu Agematsu with Seima Kondo, Ryota Tomaru, Junpei Fujita, and Hitoshi Fujima, covered on Music and Soundtrack |
Logo illustration | Yoshitaka Amano | Credited on the legal line of every storefront listing |
Nakashima first pitched the project around 2020, roughly six years before release; he notes that the core development period was shorter than that gap suggests. Full-scale development ran about four years, preceded by one to two years spent purely on pixel-technology research. The guiding concept never moved: what if FINAL FANTASY had continued to evolve in pixel art? Nakashima points to the surprise of the series' jump to 3D in 1997 as the bar the team set for itself, this time using modern pixel techniques to deliver that jolt.
His motivation came from his time on the mobile game. Players had asked for a console version since its early days, and he wanted its strengths in front of people who would never touch a smartphone RPG. He also wanted a new FINAL FANTASY built around classic turn-based party planning rather than action reflexes. HD-2D was not the starting point: the team tested voxel and full 3D approaches before settling on HD-2D partway through development.
Once the team had built its own take on the legacy heroes who appear as Visions, it showed the work to the creators of the numbered titles and received their approval before moving forward.
Alongside the announcement, Square Enix put out an official producer-message video in which Keisuke Nakashima walks through the game's concept and the highlights the team wants players to notice. It restates the pixel-art-evolution goal and the choice of classic turn-based party planning over action combat.
Beyond the listed credits, Naoki Yoshida reviewed the game and offered positive feedback without taking a formal role. Tomoya Asano, credited as executive producer, also gave the art team hands-on direction: the staff cite his standard that pixel sprites must never float against their backgrounds, a discipline they applied location by location.
The official middleware disclosure shows the game runs on Unreal Engine. The disclosure does not state an engine version in prose, so no version number is confirmed.