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In an interview with Famitsu Magazine, Final Fantasy developer and Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura has shared details about how Super Mario 64 (which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary) inspired his approach to 3D gaming (h/t: Genki/GamesRadar).
While 3D titles certainly existed prior to the launch of Super Mario 64 on the N64, the release of the Italian plumber's first N64 adventure clearly had a profound impact on many game developers at the time.
Banjo Kazooie's Gregg Mayles, for instance, once stated in an interview that when he saw Mario 64 for the first time, he knew, "This is the direction all 3-D games are going to go," and that it was Mario that ultimately convinced the Banjo team to go from 2.5D to 3D.
Meanwhile, the Spyro designer Michael John has elsewhere gone on record as saying, "I think everybody understood that it changed everything; everybody was paying attention."
It seems, judging from Nomura's recent comments, that he was no major exception to this either. Asked to name a game that inspired him, he told the interviewer in the recent Famitsu article (as translated by Genki), "It differs from era to era," but went on to clarify that "the game that truly shaped my current guiding principle 'to be able to move freely in full 3D' is Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64."
He elaborated, "At the time, the Final Fantasy game I was working on had also become 3D, but only the characters were 3D data, the backgrounds were made in 3D but rendered as a single image, so it was not yet possible to move around freely in 3D space. However, I felt the sensation of running around freely, like Mario, was the thing that I wanted to create"
Here, it's pretty obvious he is referring to the PS1-era of Final Fantasy titles, such as Final Fantasy VII, which famously featured polygonal characters positioned within pre-rendered backgrounds — something that he was keen to move on from. Back in January of this year, for instance, Nomura released a piece of early concept art and a comment, indicating that, early in Final Fantasy VII's development, he envisioned the game's battle system taking place in three-dimensional environments rather than on fixed battlefields, showing one way he wanted to incorporate more 3D elements into the Final Fantasy series.
This was something the team was unable to realise at the time. However, it did eventually find its way into Kingdom Hearts, a game that undoubtedly shares the guiding principle Mario 64 shaped, and the Final Fantasy VII Remake series, which also features real-time combat.