Developed from 1999 to 2001, Final Fantasy X cost approximately 4 billion Japanese yen to produce (approximately $32.3 million US)[28] with a crew of more than one hundred people.

As with most other games in the Final Fantasy franchise, the characters and story of Final Fantasy X are distinct from those of its predecessors. Executive producer Hironobu Sakaguchi states that this is to maintain the novelty of each title and to show off his team's true potential. Although he had certain reservations about the transition from 2D to 3D backgrounds, the voice acting and the transition to real-time story-telling, Sakaguchi believes Final Fantasy's success can be attributed to constantly challenging the development team through trying new things.[2] For his part, scenario writer Kazushige Nojima has said that with this installment of the series, he was particularly concerned with establishing a connection in the relationship between the player and main character. Thus, he penned the story such that — since both Tidus and the player find themselves in a new world — the player's progress through the world and growing knowledge about it is reflected in Tidus' own developing understanding and narration.[2]

Final Fantasy X also features innovations in the rendering of facial expressions on characters, achieved through motion capture and skeletal animation technology.[2][29] This technology also allowed animators to create realistic lip movements, which were then programmed to match the speech of the game's voice actors.