The creative team—consisting of Tatsuya Kando (director), Tomohiro Hasegawa (co-director), Takeshi Arakawa (planning director), and Tetsuya Nomura (character design and creative producer)—were able to experience the DS during the "Touch DS" event in November 2004. From this demonstration, they had envisioned a version of "Chain of Memories" in which the card game aspects would be present on the bottom screen and an action role-playing game on the top. As they continued to work on the game, the developers realized that they wanted to use the touchscreen more, to make "a game that can only be played on the DS". However, they also encountered the problem that by focusing heavily on the touchscreen, the top screen would be ignored. From this, the idea of the dual screen battle system arose. Several other options were explored for the top-screen game, including command-based battles or a music game, but once they reviewed the game from the eyes of the player, they ultimately settled on the card-game approach with the player having the option to control the game if they wanted to.