The game used Unreal Engine 3 as middleware due to it being at the forefront of engine technology at the time. It also allowed development to start before the console's release. Conversely, the design philosophy behind Unreal Engine clashed with the philosophies most often used in JRPG engines, resulting in difficulties with integration that repeated themselves four times during development. In addition, the team had trouble keeping up with the engine's regular updates and reading the requisite manuals. This in turn caused technical setbacks such as long loading times. Four different types of cutscenes were created, from lower-quality real-time cutscenes to pre-rendered cinematics. In hindsight, it was felt that the pre-rendered cinematics were not needed as they used the same models as the high-quality real-time cutscenes, although during development pre-rendered cutscenes were chosen due to their improved lighting and visual effects. The different grades of cutscenes were created differently: higher-quality real-time cutscenes were first shot and then tailored motion capture animations were included with hand-manipulated facial expressions, while the lower-quality cutscenes used "off-the-shelf" motion capture. Due to a lack of a clear transition point, players later felt that cutscene quality was inconsistent. The amount of higher-quality cutscenes was much higher in earlier builds of the game, and the team needed to reduce their number and replace them with standard real-time cutscenes. The final length of cutscenes was estimated at around seven hours: one hour used pre-rendered graphics despite real-time high-quality character models being used, while six hours were purely real-time. The game's visual director was Roy Sato, who had a previous background in film and television and had worked with Sakaguchi on "". Working on the game was initially difficult, as he needed to adjust to a new format and get used to a company that was still fairly new.