Full production began on "Chrono Cross" in mid-1998. The "Chrono Cross" team reached 80 members at its peak, with additional personnel of 10–20 cut-scene artists and 100 quality assurance testers. The team felt pressure to live up to the work of "Chrono Trigger"'s "Dream Team" development group, which included famous Japanese manga artist Akira Toriyama. Kato and Tanaka hired Nobuteru Yūki for character design and Yasuyuki Honne for art direction and concept art. The event team originally envisioned a short game, and planned a system by which players would befriend any person in a town for alliance in battle. Developers brainstormed traits and archetypes during the character-creation process, originally planning 64 characters with unique endings that could vary in three different ways per character. Kato described the character creation process: "Take Pierre, for example: we started off by saying we wanted a wacko fake hero like Tata from "Trigger". We also said things like 'we need at least one powerful mom', 'no way we're gonna go without a twisted brat', and so on so forth."