to finish and debug the game. The development was handled by Atlus and external studio Pinegrow, which included staff from earlier Japanese tactical RPG Hoshigami. Some programming work was outsourced to company Designer 7. Among the staff were Atlus director Akiyasu Yamamoto, and scenario supervisor Ryo Mizuno, author of the Record of Lodoss War fantasy novel series. The story Yamamoto's earlier work as a debugger for Atlus proved useful during the final stages of development. The gameplay was described by Pinegrow staff as an improved version of the battle system used in Hoshigami. The game's story revolved around religions conflict, focusing on the Aeque faith, Dignus' attempts to undermine it, and the main cast's position between the two factions. While described as a spiritual successor to Hoshigami, Atlus said that it was not a sequel to it, instead being its own game. The character designs were done by Shigenori Soejima, who had previously worked at Atlus with Kazuma Kaneko on Atlus' Persona series. While he had heard rumors about the project, his assignment to the project came out of the blue when the game's director asked him if there was an available illustrator for the game. Soejima managed to get the post, which was his first as a character designer as well as art director. One of his major problems was that he had yet to refine his own drawing style. Describing himself as initially "at a loss", much of his memory of the experience is dominated by finding his chosen style rather than specific character designs. To get the feel he needed, he used brushes as opposed to cel-shaded drawing he used in later projects. The characters' metallic clothing and contrasting colors of items was influenced by The Lord of the Rings, while some characters and the environmental textures were inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki. The cutscenes used cel-shaded animation, and were created by Japanese studio Kamikaze Douga. Character sprites and status images used high-resolution artwork. The game's setting was in a vast desert, so this needed to be taken into account with environment and character designs. Not only did the developers need to provide places of interest to players, but Soejima needed to create realistic clothes for characters. For instance, there was a lack of classic armor in the game as the hot desert climate would have made it impractical. There was also a concern over