Watanabe first became interested in writing in junior high school in 1988, after reading the Wizardry novel Tonariawase no Hai to Seishun by Benny Matsuyama.
[5] Hiroshi Minagawa, the co-director of Final Fantasy XII, expressed his regrets that many of the story ideas by Watanabe had to be dropped so the game could meet the deadline for the release.
[note 1] In March 2006, Watanabe rejoined the Final Fantasy XIII team after Kazushige Nojima and Motomu Toriyama had conceived a mythology and story for the game, respectively.
He was shown a rough outline of the plot until chapter eight and was asked by Toriyama to flesh things out and to correct how it would all connect.
Watanabe decided how Toriyama's rudimentary cutscene ideas should play out, wrote the script and adjusted the personality of each character to emphasize what the story tried to express.