San Francisco — Change isn’t easy. Square Enix learned this during the development of the WiiWare-targeted “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King.” At GDC last week, Square Enix shared some lessons in a panel entitled “WiiWare Project Lifecycle: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, The Little King.”

“My Life as a King” Designer, former “Final Fantasy XI” and “Front Mission Online” server programmer and self-proclaimed “token English speaker/programmer” Fumiaki Shiraishi and Producer Toshiro Tsuchida told a packed crowd they quickly discovered Square Enix’s traditional development tactics — which produce the sprawling epics beloved by gamers worldwide — weren’t going to work in this decidedly atypical development environment.

“With “Final Fantasy VII,” we established a process for developing high-quality games,” said Tsuchida. “All our games since then have been developed with a similar process.” Additionally, Tsuchida humbly suggested the traditional process could be preventing some creativity at Square Enix.

“Creators need to be creative,” he said.

What is Square Enix doing to make sure that continues to happen? Read on to find out.

Shiraishi actually started early development of “My Life as a King” before Nintendo had publicly disclosed any details on WiiWare. And that’s not because Square Enix was privy to Nintendo’s secrets; Shiraishi just assumed Nintendo would produce such a service and immediately pitched a series of ideas, including one that became “My Life as a King.” His first pitch was denied.

At Square Enix, projects are not designed around a core gameplay mechanic; instead, they start with visuals. That wasn’t the case with “My Life as a King,” however; here, the gameplay concept came first, and Shiraishi found himself borrowing art assets from the GameCube title “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles” at the game’s outset. “This may seem kind of obvious to some studios, but it’s definitely different at our company,” he said.

Like most Japanese studios, Square Enix often creates all of its game development technologies in-house to fit their project-to-project needs. As game budgets continue to grow and development moves into four, five and six year periods, that culture appears to be changing — even in Japan.

“Gone are the days when developing everything in-house is the logical choice,” said Shiraishi. For “My Life as a King,” Shiraishi’s team utilized both NintendoWare, a set of tools produced by Nintendo, and Squirrel, a freely available programming language.

Elsewhere in the company, “The Last Remnant” uses Epic Games‘ Unreal Engine 3 technology. So far, Square Enix has not said if any other projects are utilizing those tools.

Unfortunately, Shiraishi didn’t indicate whether this design philosophy would continue at Square Enix. While it’s likely that decision rides on the success of “My Life as a King,” at GDC, Square Enix also revealed Crystal Tools, a company-wide proprietary middleware for use on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC and sometimes Wii. Does this mean Japan’s flirtation with American middleware (see: “The Last Remnant”) will be a one-time thing?

Count us in to see the results of Shiraishi and Tsuchida’s experiment later this year.

“My Life as a King” is scheduled to launch alongside the WiiWare service in March overseas, and common sense dictates it will likely accompany the US debut on May 12, as well.