A lot of is supposedly from the Ultimanias for FFIX, XII, and XIII but looking back, the links for the source don't actually go back to anything, so I'm kind of happy I didn't put some of the stuff in the article cause I would hate to learn it was all fake later. :sweatdrop

From what I read on various Wiki's, basically Matsuno wrote only a rough draft for the plot of FFXII before he left the development team, so it was up to Watanabe and Akiyama to actually make a working story out of it while still keeping to the theme of the story that Matsuno wanted, which was a story about nobility through the eyes of a commoner, the script team decided to do this by writing Vaan as a non-entity so that the player would think of him as a player avatar as opposed to a character, and focus the story on the games real protagonists of Balthier and Ashe. The goal was to make the player feel less like they got attached to a character driven story but instead feel like they went on an adventure with real people. I wish I could find a translation.