Get To Know Your Staff pt II

Get To Know your Staff Part 2: The Old Dogs and Up and Comers

Hiromichi Tanaka - Hiromichi Tanaka left college with Sakaguchi so they could join Square and make video games. Tanaka is best known for being a key designer for the first three Final Fantasy games being one of the founders of the Job Class system. He later moved onto work on the Seiken Denetsu (Mana) series and Chrono franchises before being brought back to work as the producer for FFXI which he considers to be an evolution from FFIII. Later on he helmed the remake of FFIII for the DS and was tasked developing FFXIV. Due to the commercial failure of FFXIV, Tanaka stepped down from the development team and later retired from Square-Enix. He remains a controversial figure for the FF MMO community but is probably most well known and beloved by the Mana and Chrono fans.

Attachment 38228

Kazushige Nojima - Nojima joined Square sometime in the mid-90s making his debut as the director of the cult Super Famicom game Bahamut Lagoon. His first and most notable intro to the series was working with Kitase in adapting the original story by Nomura and Sakaguchi for FFVII. The success of VII allowed Nojima to be the main scenario writer/designer (basically the script writer) for FFVIII, FFX, and FFX-2. After 2003, he left Square-Enix to form his own company Stellavision Ltd. and continues working for SE as a freelance writer, penning the stories for the entire Compilation of FFVII and Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. He is also credited with creating the scenario concept for the games in the Fabula Nova Crystallis though he is only writing the actual scenario for Versus XIII.

Attachment 38229

Daisuke Watanabe - Watanabe is what we would call the new blood of the FF series.. Largely cause he's one of the few guys to join Square after FFVII was released. Watanabe gained his start as the scenario writer for Threads of Fate. His first work in the FF series was assisting Nojima in FFX and X-2's scripts. He was also brought along and has been one of the major contributing writers for the Kingdom Hearts series. After Matsuno left Square-Enix in the middle of FFXII's development, Watanabe was brought in to help Jun Akiyama finish Matsuno's script which was mainly a rough draft of the story. Later he was brought in to convert Toriyama's plot for FFXIII into a script which he had to often re-write for Toriyama who had a very specific vision for the story. He would go on to help write the scenario for FFXIII-2 and is currently working on Lightning Returns.

Attachment 38230

Motomu Toriyama - Joined Square in 96, he was a huge fan of FFIV and joined the company when they were hiring for VII's development. He started as the event planner for Bahamut Lagoon, later he was asked to work on VII where he was put in charge of the Midgard section of the game which he ended up expanding beyond the original scope of the script, causing several rewrites. The positive feedback on the Midgard section piqued Kitase's interest who later brought him in as the event director and scenario supervisor for FFX. Toriyama created the games pacing and wrote several scenes and backstories for the characters. The success of FFX had him promoted to work on FFX-2 which also met with modest success. He later headed the team that designed the FFVII PS3 Tech Demo and directed and wrote FFXII: Revenant Wings. Kitase chose Toriyama as his successor for directing the FF series and Toriyama went to work on FFXIII which he wanted to make even more story focused than previous FFs. The game was commercially successful but received some stinging criticism. To right this wrong, Toriyama began work on FFXIII-2 to rectify the fan complaints and it';s success has led him to work on Lightning Returns. Toriyama says FFXIII is his favorite game in the series and he follows heavily in Kitase's footsteps in terms of game design philosophy, preferring linear story driven games, and doesn't like giving the player too much freedom because he feels it detracts from the story and characters.

Attachment 38226


Takashi Tokita - Joined Square in 85 and started off creating sound effects for the games. His first entry in the series is the sound effect designer for FF III. Later he was chosen to be the lead designer for FFIV where he focused on making each of the games characters unique and building a memorable world by making each location memorable in it's own way. The huge success of FFIV in Japan as well as the cult classic Live A Live, lead to Tokita being chosen as one of the co-directors of Chrono Trigger. He later worked as an event planner in FFVII before moving onto direct and write Parasite Eve. Tokita largely worked on side projects like Chocobo Racing before working on the ports for FFI and II: Dawn of Souls, and FFIV Advance. Tanaka's huge success with the 3D remake of FFIII green-lighted Tokita's desire to remake FFIV in a similar style, which finally gave Tokita a chance to add back in parts of the scenario that were cut due to time constraints. Tokita and the development team were inspired by the remake and wanted to revisit FFIV. With SE expanding into the cell phone gaming market, Tokita was given an opportunity to revisit FFIV by making the direct sequel FFIV: The After Years. Tokita moved onto work on the handheld cell phone divisions, directing new titles like Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light, FFIV: Complete Collection and recently the retro FF title, Final Fantasy Dimensions. Tokita prefers smaller development teams cause it allows more creative freedom, and he's decidedly retro in his style largely spearheading the retro 2D 16-Bit games of yesteryear. His favorite game in the series is Final Fantasy IV.

http://static.gamesradar.com/images/...icle_image.jpg

I think I might be able to finish this in one more part but it might need to be two parts, it depends on how anal I feel about pointing out behind the scenes people.

I've always enjoyed reading biographies and interviews with the minds behind the games I play, and this series has been pretty comprehensive, even about the more elusive developers.

Should we limit it to FF developers, though? The award is for square enix employee, but I understand that it's a Final Fantasy 25th anniversary thing...

I plan to. To be in this articles you have to have worked on an FF title and right now I'm going from people who have worked on a majority of the games (first article) to people who haven't worked on as many or had limited roles. I'm annoyed that I'm having issue finding info on Jun Akiyama though, the stuff I found on Daisuke Watanabe made me confirm some suspicions I had about FFXII. I think the subtitle for part 3 will be: "We're known better for other work"

Post some links, too! I wanna know what you mean about XII and Watanabe.

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. :(