Article: Get to Know Your Staff Part 3
It's time for Round 3: We're more famous for our Non-FF titles
Yasumi Matsuno - Matsuno began his career working for the company Quest, where he made his debut with his two signature SRPG series Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre. Matsuno was eventually scouted by Sakaguchi who was a big fan of his games. Matsuno himself was a huge fan of the FF series and jumped at the chance to join Square; he took some of his Quest employees with him and they were joined with Hiroyuki Ito to create Final Fantasy Tactics, an FF SRPG in the same style as Tactics Ogre. The game's success led Matsuno to work on the cult classic genre-defining Vagrant Story which was the first game by Square to get a perfect score in Famitsu magazine.
He moved on to be a supervisor on the PlayOnline system before he was chosen by Sakaguchi to work on the next FF title. During XII's development, Matsuno worked as a producer for the spiritual sequel to FFTactics - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Soon afterwards, Matsuno became ill and had to leave FFXII's development. He quit Square-Enix shortly after and has now become a freelance designer who worked on Mad World for the Wii, SE's remake of his Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, and a new title with Level-5.
Matsuno's style is very distinct; he likes his games to be technical and subtle with their depth, often appearing simplistic on the surface before cracking the code shows it's anything but simple. His stories and characters tend to have a heavier emphasis on realism which he accomplishes by placing a heavier emphasis on history and politics, as well as focusing the conflicts in his story on the ideological conflicts between his characters as opposed to a general "Good vs. Evil" plots.
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Masato Kato - Kato got his start working for Tecmo on Captain Tsubasa (soccer simulation game based on a popular manga) and Ninja Gaiden. He eventually left Tecmo to work for Studio Gainax (Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL) before finally landing a job at Square where he made his debut as one of the writers for Chrono Trigger. He wrote a huge part of the plot and cast, most notably the Kingdom of Zeal sections. He went onto work for the now, non-canonical sequel Radical Dreamers. He was next brought on to be a writer and script planner for Final Fantasy VII. Afterwards he was brought in to be one of the four main writers for the cult classic RPG Xenogears.
Kato was brought back to work on a proper Chrono sequel, this time getting full control of the project as both its head writer and the game's director, he took several characters and story concepts from Radical Dreamers and made Cross to serve as a proper sequel, debunking Radical Dreamers from canon. Afterwards he was brought in to write for Square's first MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI, for which he wrote the plot concept, several of the events, and the Rise of the Zilart expansion. He left SE in 2003 and became a freelance writer. He would come back to work on more expansions for FFXI, the World of Mana compilation, and the port of Chrono Trigger for the DS. He has expressed great interest in making a new Chrono game, along with the series composer Yasunori Mitsuda. His stories tend to explore themes concerning philosophy and environmentalism, and he tends to favor large ensemble casts.
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Akitoshi Kawazu - Kawazu joined Square way back in 1985 and was one of the game designers for the original Final Fantasy. His real mark on the series came from Final Fantasy II where he allegedly created the games love-it-or-hate-it character development system, a system he would take with him when he started working on Square's experimental RPG series SaGa franchise. He would go onto turn SaGa into a large franchise for Square before being asked in 2003 to be the producer of the first exclusive Final Fantasy game for the Nintendo in nearly a decade with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. A few years later, Kawazu was asked to step in and take over Executive Producer role for FFXII after Matsuno had stepped down. He would continue to work on both the SaGa and Crystal Chronicles franchises afterwards.
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Kazuhiko Aoki - Aoki joined Square in 1984 where he began work as an assistant for Sakaguchi; he got his first break into the FF series as the battle planner for FFIII and then later reprised his design role in FFIV. He would later go onto be a producer for Chrono Trigger and an Event Designer for FFVII. Afterwards he was tasked with working on the PS1 ports of FFIV and FFV, before breaking out on his own as the director of the often underappreciated Chocobo Dungeon series. He did come back to work as an Event Designer for FFIX and served as the director for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.
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Kenji Terada - Terada is a scenario writer, novelist, manga writer, and script writer. He is largely known for his work in anime as the script writer for popular anime series such as Dirty Pair, Kimagure Orange Road, and Super Dimensional Calvary Southern Cross (the series that served as part two of the Robotech trilogy). His reasoning for being on this list is because he was the scenario writer for the first three Final Fantasy games. He also wrote novelization of Final Fantasy II and a manga for Final Fantasy III, where we get the name Mateus for the Emperor Palamecian as well as the not-so-canon-anymore names for the four Onion Knights, Muuchi, Doug, J. Bowie, and the only female Melfi. The first three Final Fantasy games are getting new novelizations, though it's unknown at this time if Terada is going to be involved.
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Nasir Gebelli - Born in Iran, Gebelli moved to the U.S. and studied computer science. He worked for Sirrius Software but eventually formed his own company called Gabelli software. When the great video game crash of '83 happened, Geblli lost his company and was out of job. When Nintendo started to show off their new video game system, Gebelli moved to Japan on a travel visa to see if he can get some work with Nintendo. He was rejected but eventually found work with a little known company called Square. With Gebelli's experieince as a programmer, the company was finally able to move away from it's parent company and become it's own independent entity. He was went on to make games such as 3-D World Runner, Rad Racer and last but not least, Final Fantasy.
Funnily enough, Gebellie can't speak Japanese, and no one on the design team could speak English, so they often had to have a translator help them. This became especially amusing as the idea of an RPG like Dragon Quest was new to Gebelli and Sakaguchi often had a difficult time explaining the mechanics to him. Gebelli would go onto program Final Fantasy and its sequels FFII and III respectively. Midway through development of the later two FFs, Gebelli's work visa expired and he had to return to the U.S. The Square staff followed him and finished the games in his home at Sacremento, California. Gebelli would end his career at Square after programming the 16-bit classic Secret of Mana. Afterwards Gebelli left the company and has lived quietly on the royalties from his other games, though he still apparently talks with Sakaguchi from time to time.
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Kaori Tanaka - I'll forgive you if the name doesn't sound familiar as she usually goes by her pen name Sorya Saga. She got her start as a graphics designer, and joined Square in the early 90s. She worked as a graphics designer on Final Fantasy V and the Romancing SaGa games. During FFVI's development, Soraya Saga was asked to help as one of the writers where she would create two of the most beloved characters in the game, Edgar and Sabin Figaro. She wrote their backstories, created their designs and wrote most of their characterizations and story scenes.
She then joined forces with her husband Tetsuya Takahashi (another graphics designer whose most notable work was designing the Magitek Armor marching to Narshe opening sequence in FFVI) and they wrote a script for a game they wanted to be FFVII. It was considered too dark and complicated for an FF but was greenlit as it's own production, called Project Noah. Masato Kato and Hiromichi Tanaka joined the project and it eventually became the cult classic Xenogears.
The Xeno team eventually had a falling out with Square and left the company, Takahashi starting his own production company called Monolith Soft. They would join forces with Namco to create the Xenosaga franchise with Sorya Sage penning the main story, and writing the scripts for the first two games and the spin-off cell phone game Pied Piper. Afterwards she left the company and is now a freelance artist and writer.
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Masashi Hamauzu - Born in Germany to Japanese parents, Hamauzu has been involved with music since he was in kindergarten. A long time fan of the FF series, he applied to the company in the mid-90s where Uematsu was impressed with his resume and hired him. He got his start on Front Mission Gun Hazard and 3D fighter Tobal No. 1. For some time he worked on both Chocobo Dungeon as well as Saga Frontier 2 before landing a job helping Uematsu work on the score of Final Fantasy X. He moved onto other early SE PS2 projects like Unlimited SaGa and Samurai Legend Musashi, as well as Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII. His next big break was being chosen as the head composer for FFXIII. He left Square in 2010 to form his own company Monomusik but has retuned to compose the score for the two other entries in the XIII trilogy.
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