Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
Very sad to see, I think he got scapegoated hard for FFXIV.
I agree, this definetly comes across as him retiring after becoming the fall guy for XIV's failure. While I'm sure he is partially responsible for some of the games problems, I don't necessarily feel he's completely at fault here for whatever issues fans have with XI and XIV.

He's technically the true "Father of Final Fantasy," the one who, along with Koichi Ishii, came up with the world of swords and sorcery that Final Fantasy would inhibit, directed FFIII and IV,
I know you're still on your "Sakaguchi is a hack" campaign, but it was actually Sakaguchi who co-wrote FFI's plot with Koichi Ishii, Tanaka was a co-designer along with the two of them, but they are the ones who were charge of the actual story and Sakaguchi says it was Ishii who was the one who came up with the Crystal concept, but Sakaguchi came up with the whole concept of what the game was going to be. He also didn't direct FFIV, he didn't even really work on it cause he jumped to do Seiken Denetsu instead. Tanaka is also only credited with directing the DS remake of FFIII, he was simply one of the main designers in III who came up with Chocobos and the Job class system. ,

He's the man who put the "Dream Team" of Square and Enix's best and brightest together for Chrono Trigger,
This is also incorrect, he never worked on Chrono Trigger, only Chrono Cross as producer and battle designer, and as a supervisor for the PSX port of CT. The Dream Team was created when Horii, Sakaguchi, and Akira Toriyama were in America on business trips, and they got to talking about making a game that has never been done, which ended up creating the "Dream Team" and Chrono Trigger.

and believed enough in the Monolith guys to give them another shot with Chrono Cross after their relative failure with Xenogears.
Xenogears was actually commercially successful, and even became a greatest hit, so it's far from a failure, considering the games success allowed Xenosaga to even be made. Hell Nintendo changed their latest entries name to reflect the Xeno brand name so I would argue that Xenogears was far from a failure.

He was the driving force for Final Fantasy XI and the reason why we got such awesome remakes with Final Fantasy III and IV on the DS.
Um, once again, he didn't work on the DS remake of IV, that was Tokita.

So yeah, while he was definetly an important founding member of the Final Fantasy series and did some great things with Mana series (from what I've gathered, he's like Ito, and specialized in battle systems since he has confirmed that as something he did for the first three games) I feel you have really kind of shot yourself in the foot in your attempt to discredit Sakaguchi (and to a lesser degree, Xenogears) with this post.