Interesting. I think I'd seen him compare FFXII's gambit system to football before in the sense of assigning plays the characters then execute much like a coach, but I hadn't seen him compare the battle systems in earlier games to it in that way. Makes quite a bit of sense in retrospect actually.

Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
He didn't "direct" FFVIII, but he was credited for the Junction system I believe, which a lot of people will probably consider as his one misstep.
I'd agree that's his biggest misstep, but I often wonder how much of that was him because I'm not sure how big his role in FFVIII was. The junction system was a great idea that suffered from poor balance. Sometimes I wonder if that was because other people implemented the idea throughout the game for him and missed some things, or if they simply didn't have time to iterate on it some more to get the balancing right, or if they simply missed it. Still, like you, I consider him my favourite developer on the FF series. He's played a fairly sizable role in all of my favourites that's hard to ignore. I wish they'd get him working on something new, or tell us about it if he already is.