Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
That doesn't mean that him stepping back and letting Ito take the reigns more on some titles wasn't because he knew it was a good idea, rather than simply being forced to work together.
It still wasn't really his choice though, and letting Ito do his thing because the boss man tells you isn't a sign of good leadership. The fact they work really well together is not the same as a leader who knows the people he wants. I mean he didn't really try to recruit Ito for Vagrant Story or FFTA, instead preferring his old Quest team to do all that. I would still argue that when it comes to Ito, that's more of Sakaguchi's good judgement than Matsuno's. He liked both designers and that's why he kept trying to pair them up, so I would still not give Matsuno the credit since their collaboration were largely the insistence of a third party.

I will say if I was going to tip this one person's favor in terms of the design team, I would go with Takahashi purely on the basis that his games always have the best composers. Maybe it's because I recently purchased the Myth album but good god do his games tend to have really good soundtracks. I like Hitoshi Sakimoto (though his best work IMHO is a non-Matsuno title) but his OSTs tend to be purely atmospheric for me, whereas regardless of who composing for Takahashi, his OST's really have a strong sense of emotion and character to them.

I'm still debating who I like more.