Hironobu Sakaguchi Director - Final Fantasy

Hironobu Sakaguchi is a Japanese video game designer and the creator of the world renowned and widely successful Final Fantasy game series. Though best known for video game design, he is also an author, producer, director, and a film director. In addition to the Final Fantasy games he is known for his accomplishments of directing the computer animated sci-fi film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and is also connected behind a number of other successful non-mainline Final Fantasy game titles, such as Chrono Trigger and Chocobo Racing.

Sakaguchi left the Final Fantasy franchise maker Square Enix in the year 2004 to open his own game studio, Mistwalker. However his legacy and input still continues as the Final Fantasy series would go on to inspire future cosplay, fan art, spinoffs, merchandise and apparal, figures, film, TV, and a host of other material.

Early Life

Sakaguchi was born in Hitachi, Ibaraki, Japan in the year 1962. Originally, he planned on being a professional musician and booked venues during his secondary education; even selling tickets to the shows by hand. He started by ending up pursuing studies in Electrical Engineering at the University of Yokohama, however before graduating, dropping out in 1983 with Hiromichi Tanaka, another well known Japanese video game developer. Sa went on to achieve great success in the video game industry, eventually becoming a senior vice president of software development at Square, producing Final Fantasy XI, the company's first massively multiplayer online role playing game(MMORPG) among other famous titles.

Career

While pursuing studies in engineering and programming, Sakaguchi desired an Apple II computer, but because the cost was too expensive, he ended up buying a knock-off computer in Akihabara, a well-known Otaku and IT area in Japan. To buy software and fund himself, he sought part time work and was eventually offered an opportunity to work at Square, a branch of the Denyusha Electric Company. At this point, he still wanted to be a musician, but thought that working at Square would give him the programming experience he needed.

"I had so much fun when I first started at Square. During those days the development studio was in a rented apartment. Because I was so poor I'd often stay at their premises because they had a bath and air conditioning. I never really went home..."
-Hironobu Sakaguchi

Square became an independent company in 1986, and while Sakaguchi was hired there as a full time employee, his title was Director of Planning and Development. In the beginning, the games he was responsible for were unsuccessful. Questioning whether he had chosen the right career path, he vowed to go back and finish his studies; if Final Fantasy, the game he had pitched and spent most of his work on, failed. The game went on to be very successful and spawned the beginning of a major franchise for Square. Sakaguchi was promoted to Executive Vice President, and continued directing games in the series until Final Fantasy V. After Final Fantasy V, he acted as a producer for the various other Final Fantasy projects that were released. In 1995, he became president of Square's North American division, and the last game he produced was Final Fantasy IX. He also worked on other popular titles, including the Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, and Kingdom Heart. Sakaguchi left Square Enix in 2004.

Mistwalker and Present Work

In 2004, Sakaguchi founded his independent game studio Mistwalker in the year 2004 with funding from Microsoft Game Studios. He released one of his works known as Blue Dragon in 2006, and Lost Odyssey in 2007 on the Xbox 360, and ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat on the Nintendo DS. He was developing an action RPG to be titled Cry On, but the project was cancelled in 2008. Sakaguchi then began work on a large scale project, announced in January 2010 as “The Last Story”, it was co produced with Nintendo for the Wii. It was the first game he directed since Final Fantasy V. The game was well received by critics, but some noted its lack of originality in the RPG genre. In 2016, he announced that a new development company, “Dawnwalker” would be opened in Tokyo.

Work on Last Story

After Hironobu Sakaguchi departed from Square Enix, Sakaguchi had made various attempts at creating new RPG games through his own company Mistwalker. He released Blue Dragon in 2006 and Lost Odyssey 2007. In most recent times Sakaguchi released ‘Last Story’ in 2011, an RPG that was created upon the mistakes made during the development of previous titles. Together with designer Takuya Matsumoto and some more familiar names such as Nobuo Uematsu, they created a more traditional RPG game. This game was meant to recapture the pioneering spirit Sakaguchi brought to Final Fantasy. However, also adding elements of faster combat, tactical control and third-person action

Links

Hironobu Sakaguchi Twitter
Mistwalker Official
Eurogamer Sakaguchi Interview