Hironobu Sakaguchi

Life

Hironobu Sakaguchi was born on November 25, 1962, in Hitachi, in Ibaraki Prefecture; his parents came from Kyushu. As a boy he collected polished stones, read through his mother's large library and played the piano, and in high school he played folk guitar in an amateur band and nearly got himself expelled for selling homemade concert tickets. He meant to be a musician. At Yokohama National University, where he studied computer science, his friend Hiromichi Tanaka gave him access to an Apple II, and Sakaguchi fell for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, skipping classes to play it. Unable to afford an Apple, he bought a cheaper knockoff in Akihabara, and to pay for software he went looking for part-time work.

Work

In 1983 Sakaguchi and Tanaka found jobs at Square, a new games subsidiary, founded by Masafumi Miyamoto, of Den-Yu-Sha, a company in the electric power industry. Sakaguchi worked on early computer titles such as The Death Trap (1984) and on Famicom games including King's Knight (1986), mostly action games he disliked, and earned a reputation as a demanding boss. When Square became an independent company in 1986, he was made a full-time director of planning and development.

That year Enix's Dragon Quest proved that a role-playing game could be a Famicom hit, and Sakaguchi finally persuaded Square to let him make one. He admired Dragon Quest for delivering a long adventure with saved progress on a home console, and he drew on Ultima and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord as well as The Legend of Zelda. Few colleagues believed in the project, and at first only three volunteered to join him, but the work gathered momentum. The working title Fighting Fantasy collided with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, so it became Final Fantasy; Sakaguchi and his colleagues have given several reasons for the word "final," including the team's wish for a title abbreviated "FF" and the widely told story that he expected it to be his last game if it failed. Released on December 18, 1987, with character art by Yoshitaka Amano, music by Nobuo Uematsu, a scenario by Kenji Terada from Sakaguchi's story and programming by Nasir Gebelli, Final Fantasy followed four Warriors of Light across a world of elemental crystals and fiends such as the Lich and the Kraken. Square had planned 200,000 copies; Sakaguchi argued for 400,000, and the game shipped 520,000 in Japan.

He directed the next four entries, through Final Fantasy V (1992), and the series became Square's flagship. Promoted to executive vice president in 1991, he stepped back from directing but remained its guiding force: he produced Final Fantasy VI (1994), joined Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama as the "Dream Team" behind Chrono Trigger (1995), and produced Final Fantasy VII (1997), Square's PlayStation debut and a worldwide phenomenon, handing day-to-day creative control to Yoshinori Kitase. He also produced Final Fantasy Tactics and Parasite Eve, proposed the online game that became Final Fantasy XI, and returned to hands-on writing as producer of the nostalgic Final Fantasy IX (2000), developed largely in Honolulu.

His grandest bet was cinema. He founded Square Pictures in 1997 and directed Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), a fully computer-animated film. It cost Square and Columbia Pictures $137 million and grossed just over $85 million, damaging Square's finances and delaying its merger with Enix. Sakaguchi resigned his executive post in 2001 and left Square in 2003. After three demoralized years in Hawaii, conversations with Toriyama and artist Takehiko Inoue drew him back, and in 2004 he founded Mistwalker, with backing from Microsoft. Its games include Blue Dragon (2006, with Toriyama), Lost Odyssey (2007), The Last Story (2011), the mobile hit Terra Battle (2014), and Fantasian (2021), a two-part RPG modeled on Final Fantasy VI.

Legacy

With Horii's Dragon Quest, Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy defined the Japanese RPGs (JRPG), and it did more than any other series to carry the genre beyond Japan. Its side-view battles and later Active Time Battle system, its recurring chocobos and airships, and its willingness to make players grieve became genre conventions. Sakaguchi also nurtured talents including Tetsuya Nomura and the creators of SaGa, Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics.

Much of his work turns on death and what follows it. The loss of his mother in a house fire during Final Fantasy III led him, by his account, to focus on narrative, feeding directly into Final Fantasy VII and The Spirits Within. He received the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame Award in 2000 and the Game Developers Choice Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015.