Curated playlist
Final Fantasy designers
- Koichi IshiiKoichi Ishii created the chocobo and the moogle. These two characters became fixtures of the Final Fantasy universe, recognized by players across decades of games. Ishii built them at Square, where he also directed or produced the entire…
- Yoshinori KitaseYoshinori Kitase was eleven years old in July 1978 when he saw Star Wars for the first time. The film left such an impression on him that he tracked down the making-of video, becoming fixated not on the spectacle itself but on how it was…
- Hiroyuki ItoHiroyuki Ito joined Square in 1987 as a debugger, tasked with finding bugs in the original Final Fantasy. Few entry-level jobs in gaming feel more invisible, yet that starting point would eventually lead to one of the most consequential…
- Daisuke WatanabeDaisuke Watanabe wrote the dialog for the Zanarkand Ruins in Final Fantasy X almost entirely in a single night. That moment of compressed creativity stands as a small emblem of a career defined by tight deadlines, dropped story ideas, and…
- Yusuke NaoraYusuke Naora returned from Bali, Indonesia, carrying images that would reshape his work for years. He had seen seaside towns, temples, and people in distinctive clothing handing out tropical flowers. Those impressions became Besaid Village…
- Akihiko YoshidaAkihiko Yoshida has spent decades shaping how players see the worlds they inhabit. Born in 1967, he joined Square in 1995 and spent nearly two decades building some of the most distinctive visual languages in Japanese role-playing games.…
- Hiroshi MinagawaHiroshi Minagawa, known by the nickname Nigoro, began his career at Quest Corporation in 1991. He worked alongside colleagues Yasumi Matsuno and Akihiko Yoshida during this early period. The trio collaborated on projects like Magical Chase…
- Hironobu SakaguchiHironobu Sakaguchi named the lead character of his debut film after his dead mother. Aki Ross, the protagonist of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, carried the name of the woman who died in a house fire while Sakaguchi was away, arriving…
- Kazuko ShibuyaKazuko Shibuya was born in 1965 in Japan. She would go on to spend decades contributing pixel art and design work to Square's games, including the Final Fantasy series. Before any of that, she spent her teens drawing for animated…
- Naoki YoshidaNaoki Yoshida, known to millions of players as Yoshi-P, inherited one of the most troubled games in the history of Japanese role-playing: a massively multiplayer online title so poorly received at its 2010 launch that players and critics…
- Tetsuya NomuraTetsuya Nomura was born in 1970 and applied to Square after seeing a job advertisement featuring artwork by Yoshitaka Amano. He had gone to vocational school to study magazine and advertising, then looked for work at a publishing company.…
- Yoshitaka AmanoYoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, in 1952, the youngest of four children. His father, Yoshio Amano, was a lacquer artist who specialized in traditional Suruga lacquerware and died in 1962 when Yoshitaka was…