Hironobu Sakaguchi

I think that's, that sounds like the very core of the MMO dynamic.

Um, why did they make FF XI? It's because Sakaguchi was in Hawaii.

This is, in fact-

A- again?

[laughs]

This is the last Sakaguchi game, even though I don't think he had, um, I think he had very little, if any, involvement with the developments, uh, per se.

It was originally his idea to make an MMO 'cause he was in Hawaii and the Americans were playing EverQuest, and he was like, "We should make one of these."

The final Sakaguchi was in Hawaii project.

It was like the first game to have a new game plus feature where you could restart your game with your levels from the previous gameplay.

It was such a... just a groundbreaking game, and it was created by three of the biggest names, Yuji Horii, who was making the Dragon Quest series, Akira Toriyama, who was the artist for the Dragon Quest series, and more, I think famously, the artist for Dragon Ball Z, who passed away not that long ago, and Hironobu Sakaguchi, who was the brain behind Final Fantasy.

So there was all this talk about Hori and Sakaguchi working together because the makers of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest coming together to make a game is an RPG player's dream.

And so they became what was called the Dream Team.

Yep.

Well, just like Dragon Quest needs Yuji Horii to be a proper Dragon Quest game, Final Fantasy needs Hironobu Sakaguchi to be a proper Final Fantasy game.

And I said what I said.

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

He also worked on The Spirits Within.

I bet Sakaguchi lured him to Hawaii for a few years.

I wonder if Murase surfs.

I presume yes.

They got a little bit hubristic.

And I think Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, was given a lot of power and reigns over that feature film.

And of course, it flopped.

And that ambition faded away, but that didn't stop them from becoming some pretty capable cinematic storytellers over the course of their later games.

Your idea originally is that the creator doesn't need to be Matsuno.

You suggested it could also be Sakaguchi.

It could also be Sakaguchi, yes.

Because

Sakaguchi was also driven out by Final Fantasy.

Yeah, yeah.

It could be Sakaguchi, it could be Matsuno.

It is reaching into our world.

Eve creates deformed creatures all over Manhattan that Aya must defeat before dealing with the root of the problem at the end of the game.

Aya was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and first appeared in the video game Parasite Eve back in 1998.

Gonna point out, this is Parasite Eve only...

Uh, this is Aya Brea from only Parasite Eves 1 and 2.

Trust me, I've tried.

But they had, like, they had Kitase and Hironobu Sakaguchi and Amano and, like, producers and Nomura and just, like, everybody, right? And so...

Right around the time Final Fantasy VII was in development, you had a sort of internal rift between Kitase and Sakaguchi.

And Kitase, and actually it wasn't just him, there was a lot of other people too.

Hiromichi Tanaka, who came into Square the same time that Sakaguchi did back in the early 80s, 1984, 1985, something like that.

Um, they both were college students.

They came in together and, uh, they were both, they both became game directors of separate teams and they, uh, you know, kind of, well, Sakaguchi talks about how he realized people liked Tanaka a little bit better than him.

And he felt like, uh, he wasn't as popular, but so I don't know if there was necessarily a rivalry there, but point is Tanaka worked on some of those early final fantasy games, those, the, the NES trilogy.