Hajime Tabata, director of Final Fantasy XV, has left Square Enix and founded his own studio. For many, this step was surprising at the time, but now he talks about why this decision had to happen.
Who is it about? Hajime Tabata became the director of Final Fantasy XV in 2013 but left Square Enix two years after the game’s release. At an event in Taiwan, he spoke about his decision to leave the studio and take the leap into self-employment.
In 2018, Tabata left Square Enix after only one of the four announced expansions from the DLC package “The Dawn of the Future” was released. Our colleagues from GamePro reported on this at the time.
After the episodes for Aranea, Lunafreye, and Noctis were canceled, Tabata shortly thereafter announced that his paths were parting from Square Enix. Instead, he announced that he would found his own studio.
Former Director of Square Enix did not want to continue working like this
Why did he leave Square Enix back then? In an interview with a Japanese news outlet, Tabata admitted that it had been difficult for him to talk about the reasons for a long time. Why he needed that time to speak about his separation from Square Enix is evident from his following words.
The essence is that I was pursuing a different policy than the then-president [Yosuke Matsuda] of Square Enix. But the company naturally had to follow the president’s policy, so we could not do what I deemed necessary.
In the interview, he mainly expresses his frustration about the end of Final Fantasy XV and the canceled DLCs:
“It was not my decision to cancel the DLC, but I could not prevent it, which made me even sadder at the time,” says Tabata. However, this frustration gave him the opportunity to produce better games.
“I felt that it would be impossible to continue working for many more years in this situation, so I decided for independence,” he says about his decision. By providing interesting games to all the players he had let down at the time, he wants to rehabilitate himself in the future.
Tabata wants to rehabilitate himself with his own studio
What is Tabata doing today? After leaving Square Enix, Tabata founded his own Studio JP Games in January 2019. Several international game developers from Asia are supposed to work there, including many veterans of Final Fantasy XV.
“I explained to the first members of the team the direction that I believe future games will take and what we can do in the second half of our careers as game developers. I urged them to develop an RPG that is different from anything that has come before,” explains Tabata.
He believes that the RPG genre has great potential, and through his many experiences, he wants to create a good title that also advances and develops the genre.
“Now that my career is entering the second half, I have a strong desire to develop new games […] I would not have been able to realize this if I were still working at Square Enix,” says Tabata.
What is he working on? With his own studio JP Games, Tabata is currently working on two projects according to his own statements. An RPG for consoles, which is being developed in cooperation with another company, and a “MMO-like” game.
JP Games took its first step with the new development application “Pegasus World Kit”. This is a toolkit with many technologies that are necessary for RPG development. It is supposed to assist developers who want to create a role-playing game so that they do not have to start right from the beginning.
Meanwhile, you can read about the experiences with the Final Fantasy MMORPG by Sophia Weiss here: For my first MMORPG, I needed two attempts; only a dancing catboy convinced me
