Hironobu Sakaguchi is the father of the Final Fantasy games. For a conversation with the director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV, he originally only wanted to try the MMORPG once. Now he explains how deep he really is into it.
Who is Hironobu Sakaguchi? Sakaguchi is a Japanese game designer and game developer. His first game, Rad Racer, was released in 1987 by Nintendo. That same year, Final Fantasy launched at Square, one of the two companies that would later merge to become Square Enix.
He worked for the company until around 2006. His works include, among others:
- Final Fantasy 1 to 10, 10-2, and 12
- Chrono Trigger
- Chrono Cross
- Trials of Mana
- Chocobo’s Dungeon
- Parasite Eve 1 and 2
Since 2004, he has been running his own game company, Mistwalker. The developer and publisher released eleven games by 2021, including Blue Dragon and Last Odyssey.
Most recently, Fantasian, a mobile game, was released. This is currently getting a port to PC and consoles as Fantasian Neo Dimension – precisely with Sakaguchi’s old employer Square Enix.
At the moment, Hironobu Sakaguchi plays a lot of Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail:
I have almost been living in Final Fantasy XIV
What has the MMORPG done to him? Hironobu Sakaguchi talked in an interview with Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier among other things about his fascination
for Final Fantasy XIV: I have almost been living in Final Fantasy XIV.
The game designer is absolutely fascinated by the world of the MMORPG. He loves the characters, the music, and the feeling of nostalgia that the game evokes in him. His X.com feed is filled with images and posts about the game.
In the Shadowbringers expansion, he found a 3D-animated goblin, based on the templates from his early Final Fantasy games. That made him so emotional that he wanted to cry. He also posted this on X.com.
Now it has come to the point that his gaming behavior sometimes even impacts his work:
Sometimes – I want to emphasize: really only sometimes – a team member from Mistwalker makes a brief detour into Final Fantasy XIV and I see a message pop up like,
Hironobu Sakaguchi in an interview, 03.07.2024Hey, the meeting has started.
On the Friday evening when Jason Schreier conducted the interview, the journalist apologized for interrupting Sakaguchi’s adventure in the new expansion Dawntrail. Sakaguchi then admitted that he had been gaming just minutes before the interview.
Why did he start playing the game? According to Sakaguchi himself, his first foray into the MMORPG was actually just pure courtesy. Accordingly, he installed the game thinking he would only spend a few hours in it.
Now he has reached the point where he could dive straight into the new expansion for the Early Access of Dawntrail.
Additionally, Hironobu Sakaguchi meets regularly with Naoki Yoshida, the director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV. His good character and their good relationship are also among the reasons why the port of the Mistwalker game Fantasian is being published by Square Enix. Sakaguchi trusts Yoshida and his team.
Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail launched last Friday in Early Access and officially released on June 2nd. MeinMMO editor Sophia Weiß also took the time and started right at 11 AM when the servers were back online in the new expansion. She summarized her experiences for you: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail shows that the MMORPG is increasingly becoming a single-player experience
