"With Final Fantasy 16, Square has delivered its sixteenth mainline Final Fantasy title." It's one of those sentences that is simultaneously redundant and revelatory; as game development costs have risen exponentially, the number of series that have lasted this long whilst priding every entry as a massive undertaking can be counted on one hand.
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Who does it take to helm something like Final Fantasy? A talented team who can work in harmony, certainly. Arguably even more crucial is a senior staff comprised of folks with enough Final Fantasy experience to level up to 99. Here they are - the arbiters of Clive Rosfield's FF16 journey.
Though we'll be having fun with this who's-who guide, let's take a moment first to remember that everyone who contributes to a video game deserves to be celebrated - not just the rock stars. And who knows, someday some of those whose names merely flash by in a blink during the credit roll will graduate to a degree of notoriety seen here today!
Square Enix, like any big-name developer, has its fair share of unsung heroes. Hiroshi Takai is one of those heroes. He's hardly a household name like Tetsuya Nomura, despite his work at the company predating Nomura's by a couple of years. Takai's graphical contributions to early entries in Square's cult-classic SaGa series are the stuff of legend among hardcore fans.
Takai's favorite Final Fantasy is the fifth - it was the first one he helped to develop, and he was placed in charge of its battle visuals. But what Takai fell in love with most was the class-swapping customization and overarching sense of adventure. Long before accepting the heavy task of directing Final Fantasy 16, Takai also played a vital role in several other hits, including Legend of Mana and Square's first MMO, Final Fantasy 11.
He would eventually be brought on as an assistant director under Naoki Yoshida for Final Fantasy 14's 2.0 reboot and first two expansions - the duo had previously worked together on an action-centric game that was ultimately canceled due to issues with available workforce at the company. Prior to all this, Takai was tapped for a directorial debut with The Last Remnant.
A veteran of 32 years and counting, Hiroshi Takai's fame is surely overshadowed by the next fellow on our list, but Final Fantasy 16 wouldn't be what it is without his steady guiding hand.
When Naoki Yoshida first played Yasumi Matsuno's Tactics Ogre, he decided then and there he would work toward a career that would allow him to one day work alongside the industry icon. Matsuno's drive to create captivating worlds populated by compelling characters and brimming with deep gameplay mechanics doubtless shaped Yoshida's future endeavors.
After lending a strong hand to the development of Dragon Quest 10 - the legendary JRPG series' foray into the MMORPG landscape - Yoshida found himself at the center of Square Enix's attention following the disastrous launch of Final Fantasy 14. Together with Hiroshi Takai and Hiroshi Minagawa, he outlined a complete overhaul which would necessitate a full-blown reboot of the ill-fated second Final Fantasy MMO.
It was an expensive undertaking to say the least, and not the sort of thing that had ever really been attempted before. Naoki Yoshida proved to be the right man at the right time; Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn launched to great success which has only increased over the past decade's worth of fresh content.
An accomplishment of this magnitude sprang Naoki Yoshida into the upper stratosphere of video game developer fame. His steady hand and obvious love for the series compelled fans to hope he might one day direct a single-player FF, and while technically his job title for Final Fantasy 16 is producer, it's hard to deny how hands-on Yoshida has been with its construction.
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There's long been a perception across FF fandom that you can pretty easily slice Square Enix's chief personnel into neat little quadrants. Anyone who worked on Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story surely worked on Final Fantasy 12 and Final Fantasy 14. While this has hardly been the case for most personnel, there are a few leading figures whose resume really can be traced so simply.
Enter Kazutoyo Maehiro. An event planner on FFT, main level designer on Vagrant Story, and even the quest planner for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Maehiro is almost as 'Ivalician' in spirit as Yasumi Matsuno himself.
Final Fantasy has always been a franchise happy to change its setting between installments, but these games nevertheless share some distinguishable DNA. The medieval aesthetic, the sharp character writing, the relatively mature tone, it was the perfect combination of factors for anyone interested in contributing to Yoshida's retooled Final Fantasy 14, and Maehiro took the ball and ran, serving as main scenario writer on not just A Realm Reborn, but the award-winning expansion, Heavensward.
While subsequent expansions all have their share of diehard lovers, most players concur FF14's storytelling hit its first home run with Heavensward. Astute sorts soon noted Maehiro's strange departure from the team thereafter, and hoped for years it might mean exactly what it's turned out to be - Kazutoyo Maehiro has written the script for Final Fantasy 16. No wonder it's so good.
There's a lot about Final Fantasy 14 composer Masayoshi Soken that tends to surprise people. There's the birthplace twist - Soken was born in Mexico, not Japan. There's the heroic shocker - he was receiving chemotherapy treatment for cancer whilst penning much of Shadowbringers' soundtrack from his hospital bed, because he refused to give up, and he knew he needed something to center himself on.
And then there's the accolade-studded jaw-dropper - Soken simply never misses. Naoki Yoshida's longtime musical companion has captained the tunes for everything from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker, and he is no doubt humming the critical tunes for whatever the next FF14 expansion is titled even as we type. He's profoundly eclectic, breathtakingly ambitious, and dares to take a crack at well over a dozen genres at any given time.
If we sound like we're effusively singing Soken's praises, well, we are. It's kind of what most Final Fantasy 14 fans learn to do. Square Enix is filled with skilled composers, to be sure, but if Final Fantasy 16 didn't give Masayoshi Soken center-stage, it might have never felt quite right. Instead, we've been treated to one of the strongest scores in the series.
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He helped to translate Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions. His experience elevated him to the role of English localization director for the entirety of Final Fantasy 14, where his invaluable talent for worldbuilding, spurred by a lifelong love of epic fantasy fiction, has given him massive input on the game's ever-expanding lore. His continuing role as localization director for Final Fantasy 16 is a no-brainer, and he's proven he's still got it.
But we wish to draw exceptional attention to the one thing Michael-Christopher Koji Fox has done that hasn't been shouted from rooftops with glee: this wild hero among heroes voiced all the Moogles in FF14's bizarre 'Good King Moggle-Mog XII', a song so odd it feels less Eorzea and more... Danny Elfman.
Koji Fox has an unmistakably terrific ability to transform good Japanese writing into equally good English, not to mention a cheerful personality that seems to vibe impeccably well whenever he's on stage with close friends like Naoki Yoshida and Masayoshi Soken. He also seems to love Torgal, Clive's boon wolf companion, as much as the rest of us do, so he can't be a bad dude.
The senior staff on Final Fantasy 16 is star-studded, to be sure, and nearly all of them have a long and storied history at Square Enix. Ryota Suzuki's star is hardly any dimmer, but his past affiliation with Capcom separates him from the rest of the pack, having only joined Square Enix to direct FF16's action-packed approach to combat.
Square made sure to hire someone custom-built for the job, and with his extensive know-how from guiding the core combat systems for Dragon's Dogma and Devil May Cry 5, it's hard to argue they didn't find the right guy in Suzuki. Echoes of his past work shine clear as day in Clive's diversity of Eikonic abilities, and with all we've heard for the ramped-up difficulty in New Game Plus' 'Final Fantasy Mode', we bet Suzuki's excellence will be on full display there.
We wrap with another mainstay of several shared projects. In a way, Hiroshi Minagawa began his career by living the life Naoki Yoshida could only dream of; he led the art direction for Yasumi Matsuno's pre-Square masterpieces, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen and Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. When Matsuno joined the House of Final Fantasy, Minagawa went with him.
Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, all the Ivalician fare, and thus everything surrounding Matsuno - that's where you could find Minagawa from the late 1990s through the 2000s. He even served as art supervisor for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and its sequel, two handheld spinoffs set in the same universe.
When Minagawa joined visionary FF guru Hiroyuki Ito in co-directing Final Fantasy 12 following Matsuno's health-related departure from the project, in some ways it felt like the culmination of his prior work. But after taking a few years away from individual game development to help with Square Enix's in-house Crystal Tools engine (that didn't go well), he joined the FF14 crew. Naturally, that meant making the dragoon jump to FF16.
Final Fantasy 16 oozes Minagawa's style. While it isn't necessarily the sort of eye-popping color parade that one might find in installments like FF8 and FF10, it's precisely attuned to the sensibilities we've seen in every high-fantasy Final Fantasy to-date.
Next: Final Fantasy 16: Caer Norvent Walkthrough