Before Final Fantasy
Hironobu Sakaguchi was born in Hitachi, Ibaraki prefecture, in 1962. He joined Den-Yu-Sha — which became Square Co., Ltd. — in 1983, initially working in the planning department before moving into game development. Square in the mid-1980s was a small, financially precarious software developer producing games for NEC's PC-88 and Apple II computers, then transitioning to the Famicom. The company had produced several games without commercial success significant enough to stabilise its finances. By 1987, Square's situation was serious: the company needed a successful product or faced the prospect of closing.
Sakaguchi proposed an RPG. Dragon Quest — Enix's Famicom RPG — had launched in 1986 and demonstrated that console role-playing games could reach mass audiences in Japan. Square needed to produce something in the same category. The game Sakaguchi designed — in collaboration with programmer Nasir Gebelli and artist Yoshitaka Amano — was called Final Fantasy for reasons that have become one of gaming's origin myths: the company was making what they feared might be their final game, and Sakaguchi himself had considered leaving the industry if it failed. Whether the name was literally accurate to these circumstances or had already acquired a retroactive narrative quality is impossible to fully determine. What is clear is that the game succeeded.
What Final Fantasy I established
Final Fantasy launched on the Famicom in December 1987 and sold 400,000 copies in Japan — sufficient to stabilise Square's finances and establish the franchise. The game was a conventional RPG by the standards Dragon Quest had just set: a party of four characters with selectable classes, turn-based combat, a world map connecting towns and dungeons, and a narrative framing device involving crystals and elemental imbalance. Its distinction from Dragon Quest was partly superficial — the visual style Yoshitaka Amano had established for the characters, the class diversity that allowed players to customise their party's composition — and partly structural: Final Fantasy's combat system was party-based from the beginning, where Dragon Quest had started with a single character hero.
Sakaguchi's most significant early contribution to the franchise was not mechanical but managerial: he established Final Fantasy as an anthology rather than a continuation. Each numbered Final Fantasy title would feature different characters, a different world, and a different narrative, connected to other entries only by thematic and mechanical conventions — the recurring spell names, the chocobos, the Cid character archetype, the crystals — rather than by shared story. This decision, which separated Final Fantasy from most franchise RPGs, allowed each game to be designed without the continuity constraints that sequential narratives impose. A player who had never played Final Fantasy could begin Final Fantasy VI without needing context. Each title was an entry point.
Final Fantasy VII and what it changed
Final Fantasy VII (1997) is the game most associated with Sakaguchi's legacy, though its production involved a large team and multiple directors. It was the first PlayStation Final Fantasy, the first rendered in 3D environments, the first with voice acting in cutscenes, and the first to reach a mass global audience. It sold 9.8 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling Final Fantasy until Final Fantasy XV surpassed it decades later. Players who had grown up with 16-bit RPGs encountered something that looked and felt more like cinema than any game they had previously experienced: pre-rendered backgrounds of extraordinary visual quality, fully three-dimensional character models in battle, and a narrative that dealt with environmentalism, corporate power, identity, and grief with a seriousness that its competitors hadn't attempted.
The game's most famous moment — the death of Aerith Gainsborough at the midpoint of the story — became the reference point for emotional impact in games for a generation. Players who had spent thirty or forty hours with the character were not warned and had no opportunity to prevent the outcome. The death was permanent and was not revealed as reversible later in the story. Its cultural impact was proportionate to its unexpectedness: the games industry had conditioned players to expect that important characters could be saved, that death was a temporary state of game mechanics rather than a narrative fact. Final Fantasy VII demonstrated otherwise at a scale that millions of players experienced simultaneously.
The film and after
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) was Sakaguchi's attempt to produce a photorealistic computer-generated film — the first feature film with fully computer-generated human characters attempting photorealism rather than stylisation. The film cost approximately $137 million to produce and earned approximately $85 million worldwide against a marketing spend that brought the total loss to an estimated $94 million. Square Pictures, the film subsidiary established specifically for the project, was shut down. Sakaguchi, as the film's director and the executive most associated with its production, resigned from Square shortly after.
The film's failure was technical in some respects — the human characters exhibited the "uncanny valley" effect, appearing almost real in ways that drew attention to their unreality — and narrative in others. The story it told was science fiction of a generic kind that didn't use the visual investment to build a world that was compelling on narrative grounds. But the production represented a genuine technical achievement: the human characters were more convincingly rendered than anything produced at comparable budget before. The film simply solved a technical problem before the narrative and commercial infrastructure required to make solving it valuable was in place.
Sakaguchi founded Mistwalker in 2004. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey — Xbox 360 JRPGs produced in collaboration with Nobuo Uematsu and Akira Toriyama — were received warmly by players nostalgic for 16-bit Final Fantasy conventions and commercially modest. The franchise he had built continued without him under Square Enix (the merger of Square and Enix in 2003). The series that had been named for its creator's last attempt had outlasted its creator's involvement and produced entries — Final Fantasy XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI — that were, in varying degrees, the work of the institution the first game had made possible. Sakaguchi's specific sensibility — his preference for emotionally direct narratives, traditional party structures, melodramatic scope — is most visible in the games that preceded his departure and in the Mistwalker games he made after it.