Hironobu Sakagushi

Let's talk today about video-games with one of my favourite man in the industry, Mr Hironobu Sakagushi. He was born on November 1962 and was the Square Co,Ltd planning head-master.
In 1991, he had a promotion and began the vice president of the company.

But let's back to the beginning, in 1986. Square Co, Ltd was in a crisis and was going to bankrupt when a man had an idea. In Japan a brand new kind of games was coming, the RPG with Dragon Quest from enix which has a big sucess in all the country. Mr Sakagushi then decided to do a game in that kind and called it Final Fantasy as the last hope for the company. The game, released in Japan in 1987, was finally a sucess that saved the company and allowed them to do a second one and a lot more in the future, twelve episode from now on.

Mr Sakagushi worked on many other games Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story and created others famous series like Secret of Mana (Seiken dentsu), Saga Frontier (Romancing Saga), Front Mission, Final Fantasy Tactics, or Kingdom Hearts.

Everything was doing fine for him, most of his games was sucesses and then he wanted to create an animation movie. He used to put what I call cinematic in his games (specially in FF since the seventh) so that did'n't suprised me. He worked for three years on his film called Final Fantasy the spirits within and released it on July 2001. Although he decided to make the film in english, with the voice of famous actor like Alec Baldwin, the movie didn't work in the US neither so much in Japan and Europe.

This failure caused the merge of the company with Enix in April 2003 and Mr Sakagushi due to that was less considered by the new company. He made two games for Squarenix, Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance before going and creating his own company Mistwalker in 2004.

Three games had been made by Mr Sakagushi with Mistwalker :Blue Dragon in 2006, Archaic Sealed Heat in 2007 (only in Japan), Lost Odysee in 2008 and Blue Dragon plus.

Since Mr Sakagushi left Squarenix, it seems like a piece of the Final fantasy spirit has gone with him. The serie is taking a new turn more action/rpg . But I remember what Mr Sakagushi used to say, he said that the main thing when you create a game is to tell stories, so I hope then won't forget that.
Good luck Mr Sakagushi and thanks to make us dream.