Squeenix Square Enix overview

[IronicNeurotic]

Just for those who are interested a short overview of SQE's internal development teams and what is decline or incline YMMV.


Production Departement 1

Lead: Yoshinori Kitase

Directors: Toriyama (shit), Nomura (overrated shit)

Games: Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday, TWETY

Verdict: Shit. Responsible for most of the recent at Square Enix. Their Final Fantasy Games suck, Kingdom Heart's story is some of the worst ever if you remove Disney (Seriously, just read this), 3rd Birthday is a travesty.
Combat systems are alright, but badly included and style over substance.

Their only good recent games, The World Ends with you and FF:Type-0 were heavily co-developed by other departements/studios. (Not so sure on Type-0 though)



Production Department 2

Lead: Akitoshi Kawazu

Games: SAGA, The Last Remnant, Final Fantasy CC

Verdict: Mostly . There are some turds, but overall really good games, that may have too much depth at times (Specifcally SAGA). Of course, nowadays redelageted to making mediocre CC and mobile games.



Production Departement 3

Lead: Naoki Yoshida

Games: Xenogears, Threads of Fate, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy XI/XIV

Verdict: . (Hard) Ups and downs as you can see yourself. Currently in an Incline phase since Yoshida took over (Seems and talks like an awesome designer), but seemingly stuck making MMO's.



Production Departement 4

Lead: Hiroyuki Itou (Best (current) designer Square employs IMO)

Games: Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy IX/XII

Verdict: Definite . Their only true misstep so far was Guardian Cross and that was made by their C-Team with Itou only providing basic concept ideas. Presumably working on Final Fantasy XV. Itou's basically the reason Square didn't fall into cutscene-mainia earlier on.



Production Departement 5

Lead: Rie Nishi

Games: Parasite Eve II, Brave Fencer: Musashi, Kingdom Hearts

Verdict: Some good people, but basically PD1's bitch. Nuff' said.



Production Departement 6

-Defunct-

Games: Front Mission



Production Departement 7

Lead: Takashi Tokita

Games: Parasite Eve, FFIV-The After Years, The Bouncer, FF Dimensions

Verdict: Mostly (and recently) meh . Tokita did do recently some good stuff though like FF: 4 Heroes of Light and Braverly Default outside of his departement .



Production Departement 8

-Defunct-

Games: Mana Series

Team moved on to form the Nintendo owned Brownie Brown. - Thanks to deuxhero.



Production Departement 9

Lead: Yuu Miyake

Games: Dragon Quest

Verdict: Good Stuff. It's, well Dragon Quest so I'm not sure if I can call it incline, but its the most steady high quality series Square has. Only comes from outside of the departement by making DQ more and more into an MMO (With X being just that).



Production Departement 10

Lead: Yoshinori Yamagishi

Games: Does not produce games, but contains producers for stuff that is A: Outsourced or/and B: Completly developed by Third Parties.

 

[abnaxus]

Should Xenogears be attributed to Production Team 3? Didn't the main developers of that game leave and found Monolith Soft?

 

[IronicNeurotic]

Should Xenogears be attributed to Production Team 3? Didn't the main developers of that game leave and found Monolith Soft?

Yeah on both accounts. It was *made* by the team thats now in 3 (and produced by the former lead of 3, Tanaka (who had an even more hit and miss career than the department itself) but the director and several designers/artists left to fund Monolith Soft.

 

[Sul]

What's your source on Hiroyuki Itou leading the development of FFXV? If that's true we might see some instead of another game full of plot holes and inconsistency filled with pretty boys and gals on pretty jackets saving the world from bishonen, well, except if Square pulls another Vaan from their shareholder pockets.

 

[IronicNeurotic]

What's your source on Hiroyuki Itou leading the development of FFXV? If that's true we might see some instead of another game full of plot holes and inconsistency filled with pretty boys and gals on pretty jackets saving the world from bishonen, well, except if Square pulls another Vaan from their shareholder pockets.

Rumors so far, but he has been working on a large-scale game since Zodiac Job System was released in 2008 and hasn't really been working on anything else since. So, unless he's doing an original IP it's most likely Final Fantasy.

It would also fit with him directing the last mainline FF in every generation since 6 (6,9,12)

 

[GarfunkeL]

Well, six was the best SNES FF and apparently 9 was the best PS FF or at least most old-school and the cool kids tell me that aside from Vaan and everything related to him, there wasn' that much wrong with 12, so 15 might be decent enough.

 

[IronicNeurotic]

Well, six was the best SNES FF and apparently 9 was the best PS FF or at least most old-school and the cool kids tell me that aside from Vaan and everything related to him, there wasn' that much wrong with 12, so 15 might be decent enough.

If you need another reason, this should be enough (Wikipedia Copy/Paste)

The next game Ito worked on was Chrono Trigger. The game was in development at the same time as Final Fantasy VI but by a different development team. When development of Final Fantasy VI was complete, Hironobu Sakaguchi moved Hiroyuki Ito and Yoshinori Kitase over to the Chrono Trigger team as he wanted to speed up the games development so it could be released early the next year.[1] Sakaguchi appointed Ito and Kitase to be co-directors alongside the existing directors Takashi Tokita and Akihiko Matsui.[1] While Ito checked the current content and progress of the game, he noticed that all the event scenes in the game only required the player to press the "A" button after dialogue boxes. As a result of noticing this, he decided to step down as a director and instead take the position of an event planner.[1] The reason was so he could spend most of his time and effort on modifying the event scenes to require more player interactivity like he had done to the event scenes in Final Fantasy VI.[1] An example of an event scene Ito created was the trial of Crono.[1] At the time Ito joined the project, there was no trial and Crono was thrown in jail by the Chancellor as soon as he returned to Guardia Castle with Marle. Ito decided to modify this by adding a trial scene that would determine if Crono was guilty.[1] He created numerous morality events at the Millennial Fair that would affect Crono's case and created dialogue choices during the trial for the player to input. The player's gameplay actions at the Millennial Fair and their dialogue responses during the trial would all affect the verdict on Crono.[1] Ito says that his aim in creating this event scene was to show players that their gameplay actions can influence the story.[1]

A true bro

 

[deuxhero]

What was team 8 is now the Nintendo owned Brownie Brown pretty much all the way (SE has even outsourced two Mana games to them) which was behind Magical Vacation/Starsign, Blue Dragon Plus (Likely the only case of a Nintendo owned studio making a game for a Microsoft IP), Mother 3 (!), and co-developed London Life and Fantasy Life with Level-5. Haven't really played any, though they are fans of good pixel art over 3D.

 

[IronicNeurotic]

What was team 8 is now the Nintendo owned Brownie Brown pretty much all the way (SE has even outsourced two Mana games to them) which was behind Magical Vacation/Starsign, Blue Dragon Plus (Likely the only case of a Nintendo owned studio making a game for a Microsoft IP), Mother 3 (!), and co-developed London Life and Fantasy Life with Level-5. Haven't really played any, though they are fans of good pixel art over 3D.

Thanks, will add

 

[abnaxus]

How was Hiroyuki Itou involved with development of Vagrant Story?

 

[IronicNeurotic]

How was Hiroyuki Itou involved with development of Vagrant Story?

He wasn't involved with Vagrant Story. The team was though.

 

[Rahdulan]

I can't be the only one who liked The Last Remnant. Kinda wish it wasn't a one-off, but at least the PC port got nicer treatment and is ironically the definitive version of the game.

 

[eric__s]

Yes, there were things about Last Remnant that were really cool and the way it (and Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, another Kawazu game) handled time is a big influence on what we're doing with Barkley 2. It had a lot of cool ideas about party and unit composition - units were molecules and the characters that made up the units were atoms. Each character had individual abilities but you wanted to build up your units to perform specific tasks, so you'd try to group similar characters together. Lots of cool stuff going on in the game, but it also had a ton of unbelievably bad problems too, like the item upgrade system which required you to look things up on a wiki, which no games should do.

My pal has a phone with GREE on it, the operating system (or whatever) you need to play Emperor's SaGa, the new SaGa game, but unfortunately he can't get Japanese games on it. Too bad, we wanted to play it : (

 

[IronicNeurotic]

abnaxus

Things Itou was involved with during his time at Square Enix (various sources)

- Planner on that infamous *Square no Tom Sawyer* game
- Wrote on the scenario for the original SAGA game (Final Fantasy Legend)
- *Worked* on Rad Racer/Designer on Rad Racer II
- Created the original Final Fantasy battle System
- Responsible (among others) for sound effect in Final Fantasy III
- Debugger for the first three FF games
- Created the ATB System in Final Fantasy IV (Inspired by Formula One and the NFL for some reason)
- Refined Battle System/Created the Ability Points system/Designed the Job System/Created the "Gilgamesh" charachter

Next he was appointed director of Final Fantasy VI alongside Kitase after Sakaguchi decided to step down from the role during the development process. Among other things he did the following

- Designed nearly all gameplay aspects (Battle system,AP,Espers,unique charachter traits, relics)
- Responsible for structure, pace and flow of the game
- Wrote the backstorys of Locke and Celes
- On his own accord, he mixed many of the event scenes with gameplay. For example, originally the Opera scene by Kitase was one big cutscene where you only pressed *A* to click away the dialouge boxes. Ultros didn't even appear as well.

So, basically he did most of the work. Sakaguchi stepped down after 70% of it was already done and at that point wrote most of the game and directed the event scenes and as far as I know Kitase only ever worked on the writing team so make your own thoughts here.....

Next, he was appointed director alongside the others and Kitase far into Chrono Trigger's development by Sakaguchi. There he saw that a lot of the event scenes weren't interactive as well, so he stepped down as a director and became an event planner. He did the following things

- Enemy Map Placement
- Seemless transition to the battle scene
- Animation for charachters during event and battle scenes
- As mentioned worked on various event scenes. Created for example the trial scene.

We're now in 1995. A group of key members from Quest Corporation (Yasumi Matsuno, Hiroshi Minagawa and Akihiko Yoshida), famous for the Ogre Battle series, joined Square. Sakaguchi was partly responsible for this as he was a big fan of Ogre Battle and encouraged Matsuno to join them. He kept this for himself though and so everybody was surprised when they arrived. A week later he pulled Ito (with Hideo Minaba) away and told them he was pulling them away from FFVII to work with the Quest staff as he wanted to give them his best people (Ito is Sakaguchis favourite designer till today). They were hesitant as they didn't know the QUEST staff, but agreed after Sakaguchi pleaded.

This marked the beginning of Itou's involvment with the Quest staff. Sadly, in a way, this also marked the beginning of Kitase overtaking the FF franchise.

Anyway, Itou was appointed Game Designer for Final Fantasy Tactics. He did the following (known) things on the project

- Created the Battle System (CTB)
- Designed the Job System

His leftover work on Final Fantasy VII was the concept of the materia system and battle system.

After that he went back to the main Final Fantasy team for Final Fantasy VIII where he created the battle system, Triple Triad and Guardian Forces (NOT the draw! system), but was pulled again by Sakaguchi who wanted him to create a completly original Final Fantasy game in Hawaii where Sakaguchi created Spirits Within. This would be known first as Final Fantasy Gaiden, but later as Final Fantasy IX.

- As the director, his responsibilities here were very similiar as on VI, just more intense.
- He also did a lot of writing on the game, including editing/rewriting parts of Sakaguchi's original draft for the story.

Both Ito and Sakaguchi returned to Square after the game was finished and Spirits Within released. There he played Vagrant Story and appointed Matsuno alongside Itou director for Final Fantasy XII. XII was first envisoned as a dungeon crawler by Matsuno, but they changed that after playing Final Fantasy XI and instead wanted to create a vast, open world.

From here on there are actually some accounts that differ, especially on how Vaan and Penelope made it into the game so lets just skip to the end.

After XII Ito got a promotion by Wada and developed FFXII:Zodiac Job System, a vastly improved version of Final Fantasy XII. Since then, we only heard that he has been working on a large-scale project.


If you find any information about a Hiroyuki Itou that worked on The World Ends with You or the Kingdom Hearts series. That's a completly different Itou.