Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted to be a musician. He nearly got expelled from high school for selling bootleg concert tickets, and he joined a brand-new startup called Square in 1983 mainly to afford software for a counterfeit Apple II he bought in Akihabara. This episode traces how a friend’s copy of Wizardry rewired his artistic brain, how he rose to Director of Planning and Development by 1986 while disliking the action games Square was making, and how a project he named Final Fantasy as a personal ultimatum sold around 400,000 copies in Japan and pulled the company back from ruin.

We explore the fire during Final Fantasy III’s development that killed his mother, Aki, and how that grief, colliding with criticism that the series lacked story, led him to make death permanent and meaningful within 16-bit limits, themes that later shaped Final Fantasy VII. We then cover his golden era as producer on Chrono Trigger, the $137 million film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that grossed about $85 million, delayed the Enix merger and shuttered Square Pictures, his resignation and three silent years in Hawaii, and his rebirth with Mistwalker, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, the failed surfing game Party Wave, the hit Terra Battle, and 2021’s Fantasian.

• Why desperation, not vision, gave the first Final Fantasy its uncompromising design
• The Fighting Fantasy trademark problem behind the name
• Making players feel loss through pacing, music and permanent character death
• Why Mistwalker chose Microsoft’s Xbox 360 over the PlayStation 3
• Mentoring Tetsuya Nomura and the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award