Never-Ending Story
The untold legend of the world’s greatest RPG
For Final Fantasy’s 30th birthday, Edge presents the untold legend of the world’s greatest RPG PG
On the last day of development of a new Final Fantasy game,
Hironobu Sakaguchi, a man who looks like he would maintain his kindly half-smile even while asking you to clean out your desk and never come back, would gather the entire team into the office. Together, in a weary but exhilarated silence, everyone would sit and watch the ending to the game on which they had worked for the past weeks, months and, in the case of later entries to the series, years. Tears would fall. Champagne would flow. It was finally finished.
Except, of course, Final Fantasy’s title has always been a winking misnomer. The morning after the night before, the team would blearily gather again, this time each member holding a blank sheet of paper headed with the question: where now? The other titanic series of the videogame industry return, with each new entry and expansion, to Hyrule, to Azeroth, to San Andreas and all the rest. In Final Fantasy, however, every world is born anew, a grand and continuous act of creation and reinvention that has, over the course of three decades, come to represent a constellation of realities, each distinct apart from a few common props.
The business of multiverse creation began in a beauty salon on the outskirts of Tokyo in the mid-1980s. Sakaguchi, a student at the time, only applied for a job at Square, a tiny, chaotic start-up, because he believed that he had neither the skills nor the experience to work at more established game studios. With a ragtag band of other young people, he learned how to make games in front of the old hairdryers and panoramic mirrors. Numerous times the venture almost failed, not least because of the hubris of Square’s founder Masafumi Miyamoto, a twentysomething parttime employee at Keio University who almost sent the company spiralling into bankruptcy.
The story of these early years and all that followed has never been fully told, not least because many of the key players have parted in dramatic fashion along the way. Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy’s visionary creator, left Square under a dark cloud following the commercial failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits
Within, a CGI film that lost an estimated $90 million at the box office. Following his departure, staff were allegedly instructed by Square’s CEO not to talk to Sakaguchi, in an attempt to excise his influence.
In recent years, the ice has somewhat thawed even as the storied series has, in the 14th and 15th games, begun to rediscover the wild magic of its former days. A reconciliation of sorts allows – on this, the 30th anniversary of the first game – the story to be told by those who were there, in their own words, finally.
In Final Fantasy, every world is born anew, a grand and continuous act of creation and reinvention