Tetsuya Nomura contributed more to FFVII than Hironobu Sakaguchi but people are not ready to admit it.

[X-SOLDIER]

While this is a nice write-up from multiple reliable sources at the end of the day, it is obvious that his contributions to FFVII were really early on, and he was not involved like other staff members.

I'm curious what you mean by, "he was not involved like other staff members." because I don't think that any of the information in that entire article supports that – but also beyond that, it dismissively undercuts the significance of what all of his contributions are.

He's the reason FFVII was a 3D game and also why it was on PlayStation rather than Nintendo. That alone is massive, and is the sort of near-executive level decision of putting together a team and making the pitch for something like that no one else would have pushed for with the sort of singular vision that he was known for & what my last post primarily focused on detailing & emphasizing why it's not as easy to draw a 1:1 with the decisions that the others were making.

On top of that, he was also doing things like managing offices, focusing on corporate responsibilities, and other things like that to ensure that the game would be a success, and that the overall environment itself was one where everyone could pull off what they were doing. As I stated before – his contributions weren't about the sort of granular minutiae in the little parts of the character appearances or narrative design that the others were doing, but those were still things where he was directly involved but the others were being given more agency and taking up more prominent positions – but it's still all happening under his guidance.

As a more direct example of what this was like structurally:

Motonori Sakakibara (Movie director, Square)
"In the late ’90s, all the game companies had lots of money — especially Square, of course. So Square prioritized quality rather than obsessing over costs. That was how Sakaguchi-san operated. He always asked for a lot from the team and gave us tight schedules, but he backed up those requests with big teams and the best hardware. That was a very rare situation. He was always looking at a big vision, but at the same time, how to make it a reality."

And also specifically to FFVII:

"Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura had begun to take leadership roles over day-to-day work on the Final Fantasy series, seeing through Sakaguchi’s high-level plans and story ideas. Kitase had long been a film buff who liked the parallels between film and game storytelling. Nomura came to the series as an artist, gradually taking on more creative responsibility."

This emphasizes that Sakaguchi is giving high-level direction to the project that aligns directly to his role in the company, while Nomura, Kitase, & Nojima are all involved in the more granular details of seeing that vision through. That's EXACTLY what you'd expect from all of them in their various roles, and what types of contributions they're making to that.

None of that at all even remotely suggests that Sakaguchi wasn't continually involved, and it reinforces details about his role & contributions from the people who were actually there. That's why I don't think that anything you just claimed to the contrary is "obvious" or even accurate at all.



X

 

[Odysseus]

I think this really just boils down to:

- Sakaguchi was extremely important in making high level decisions such as the style and platform of the game, as well as assembling the team that would make the game. He also established a few baseline elements such as mako, a big city powered by it, and the detective/terrorist story that would all be iterated on and remixed but the main development staff.

- Conversely, he had little to do with the on-the-ground writing and directing decisions that would culminate in the FFVII story we all know.

To say he wasn't important would be massively reductive, but to attribute the game to him entirely would also be an enormous overstatement.