“Experimentation and emotion”: The past, present, and future of RPGs with Final Fantasy 4's Takashi Tokita

Before he was one of the most influential developers in the world, Square Enix’s Takashi Tokita was a stage actor. There was something about the art that appealed to Tokita; the emotion, the drama, the prestige of live acting – from an early age, the romance of the cinema called to him. “At first, I wanted to become a comic artist, because in my childhood there were many manga magazines that I’d read – Shonen Jump, and so on,” the legendary Japanese developer explains to us in an interview at BIG Festival, Brazil. “Those comics led to anime, on TV and in movies, and seeing those made me want to either make a manga, or become a voice actor in anime. So I chose that latter. Mostly because it’s very difficult to write and draw everything for manga [laughter]. But voice acting? I can do that with just my body, voice, and mind.” This appreciation for the dramatic stuck with Tokita. You can tell how embedded in him it is from the nature of his work – Final Fantasy 4, as Tokita has stated in the past, is the first game to really elevate the drama in the series. It’s the first game where those traditional themes of light and dark in the iconic RPG franchise really started to poke around at the chaos that lies between the two absolutes. Read more