Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone had an amazing holiday season and is ready to make 2013 into an awesome year.

While this might be just a tad late, I wanted to share Producer Akihiko Matsui’s end of the year greeting with you all.

Quote Originally Posted by Akihiko_Matsui View Post
This year (2012) was the FINAL FANTASY 25th Anniversary and in this time I have been requested to work on a few projects – the old person that I am.

While this is completely unrelated to FFXI, since the there won’t be too many posts during the year-end through New Year holidays, I decided to pick something from long ago to post about today.

(Warning: There are spoilers for the Super Famicom version of FFIV. For those of you playing the iPhone version please be careful.)

Now then, the first team I belonged to was the FFIV team.

I think I wrote this some place before, but the first work that I was delegated was the creation of memory maps. This was my first official task, but there was actually an unofficial first bit of work of sorts, which I personally believe I did a pretty good job on.

Back in that time, each cubicle at Square had a Mac and the LAN was set up with Apple Talk. Sakaguchi shared the unfinished plot of FFIV with everyone on the LAN and the development team members were able to post their complaints ideas. It was a very nice environment.

It was here that I was able to influence a change in the one portion of the plot related to Edward even though I wasn’t asked. In Sakaguchi’s original plot, after Anna’s death Edward awakens and becomes extremely powerful in battle. I just couldn’t agree with this.

I told him that a weakling does not stop being a weakling just because his girlfriend dies, and I thought he was going to lash back saying that I was the world’s biggest weakling, but I managed to persuade Sakaguchi. He was set things in motion as if it was a pain enthusiastically and changed the plot to the current FFIV plot.

Though very minor, this was just one thing that I was able to do.
Edward was created to save the party through his songs. Don’t you think this was a good way to change it?

With that said, please have a wonderful New Year!