The prominent Sakaguchi started out as a PC programmer, yet wanted to be a musician. So when he is not fantasizing the latest developments in video-game and computer graphic imagery, Mr Sakaguchi plays a little bit of piano and goes through the songs he's written. Still, it is in the field of video games that Sakaguchi does perform his greatest gigs - considered as a God by many gamers, Hironobu Sakaguchi is credited with launching Final Fantasy - the longest and most lucrative video game franchise ever.

Still, it is in the field of video games that Sakaguchi does perform his greatest gigs - considered as a God by many gamers, Hironobu Sakaguchi is credited with launching Final Fantasy - the longest and most lucrative video game franchise ever. The genesis of that game series goes back to 1987. Square Co. LTD, the company which employed Sakaguchi, was then in desperate need of a hit. Other games, such as Enix's Dragon Quest, were then more popular. But Sakaguchi thought that the basic "save the princess" formula of all those games could once and for all be improved on.

That same year, on December 18, Final Fantasy, the first massive one-megabit cartridge role-playing game ever, was released in Japan and became an instant hit with gamers.

What made the success of this new creation was its complex scenario and technical novelties. According to Videogames.com, "Final Fantasy introduced many revolutionary concepts to the console RPG genre: the turn-based battles, with their party of heroes on the right and villains on the left, the characters drawn from the mythological archetypes of several cultures, the eight 'levels' of spells and from one to eight uses per level."

Final Fantasy was released by Nintendo in the US three years later (Final Fantasy III had then already been released in Japan). The game actually sold more copies in the US than the original had in Japan.

Seven more Final Fantasy games were to follow the trend-setting original. "In the beginning, I was the main planner" notes Sakaguchi, "but when the production team increased, a director was needed, so I took that role as well. Basically, I was responsible for the story, events, in otherwords the tale, up to Final Fantasy VI."

It was with Final Fantasy VII that the visual conception of the game went one step further, integrating computer graphic movies into the gameplay - something of a common practice ever since. But you would be wrong in thinking that this step was achieved smoothly.

"We simply did not have the skill for that," revealed Sakaguchi. "At the time, our knowledge of CG implementation was near to zero. However, there were many things that only the PlayStation could do that we wanted to try, and there were many techniques we needed to learn. There was enormous work to be done in the producing aspect, so I went in that direction."

By doing this, Sakaguchi had confimation that he was as keenly interested in characters as he was in graphic development. In fact, he really felt like a director. "I want to tell stories," he revealed at the time of the Final Fantasy VII breakthrough. "I want characters like real people, crying and laughing, and because of that I am interested in dramatic presentation and visuals. In a time where the hardware develops so quickly, I want to take great advantage of this to make something that will move people's feelings even more."

With that in mind, Sakaguchi started working on a feature movie that would tell a story within the Final Fantasy world with topnotch photorealistic characters. This decision revived the debates over the morality of creating human-like characters with computers. It is known indeed that James Cameron dropped the idea of making the first full-length fiction film with CGI actors because he thought such a thing would be amoral.

Work in the field of photorealistic humans is in fact nothing new: the first generation of photorealistic humans originated from technology used in the medical field, while their cinematic counterparts were born of ILM's Pixar hardware back in the eighties. Little-known French director Jerôme Diamant Berger used that technique in his 1986 fantasy debut L'Unique, the story of an opera singer who was cloned to make her even more successful. But leaps and bounds were yet to be made before reaching the levels currently displayed by Sakaguchi's Square Co. LTD team.

To create his new landmark, Sakaguchi had to build a whole new studio from scratch, which he did with a cosy $45M in Hawaii. The film budget alone was above $130M - some reports even say 190. Four full years were spent in the making of the Final Fantasy movie - 20% of that time dedicated to main character Aki's hair wave.

For Sakaguchi, the most difficult part in the process of making this movie was maybe not the technical one. "The difficult part," he said, "is in the fact that there is a culture for movies that is so different from games. So it is tough for Japanese game makers to make the jump to Hollywood. We have to look at a completely different culture in America and make something that will entertain both American and international movies audiences."

On view of the US B.O. gross (a bare $30M), Sakaguchi may not have been very successful in that field. But his film will nonetheless be regarded as a new CGI milestone worldwide (following the overlooked A.LI.CE by Maejima Kenichi, a 3D space opera made with the "Gypsy" system) and will flesh out Sony's Hollywood animation output - Sakaguchi has been in talks with Sony to develop three more Final Fantasy movies.

Further discarding any doubts as to the morality of acting as a virtual CGI God, Sakaguchi hopes that his digital Aki Ross and Gray Edwards will be as popular as their flesh and blood counterparts. "It would be great" he adds, "if we could develop a star who would be something like a digital Julia Roberts."

But before this final fantasy comes true, be sure Hironobu Sakaguchi will have many more "hair-raising" things to perform!

Robin Gatto

Day One: Locarno's Opening Fantasy
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within