“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 art that attracted Tokita; the excitement, the drama, the prestige of live performance, from a very early age, the romance of cinema called to him.

“At first, I wanted to become a comic artist, because in my childhood there were a lot of manga magazines that I read: Shonen Jump, etc.”, explains the legendary Japanese developer in an interview at BIG Festival, Brazil. . “Those comics led to anime, on TV and in movies, and watching them made me want to do a manga or become a voice actor in anime. So I chose the latter. Mainly because it’s so hard 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 that is in him by the nature of his work: Final Fantasy 4, as Tokita has said in the past, is the first game to really elevate the drama of the series. It’s the first game where those traditional themes of light and dark in the iconic RPG franchise really began to delve into the chaos that lies between the two absolutes.

And that, according to Tokita, is one of the fundamental elements of any good story, in games or any other form of entertainment. “I love both sides, the light and the dark. Like Star Wars,” she laughs. “Light and dark together, that’s grey, that’s human. I like the turbulence between them. The chaos. It’s good for the game and it’s good for the drama. In the gray, it is a good place to experiment. And that’s true of all entertainment.”

It’s very fitting for anyone familiar with the Final Fantasy series that Tokita would choose ‘chaos’ as the word to describe what compels him (or, at least, what jump-started the era of games he most closely worked on). “For Final Fantasy 4, my task was the script, the writing, the characters, the music… everything… by myself! [laughter] I was one of the people who worked on almost everything except the map and the battles.

And so Final Fantasy 4 has a lot of Tokita’s soul, a lot of his values. Much of the direction of his life, wrapped up in a story of revenge, redemption and romance. “Final Fantasy 4 represents this game that included my aspirations to be a manga artist, to be an actor, to be a director. It marked an important turning point in my life,” reflects Tokita. It also marked a turning point for the series: starting with FF4, the RPG giant became more emotional, more concerned with the lives and loves of its characters than letting players kill orcs and dwarves.

When I ask Tokita about the path this game, among others, set in the RPG genre, he laughs. “Today, RPGs have many styles: they are made all over the world, for all different consoles, by indie developers and big developers. So what does RPG mean to me? Play an original character in an original world. This is role playing. You can turn any world, any story, any character, anything, into an RPG.”

He tells me that it was Dragon Quest 2 that taught him this; that it was Koichi Nakamura’s Enix RPG that made him realize that RPGs could be… well, anything. “Dragon Quest 2… that’s my ‘fate’ game,” he muses. “When I was an actor, one of my friends was a programmer and he recommended me to play the game he was working on: Dragon Quest 2. I don’t like Dragon Quest 1… there’s only one character, no variety, no action.

“But when I played Dragon Quest 2, I saw that it had a lot of characters, drama, and a great story. So, I realized that I can make any story and any character work in an RPG game. Which led me to the work I did on Final Fantasy.”

Tokita experimented with the Final Fantasy formula way back in 1991 – long before the series considered ditching the turn-based setup of its heritage for full player action, like in Final Fantasy 16. Tokita says the genre, and the series as a whole, has always been about experimentation. It’s essential to his DNA.

“I think the most important things are emotion and experimentation,” he replies when I ask him what, in essence, makes a great RPG. “And that’s not just in RPGs, but in all entertainment. Good entertainment is where the audience or player can be immersed, and our expectations for how it works continue to rise. So, I think that’s the truth of entertainment: we have to keep experimenting. [He mimics with one hand low, one hand high] Other media are up here, and we are here. We keep experimenting, we can get this far too”.

keep in mind: Interview with Takashi Tokita has been edited for readability and clarity. It took place at BIG 2023, prior to a talk by the Square Enix developer about his career and history with role-playing games.