Final Fantasy pulls its struggling developer back from the edge

What happened

The studio had produced a run of commercial disappointments, and the project was assembled by a small team with modest expectations. Hironobu Sakaguchi's design took the party management and dungeon crawling of American computer role-playing games and made them legible to a console audience: four characters chosen at the outset, battles presented from the side with the party facing its enemies, and a plot that opened conventionally before turning into something stranger. Nobuo Uematsu's music, written for four sound channels, did much of the emotional work.

Sales in Japan were strong enough to keep the company going and to justify a sequel almost immediately. Each installment that followed offered a new setting and cast rather than a continuation, which let the series absorb whatever the current hardware could do without being tied to old decisions. An American release of the first game arrived a few years later to limited attention, and the series only became a Western mainstream property with its move to optical discs a decade afterward.

The world at the time

Nintendo's console had a vast Japanese audience and a growing appetite for longer games, and battery-backed saving had just made them practical. American computer role-playing games were known to Japanese developers and admired, but their complexity and keyboard-driven interfaces did not transfer to a gamepad and a television.

What it changed

The series became one of the industry's longest-running and its developer one of Japan's most important, eventually merging with the rival that had defined the genre alongside it. Its later move to Sony's hardware, prompted by the limits of cartridges, was among the events that decided an entire console generation.