Hajime Tabata, director of Final Fantasy XV, has left Square Enix and founded his own studio. This step came as a surprise to many at the time, but now he talks about why this decision had to be made.
Who is the person you are talking about? Hajime Tabata became director of Final Fantasy XV in 2013, but left Square Enix 2 years after the game’s release. At an event in Taiwan, he spoke about his decision to leave the studio and venture into self-employment.
In 2018, Tabata left Square Enix after only one DLC of the four announced expansions from the DLC pack “The Dawn of the Future” was released. Our colleagues from GamePro reported for you back then.
After the episodes for Aranea, Lunafreye and Noctis were canceled, Tabata also announced shortly afterwards that he would be parting ways with Square Enix. Instead, he announced that he would set up his own studio.
Ex-Director of Square Enix didn’t want to continue working like this anymore
Why did he leave Square Enix back then? In an interview with a Japanese news outlet, Tabata admitted that it was difficult for him to talk about the reasons for a long time. Why he took this time to talk about his separation from Square Enix is clear from his following words.
The essence is that I pursued a different policy than the president at the time [Yosuke Matsuda] from Square Enix. But of course the company had to follow the president’s policies, so we couldn’t do what I thought was necessary.
In the interview he mainly expresses his frustration with the ending of Final Fantasy XV and the canceled DLCs:
“It wasn’t my decision to cancel the DLC, but I couldn’t stop it, which made me even more depressed at the time,” Tabata said. However, this frustration gave him the opportunity to produce better games.
“I had the feeling that it would be impossible to continue working in this situation for many more years, so I decided to become independent,” he says of his decision. He wants to rehabilitate himself in the future by offering interesting games to all the players he let down back then.
Everything you need to know about the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV – in 2 minutes
More videos
Tabata wants to rehabilitate himself with his own studio
What is Tabata doing today? With his departure from Square Enix, Tabata founded his own studio JP Games in January 2019. Some international game developers from Asia are said to be working there. Including many veterans of Final Fantasy XV.
“I explained to the early members of the team what direction I think future games will take and what we can do in the second half of our careers as game developers. “I challenged them to create an RPG that was different than anything we’d seen before,” explains Tabata.
He believes that the RPG genre has great potential and with his many experiences he wants to create a good title that at the same time pushes and develops the genre.
“Now that my career is entering the second half, I have a strong desire to play new games […] to develop. “I wouldn’t have been able to make this happen if I was still working at Square Enix,” said Tabata.
What is he working on? According to Tabata, he is currently working on two projects with his own studio JP Games. An RPG for consoles, which is being created in collaboration with another company, and an “MMO-like” game.
JP Games took its first step with the new development application “Pegasus World Kit”. This is a toolkit with many technologies necessary for RPG development. It is intended to be helpful to developers who want to create a role-playing game so that they don’t have to start at the beginning.
In the meantime, you can read about Sophia Weiss’ experiences with the Final Fantasy MMORPG here: I needed two attempts for my first MMORPG, only a dancing catboy convinced me