Looks like Final Fantasy director Hironobu Sakaguchi and composer Nobuo Uematsu might disagree as to how Square Enix’s world-famous RPG got its name.
Last Friday, Wired.com photographer Jon Snyder was shooting Uematsu after our interview, and had him turn to me and engage in some small talk while he snapped pictures. What to talk about? I remembered that a Game|Life reader had just emailed me asking if I knew, definitively, how the game got its name.
There are two different stories out there. One is that Square was going bankrupt, and thought this would be their last game, hence “final fantasy.” The other is that Sakaguchi was going to quit Square and go back to college, but make one final game before he left.
What I’d said to that reader was that I believed that the story about Square going bankrupt sounded like baloney — after all, wasn’t making Famicom games in the eighties in Japan like a license to print money? But more than that, Sakaguchi himself had repeated the college story in many different interviews, and I couldn’t find any source for the bankruptcy story.
So I asked Uematsu.
Is it true, I asked, that the game is called Final Fantasy because Sakaguchi was going to go back to college and quit the game biz? Uematsu laughed: It’s true that Sakaguchi was going to quit, he said, but the bigger reason, the real reason, was that Square was going to go bankrupt and the designers believed that it would be the company’s swan song.
So there we have it, from someone who was there when it all happened: the Square-was-going-bankrupt theory of the game’s unique moniker is, at least, supported by Uematsu, which takes it out of the “baseless rumor” category.
Now, someone just needs to ask Koichi Sugiyama about that rumor that Dragon Quest games can’t be sold on school days in Japan…