hian
Purist
The producer is the overseer and final authority over the project - he/she delegates work-tasks, assesses creative input/output, and gives good-to-go/no-goes in response to pitches, and serves as the primary go-between between the dev team and the executive producer and any/all company higher-ups/publishers.
The director on the other hand, directs the game - he/she takes the script and creates the cinematography, the visual representation of the scenes found within the script.
The script might say "Cloud high-jacks motorcycle and escapes Shinra", but it is the director that translates that into an actual scene within the game - whether Cloud does a triple back-flip unto the bike and drives it out a window unto the road below, or whether he calmly walks over to it, sits down and drives it down a staircase and out the front-door etc.
The directors decides the camera angles and everything else associated with the scenes.
Sometimes the director has a hands-on role to the extent that they even write the plot for the game, whilst the writer fleshes it out and turns it into an actual story.
You're right. I got that wrong (don't let anyone say I can't admit a mistake eh).
Sakaguchi had already planned the death of a character in the game from the get-go though, as the game was creatively driven by the death of his mother, and was supposed to be a detective story centered around that theme - but the person who picked the character after the re-write was Nomura, which is natural, since he is the one who designed all the characters to begin with.
Aerith and Tifa did not exist in the original script by Sakaguchi.
I don't know how you came out with that idea from above. As I said - The game was produced by Sakaguchi and that makes him the primary creative censor of the game - it does not mean he came up with everything, not even by a long-shot. Sakaguchi has stated that his primary involvement creatively was in terms of the battle system, and not much else.
My point here is that, in terms of creating a game - Nojima, Kitase and Nomura might have bounced 10 or so ideas off of Sakaguchi for each 1 he decided they should go with for all we know, and if he hadn't been there to make that call, it's also quite possible that they would have had other ideas they would rather have gone with.
To exemplify -
The cross-dressing scene might have been entirely envisioned by Nojima or Kitase for instance, but it might have been envisioned as a direct result of having Sakaguchi ask for a scene to that effect (a comedic infiltration scene centered around Cloud dressing up etc.) and then working his best within the constraints of the task given to him.
Had he not received that instruction though, or had not Sakaguchi spent time overlooking the work, we might very well not have gotten that scene or something else entirely.
I'm not saying that happened in this case - but I am saying that this is how fundamentally influential the role of a closely participating producer has on a game's development, and when you put that into context of how much has changed with the other products in the compilation, and indeed in the series as a whole, after he stepped away, I think it's pretty obvious that most of these guys would have made a completely different FF7 if he had not been there when the game was first made - which is also why I'm pretty sure the remake will be radically different as well.
Nomura for instance radically changed his aesthetic in the very next title released only one and half year after VII - into an aesthetic that he has pretty much stuck with in almost ever product ever since, with the exception of Kingdom Hearts (for obvious reasons, it being a Disney hybrid product).
I really can't wrap my mind around the thought that he changed that much in less than 2 years into a new consistent style that he's pretty much stuck to ever since - rather than say, that the style he made for FF7 was specifically requested by people like Sakaguchi for that particular title, much like KH demanded a specific style uncharacteristic for Nomura as well.
You're very right that FF7 was a team effort - as is almost every game. However, every team effort usually has a team-leader, and the team-leader will almost always have a large and distinct role in shaping the direction and performance of his or her team.
Now, Sakaguchi is probably a much more level producer than say Hideo Kojima who meticulously micro-manages everything in his productions - but still, a producer is a producer.
Naturally, the environments would be designed by those who had that specific task. However, they too were working off of concepts.
Case in point, Midgar already existed on the concept stage in the first original script by Sakaguchi.
Furthermore, directives for style and tone would certainly be in the DD passed on to the designers.
Everything cannot be micro-managed, but it can be managed. It's very unlikely that any of the environments wouldn't be presented to the producer prior to implementation - how much of a care he took when looking at them, or how strict he was about the design phase however is uncertain, but probably quite low since any designer worth his or her salt would be striving to keep their designs consistent with one another based on the first scenes designed and deemed acceptable by the producer.
That's a moot point though, since they could very well have chosen a different post-processing technique, or used any number of filtering techniques to balance the color-levels to look more vibrant in post-production.
If AC has lower color saturation, that's a design choice - not an accident.
And, as the previous poster pointed out - this reduced color vibrancy is consistent with the rest of the design, were pretty much every character in the game has taken on a more subdued look compared to their original counter-parts.
The role I described to Sakaguchi is not done by the director. The director (usually, although it changes a lot from genre to genre) directs cinematography - story scenes, not literally the direction of the game as a whole. Traditionally, back in the days before "cinematic gaming", on the SNES and the NES, there was less of a distinction perhaps, but with the advent of 3D gaming where actual directing, in the same sense as with the movies, became a necessity the roles have become more distinct.
There is a lot of overlap though, in Japanese dev teams, if the two people are close in seniority and friendship, which Kitase and Sakaguchi were.
Sakaguchi readily admits that Kitase was indeed director in the major sense and that he was responsible for pretty much all of the finished story (which is strange considering Nojima being the writer - which probably means that Nojima was only responsible for writing/fleshing out scenes already decided by Kitase).
(Sakaguchi on Kitase's role from interview : "I’ve left all the in-game event scripting in his hands.")
My point is not to say that the rest of the primary team didn't contribute or do creative leg-work - but that their creative leg-work would be, although to what degree is uncertain, shaped by whatever Sakaguchi set them to work with, whilst having to take into account what he, as creative head, would want for the final product.
The biggest reason I stand by the opinion that his influence must have been significant, is because the style of FF7 is consistent in many ways with the earlier games and later projects by Sakaguchi, whilst the projects of the rest of the team have much more drastic differences in style.
