One extremely conspicuous thing we noticed while making SAC is that after Icicle Lodge, there's not a single mention of Aerith in the game until some optional dialogue with Red on the Highwind bridge as Cid after finding Cloud, and then not again in a main story scene until you talk to Bugenhagen as Cloud. It's in a way that doesn't feel like it was just because they wanted that sense of loss to linger or whatever, but more like they hadn't decided exactly when she'd die and didn't have the characters talk about her as a result lol. There is also the stuff with the post-snowboard dialogue and also the Fort Condor Magnus Materia event where she has text after her death, which could also be a result of it being uncertain.
It's always interesting when little facets of design process end up exposing themselves like this. Especially with RPGs where there are some locations that can be reached in any order, and some that are linear, it's always interesting to find things where the specific sequence of location events (which feel critical to the story we're familiar with) have details that show that they weren't set in stone nearly as early as it might seem, and have space for elements that would be impossible for when they appear.
I also feel like the theme of loss is overstated, at least in relation to him. Not that he was totally uninvolved in the decision to kill Aerith, but the actual idea to do so seems to have originated somewhere between Kitase and Nomura:
I think that an over-focus on "agency of the decision to have Aerith die" is actually missing the forest for the trees insofar as what that theme is in the context of Sakaguchi's contribution in this case.
I've detailed a fair bit about Sakaguchi's experience with death shaping the story & being overtly reflected in Remake/Rebirth in another thread which hits on a lot of his lasting contributions that I don't want to just repeat here. One important thing is that this theme all started back in
Final Fantasy III. One of the bigger things is that even if he's not making the specific decisions about various story details, it's still his personal philosophical attempts to grapple with that kind of loss from personal experience that created the core of the story about the Lifestream itself.
Following along that line, one of the things that I think is worth mentioning is that non-material contributions are harder to gauge, but still just as important of
a REAL contribution to what the end product is. Sakaguchi's own life experiences are also worth noting, being that he's older ('62) than Nojima ('64), Kitase ('66), & Nomura ('70), and as he's using that as a foundation from which a lot of the world & story's more specific inspiration & iteration can still take place outside of his direct influence, when it comes to the roles of the writer, director, & artist being able to contribute to shaping that.
I've always seen that contribution of his as being basically the North Star as the point of guidance around the core of what
FFVII explores from an existential standpoint – and since those themes are heavily shaped by his own very unique philosophical outlook around those things from his experiences back then, it's hard to overstate how much he contributed to
Final Fantasy VII. The variability & nuances that Nojima, Kitasae, & Nomura tackle all match to what one would expect from their various roles with Nojima as the writer, Kitase as the director, & Nomura as the artist. It's also worth noting that this builds off of the foundation that Sakaguchi established
not JUST in FFVII, but with the general theme of death in earlier
Final Fantasy titles, meaning that both Nomura & Kitase would already be familiar with some of that, and be able to easily iterate in directions that explored those things differently than they had done before.
Given that that's why
FFVII is focused around the Lifestream, and it's both literally & metaphorically the lifeblood of the world in the story – everything that
Final Fantasy VII is wouldn't exist how it does without it. As the
Compilation has proved over the years – there's a lot of malleability with the various details in the game when it comes to how the characters look, and exactly what happened with them in various circumstances. However, I'd argue that the core themes of Sakaguchi's are still absolute & fundamental to how the narrative is shaped both in the original game, and in what came afterwards.
It's also worth looking at this in the general context of what we know about Sakaguchi's role in general at Square, and just how much of that was involved in other tasks. The section "
Sakaguchi leaves Square and the company begins to change" really helps to emphasize a lot of what that looked like from a business operational perspective.
• Kazuyuki Hashimoto (CG supervisor, Square Japan; Chief technical officer and senior vice president, Square USA)
Especially during the Final Fantasy 7 period, Sakaguchi-san made every big decision. That was why everybody moved quickly. It was so exciting. And after Sakaguchi-san left, no one wanted to take responsibility, so all the decision making needed lots of approvals, which took a long, long time. The company didn’t move very quickly. It suffered from “big company disease.”
• Shinichiro Kajitani (Vice president, Square USA)
When Sakaguchi-san wanted to make a decision, it would just happen like that. But after he left, several people had to do it. … It became more of a committee-based thing, so it took a lot more time to get things done.
• Hiroshi Kawai (Character programmer, Square Japan)
It’s one of those [things] where, when somebody like Sakaguchi-san, who had such authority in the company, kind of just disappears, there’s this vacuum that exists where nobody can really arbitrate between your devs and your artists and your game designers. And in that environment, most people — especially in Square — tended to avoid conflict and try to resolve things as best as possible. And unfortunately, the way each individual tried to resolve it wasn’t necessarily in the end user’s interests.
• Tatsuya Yoshinari (Programmer, Square Japan)
Basically everything was different between Square and Microsoft. But if I had to choose the most significant difference, it was that we didn’t [initially] have anyone at Microsoft that was like Sakaguchi-san back at Square, that powerful leader who really kind of had that aura of leadership and drove everyone forward.
• Motonori Sakakibara (Movie director, Square)
The company seemed like it was becoming [more about costs than creativity]. At the beginning of this interview, I mentioned that Square was very creative — the first priority was creativity, right? But I think after the movie project, they changed some of the direction of the company, especially after Sakaguchi left.
It's ironically the EXTREME strength of that collective unity and ability to be a strong guiding force that ended up being the exact same thing that undermined translating that same operational mindset into
FF:TSW
• Yoshihiro Maruyama (Executive vice president, Square U.S.)
I think [Final Fantasy 7’s success] changed [Sakaguchi’s] style in a slightly negative way. [Laughs] He thought he could do anything within the company. That’s why he started investing even more money in Final Fantasy the movie, which became one of the biggest flops. That made him a little out of control. The original budget of the film was like $40 million dollars, and it [ended up costing] close to $150 million. So when I actually did the calculation on how much it was going to cost based on the number of people Sakaguchi wanted to assign, I quickly figured out it couldn’t be finished for $40 million. But you know, they did it anyway. They kept investing more money.
• Alex O. Smith (Localization specialist, Square U.S. and Japan (1998-2002) )
The movie … was an unmitigated disaster. … I talked to the lawyer, and I just remember at a party, but she was the lawyer from Hawaii who had handled their applications for doing the movie there. And there were so many tax benefits on the table, and they didn’t take a single one. Because they went in and they were like, “We’re bringing our team.” And they were like, “You hire 10 percent Hawaiian and you get this huge tax cut.” And I don’t think it was like Sakaguchi sitting there going, “No, we’re keeping it pure. It’s our team.” I don’t think there was any thought at all. I think it was like, that came in and the whole organization was so dysfunctional that when that kind of news hits the grind, it never gets to the person that needs to hear it.
And that’s the problem when you’ve got that kind of power structure. It’s like a family thing. And this is endemic in Japanese companies where it operates like a family instead of a business. And so, if something isn’t on the family’s radar, it just doesn’t happen. And there are so many missed opportunities there. So apparently, they could have saved so much money — millions of dollars — if they had taken advantage of these really easy [opportunities]. They just had to hire janitors locally, really, and they could have done it.
(I think it's also a not insignificant impact to the struggle that we still see around the
Final Fantasy titles now, and especially with the modern "live-service" era of game monetization and things all attempting to offset this type of risk, even as the size & budgets of AAA games starts to get closer and closer to what happens with film production, but that's a bit of an aside that I just felt was worth highlighting).
Overally, that's why it's worth looking at what Sakaguchi's contributions to
Final Fantasy VII were from a bit of a different perspective than just attempting to compare them against the explicit details like around who technically decided that Aerith was going to die. Especially in looking at things like how they're different from things like what Nomura contributed, it's really necessary to also just emphasize the big difference in the roles that they had, and what to expect qualifies as a "contribution" to try and gauge that.
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