Square was legendarily troubled in the years immediately leading up to its 2003 merger with Enix, and a big part of those troubles came down to the financial failure of Hironobu Sakaguchi's CG epic, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Sakaguchi resigned from the company before the merger went down, and according to fellow Final Fantasy legend Nobuo Uematsu, Square just wasn't the same without him.
"Square collapsed after Sakaguchi left," Uematsu said on a recent episode of his Together with NOBIYO podcast, as translated by Automaton. Sakaguchi was a guest on that episode, and the two reminisced on their time together at the company. "To put it simply – he is the big boss. Always has been and always will be," Uematsu explained.
Sakaguchi and Uematsu both worked at Square going back to the '80s, and would famously collaborate on 1987's Final Fantasy. "We didn’t even have a proper corporate organization, yet everybody listened to him. It’s a kind of quality you just have to be born with," Uematsu said of Sakaguchi.
"Maybe Sakaguchi isn’t aware of this, but the situation at Square was awful after he quit," Uematsu said. "He left and the organization suddenly collapsed. I thought to myself – Oh no, I should get away from here."
Of course, Sakaguchi was something of a figurehead of Square's troubles at the time, since the Final Fantasy film that he helmed ended up being something of a financial disaster - one so substantial that it delayed the already-planned merger with Dragon Quest publisher Enix. Sakaguchi resigned from his position at Square in 2001, though he'd continue to be credited as an executive producer on various Final Fantasy games until 2003.
Uematsu himself left Square - by then properly rebranded as Square Enix - in 2004, working as a freelancer ever since. He's composed a few tunes for his old employer since then, but he's had far more prolific contributions to projects like Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, and Fantasian, all of which were developed by Sakaguchi's studio, Mistwalker.
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