Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted to be a musician. He nearly got expelled from high school for selling bootleg concert tickets, and he joined a brand-new startup called Square in 1983 mainly to afford software for a counterfeit Apple II he bought in Akihabara. This episode traces how a friend's copy of Wizardry rewired his artistic brain, how he rose to Director of Planning and Development by 1986 while disliking the action games Square was making, and how a project he named Final Fantasy as a personal ultimatum sold around 400,000 copies in Japan and pulled the company back from ruin.

We explore the fire during Final Fantasy III's development that killed his mother, Aki, and how that grief, colliding with criticism that the series lacked story, led him to make death permanent and meaningful within 16-bit limits, themes that later shaped Final Fan ...