Final Fantasy 15 director finally touches on what pushed him to leave Square Enix
This comes five years after Square Enix held a livestream dedicated to announcing most of 15's DLC was being cancelled.
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Five years after he left Square Enix, Final Fantasy 15 director Hajime Tabata has shared a little bit of insight as to how things went down.
Back in 2018, one of the strangest video game livestreams potentially ever took place: Tabata announced he was leaving Square Enix, a majority of Final Fantasy 15's DLC was cancelled, and some PC port features were scrapped too. After 15's tumultuous development, it was an unsurprising end, but obviously not a massively surprising one given the events that led up to that point. Now, in an interview with 4gamer, Tabata very briefly touched on why he decided to leave Square Enix (thanks, GamesRadar).
According to the Final Fantasy 15 director, the main reason was essentially down to the philosophy of Yosuke Matsuda, the at-the-time president of Square Enix. Tabata apparently said that the two of them had "different" philosophies, and he obviously knew that Square Enix as a whole would follow Matsuda. Because of that, Tabata made the decision to leave the company; though apparently he had been feeling the decision to leave for a number of years, and while he felt like he couldn't share the reasons then, he does think it's ok now.
Tabata also expressed regret at having to cancel most of Final Fantasy 15's DLC, though his frustration has pushed him towards to continue making games. In the same interview, Tabata also revealed his studio JP Games currently has two games in development, an RPG that's a collaboration with another company, and an MMORPG being developed internally. No word on a release date for either title though.
Final Fantasy 15 is just over seven years old now, and despite it being quite messy at launch (and taking a while to make it a full experience once it did release), it has seen some longevity thanks to passionate fans. It started life as Final Fantasy Versus 13, but don't worry, it seems like whatever original director Tetsuya Nomura had planned might come to fruition in Kingdom Hearts 4.