I’ve never thought of Retro as Nintendo’s elite studio. More like the remnants of Iguana Entertainment. Nintendo’s elite studio has always been EAD and it’s other manifestations for me.
As for Monolithsoft, they’ve probably been my favourite third party studio, or at least one of them, since their inception. They had a lot of important talent going in: Tetsuya Takahashi, Soraya Saga, Yasuyuki Honne, Kunihiko Tanaka (who’d worked with Takahashi since the 1980s in the same studio that developed Faxanadu), regularly work with legendary composer Yasunori Mitsuda… and most of those people are still involved casually or full time with the studio. Those people all did great things in the video game industry and have immortalized themselves with games like Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears.
Tetsuya Takahashi had already been a veteran of the industry (Nihon Falcom, and Square’s Final Fantasy and Romancing Saga franchises) when Director Kitase gave him design projects and reign over the Magitek Armour scene and intro to FF6… at that time, one of the most moving and cinematic experiences in video game history… He wanted to make Magitek Armour into a bigger part of FF7, and that concept became his undisputed masterpiece: Xenogears. The themes and concepts from Xenogears have carried through Xenosaga and Xenoblade Chronicles. He also worked as the graphical director on Chrono Trigger alongside artist Akira Toriyama of Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball fame.
Kaori Tanaka, better known by her pen name Soraya Saga, got her first major break on Final Fantasy 6 having a talent for art and writing she created the story and characters of Sabin and Edgar. She would later go on to write the original concept of Final Fantasy 7. She also wrote Xenogears and Xenosaga alongside Tetsuya Takahashi.
Yasunori Mitsuda was a legend the moment he broke into the industry with his soundtrack for Chrono Trigger. He’d continue to work alongside the team that would become Monolithsoft by composing the Xenogears soundtrack, and then several other Xeno games over the next 25 years. He also worked with Yoko Shimomura on Xenoblade Ω chronicles, and she’d previously collaborated with Takahashi and Honne on Front Mission.
Monolithsoft is an incredible studio whose roots go back years before the studio was even founded. Games that multiple key figures from Monolithsoft worked on include:
Ys III
Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes
Final Fantasy 6
Front Mission
Chrono Trigger
Xenogears
Chrono Cross
Xenogears is the project that really gave birth to their dream. The monolith is named for the Zohar that appears in that game and others.
I guess Retro Studios sometimes works with David Wise? Honestly, I don’t really know much about them other than Jeff Spangenberg founded them as a break off studio from Iguana Entertainment, taking much of the Turok team… and then most of them left within a couple of years, including Spangenberg. Rumours abound about it being a miserable place to work. Seems they’ve been a revolving door studio without a lot of foundation or a soul. And somehow they have this weird cult who keeps talking them up like they have some kind of sacred developmental potential. I’ve never bought into it.
Last edited by Jumpin - on 24 August 2022I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
