I don’t think he is. Because there’s another guy who is far more deserving of that title. I’m not much for these “worst of” or “Is X the most overrated?” discussions… at least not anymore, but I do have one from back in my more pessimistic days: Hironobu Sakaguchi.
He’s often praised as the best writer for the FF series, and while I really enjoy the early FF games, the stories are not their strong point. I found Sakaguchi was only ever able to do derivative storytelling, nothing really great or original.
For example, FF1, the game is janky as hell, but in that mess I find a fun game to play even to this day. What I don’t find great is the story. Sakaguchi created the fiends of power that are rotting away the various 4 elements of earth… Making them weaker/less useful. This is fine, until you get to the second fiend (Fire) where that whole concept is abandoned completely. They still bring up that the fiends are causing the world to decay right to the end of the game, even though that hasn’t been the story since fighting the first fiend (Lich, fiend of Earth). FF1’s strongest components were the art and music, IMO, and it feels more like accidentally great gameplay—but IMO when remasters tried to “fix” it they ruined what I liked about it… threw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak by replacing the magic system with mp, and adding in ethers and such.
Sakaguchi is often given undue credit for FF4 and FF6, which IMO are the greatest games of the Nintendo era Final Fantasy series. FF4 and FF5 were worked on during the same time, and Sakaguchi’s main focus was FF5, while design of FF4 was largely handled by future Chrono Trigger director Takashi Tokita. FF6, Sakaguchi handed the reigns over to Kitase early on.
So, to many FF4 seems like a triumph for Sakaguchi, since he wrote the story, right? It’s better than any of its contemporaries to that point… but that’s because of lead designer Takashi Tokita. Once again, the music (Uematsu) and art (Amano who designed, Tetsuya Takahashi who implemented) took high seats, but also battle system (Itoh) and scene direction (Tokita). IMO, FF4 was without rival until Dragon Quest 5 (which I didn’t play until a few years after it’s release). Tokita also reworked Sakaguchi’s story, heavily cutting around 75-80% of the text he deemed as unnecessary. But overall, the story felt a lot like a Star Wars fan fiction recycled into a fantasy world with elements of earlier FF games brought in.
Speaking of Star Wars fan fiction. When Sakaguchi was in charge of the first concept of Final Fantasy 6, Terra was a dude and a rogue partner of Locke associated with a rebellion against an Empire. While the rebellion remained in the form of “The Returners” as did the Empire, the game changed drastically once Yoshinori Kitase took over with Sakaguchi’s influences mainly being for loose concepts and framework, the cast much expanded and the initial characters (Locke and Terra) being drastically different from their origins. Kitase employed people across the dev team to write stories, among them Soraya Saga who’s join Tetsuya Takahashi to write Xenogears, and Tetsuya Nomura (of Kingdom Hearts Fame) who took the stories in far more creative directions. Kitase took the stories written by his team and unified them into what is (IMO) a giant leap in storytelling over its predecessors.
Other elements made FF6 game great, too. Uematsu once again outdid himself with one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. The game was more cinematic than ever, Tetsuya Takahashi (who was getting really into mecha at the time) made sure of that, including taking complete control of the intro scene to the game which blew minds when it first came out.
Anyway, I felt like in the early fandom that Sakaguchi took all the glory that was due to others. While it seems silly now, in older FF Internet communities there was a lot of Sakaguchi worship, and they basically gave all the credit of FF4 and FF6 to him, even though he barely did anything on FF6 on the development layer—they credited him when Kitase was the real General on the Battlefield here. Tokita eventually found his glory working alongside Masato Kato and the legendary scoring by Yasonori Mitsuda, but he really should have had it with Final Fantasy 4.
I’m not saying Sakaguchi is worthless as a writer, but he received a tremendous amount of undue credit. His writing is mediocre at best, and much of his credited success is due to heavy overhaul or near complete reworking by other writers. I’d also say he was a poor leader as well when power was placed in his hands—mainly because of his seniority and ability to stay on top of company politics (which hurt Tetsuya Takahashi). His jealousy is probably the main factor that tore classic Squaresoft apart. Many of their key talents, including Mitsuda, Uematsu, Tetsuya Takahashi, Soraya Saga left Squaresoft. The story of Spirits Within was bland and derivative, and not feeling deserving of the Final Fantasy label. His downfall was swift, and ended with his resignation and exit from Square in 2003.
I don’t know a lot about Kojima, but I do think he’s a substantially more talented of a writer than Sakaguchi from what I’ve played (mostly MGS1 and 3). And I’m not terribly familiar with the fanbase, but from my experience, Sakaguchi was usually regarded more highly than him. At least Kojima’s fans seem to be fans of Kojima’s work, and not crediting other people’s work to him.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
