Biography
Kitase wanted to become a film director after seeing the movie Star Wars at the age of 12, when it was released in Japan. After earning a degree in cinema from the Nihon University College of Art, he worked for a small animation studio, producing animated cartoons for commercials and television programs. In 1990, after one year of employment, he decided to join the video game company Square, despite having no computer knowledge.
Kitase is best known as the director of Final Fantasy VI (with Hiroyuki Ito), Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII. Kitase described his first ten years of work at Square as that of an "event scripter", directing the characters' movements and expressions on the game screen as well as setting the timings and music transitions. He has compared this work to that of a stage director. He also referred to the game Final Fantasy VII and its protagonist Cloud Strife as his favorite game and character, respectively.
Kitase became a producer when Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, chose him to be producer of the mainline Final Fantasy games developed by Product Development Division 1. In this new position, Kitase would go on to be producer of Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2. In turn, Kitase specifically chose Motomu Toriyama to be his successor as director of mainline Final Fantasy games after the positive reception to Final Fantasy X, which was directed by Toriyama. At the South Korean launch event of Final Fantasy XIII, Yoshinori Kitase said that he wanted to continue working closely with Toriyama on main series Final Fantasy games.
Read more about this topic: Yoshinori Kitase
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