Akihiko Matsui

About

Akihiko Matsui is a Japanese game designer at Square Enix. After working on the battle systems of Final Fantasy IV (1991) and V (1992) and finishing Romancing SaGa 2, he joined Chrono Trigger (1995) partway through development, where he was credited as one of three parallel directors alongside Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita — no single name placed above the others — handling planning and the movement of monsters in battle. He went on to work on SaGa Frontier and Legend of Mana, and then found the work that would define the rest of his career: the battle design of Final Fantasy XI, Square's online world, from its launch onward. In September 2010 he became the game's director; barely three months later, in December, he stepped down and moved to Final Fantasy XIV as its lead battle planner, joining a game that had just launched to a poor reception and needed rebuilding. He returned to become the producer of Final Fantasy XI in 2012, and handed that role on in 2023 while staying with the project as a planner. Across more than two decades his title kept changing — director, planner, producer, planner again — but the thing he was tending did not: the persistent online worlds that had to keep running for the players still living in them. His career reads as a quiet argument that rank matters less than staying with the world you are keeping alive.