Hiroshi Minagawa

About

Hiroshi Minagawa (born August 11, 1970) is a Japanese art director and game director at Square Enix. He came up at Quest, where he sat beside the writer Yasumi Matsuno and the illustrator Akihiko Yoshida; in 1995 the three of them moved together to Square. Minagawa was the art director of the games that would define the look of Ivalice — Tactics Ogre (1995), Final Fantasy Tactics (1997), and Vagrant Story (2000) — the ornate menus, the tiny painterly portraits, the muted, storybook light that gave that shared world its particular air. His is the layer players stare at the longest and name the least: the interface, the screen composition, the way a place simply feels before a single line of story is read. On Final Fantasy XII (2006) he began as the visual director and, after Matsuno left the project through illness, stepped up to co-direct it with Hiroyuki Ito. Later he directed the 2010 remake of Tactics Ogre, reuniting the old team, and when Final Fantasy XIV was being rebuilt after its troubled launch he joined it not as a director but as its lead UI artist — taking on a single craft again at the moment it was most needed. The work he is known for is the work you notice least and miss most: the quiet art direction that turns a set of rules and a script into a place you believe you have been.