Kazuhiko Aoki

About

Kazuhiko Aoki (born November 6, 1961) is a Japanese game designer and producer who worked at Square, later Square Enix, from 1984 until 2025. He joined as an assistant to Hironobu Sakaguchi, writing scenarios for early titles such as Cruise Chaser Blassty, and in 1988 led his own design team for the first time — on Hanjuku Hero, a comedy about a cheerfully mediocre king. He worked on the game design of Final Fantasy III (1990), the entry that introduced the job system, letting players change what their characters could be, and later handled event design on Final Fantasy VII (1997) and Final Fantasy IX (2000). His most quietly influential role came on Chrono Trigger (1995). By the time he joined as producer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama had already spent over a year talking about making an RPG together — Square would come to call them its "Dream Team." Aoki was the one who turned that talk into a game: he gathered the team's scattered ideas into a single, coherent form and held roughly fifty to sixty developers together long enough to finish it. He remained at Square Enix for over four decades before leaving in 2025 to work freelance.