Koichi Ishii

About

Koichi Ishii (born July 9, 1964, in Tokyo) is a Japanese game designer and director who joined Square in 1986. On the first three Final Fantasy games he designed characters, monsters, and jobs — and along the way created the two creatures that would come to define the series' warmth. The Chocobo, first ridden in Final Fantasy II (1988), grew out of his memory of raising a chick as a child, caught in the awkward stage between chick and full-grown bird; he named it after Morinaga's Chocoball, a sweet he had loved as a boy. The Moogle followed in Final Fantasy III (1990); by his own account in a 2020 interview, it came straight from a character he had drawn in elementary school — a white koala, one of the unpopular animals, like frilled-neck lizards, that he preferred to the fashionable ones. After those three games Ishii told producer Hironobu Sakaguchi that he no longer wanted to work on Final Fantasy; Sakaguchi replied that he could make whatever he liked for the Game Boy. Out of that freedom came Final Fantasy Adventure (1991), the first game Ishii directed and the seed of the Mana series he would tend for years, through Secret of Mana (1993) and Legend of Mana (1999). He went on to serve as the first director of the online world of Final Fantasy XI, and in December 2006 he founded his own studio, Grezzo — its name from the Italian diamante grezzo, a rough, uncut diamond — where he has led Nintendo's remakes of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Majora's Mask 3D, and Link's Awakening. The through-line of his career is quiet: the small creatures he first drew for no one but himself became some of the most beloved and enduring in all of games.