Takashi Tokita

About

Takashi Tokita (born January 24, 1965) is a Japanese game director, planner, and producer at Square Enix. He came to Tokyo at eighteen hoping to become an actor. An advertisement for a graphic designer pulled him into the games industry instead — first at another studio, and about two years later at Square, after a television commercial for the game King's Knight caught his eye. For years he did the least visible work — inputting graphics, helping with monster design for the first Final Fantasy, handling testing and sound effects on the games that followed — while quietly thinking up stories of his own. During the development of Final Fantasy II he was assigned to Hanjuku Hero (1988). His first credited role as a planner came with Final Fantasy IV (1991): Hironobu Sakaguchi led the team, Hiroyuki Ito designed the battle system, and Tokita handled event planning as lead designer. He went on to direct Live A Live (1994) — an anthology RPG that tells seven separate stories across different eras, and which stayed in Japan until its 2022 remake — co-direct Chrono Trigger (1995) alongside Yoshinori Kitase and Akihiko Matsui, and direct Parasite Eve (1998). The young man who never made it to an actor's stage spent his career putting stories on a different one.