In late 2010, three months after Final Fantasy XIV had launched to widespread criticism, Hiromichi Tanaka was removed from the project. He was replaced by Naoki Yoshida. The game had been panned for performance issues, broken systems, and a structure that felt unfinished. Tanaka had been with Square Enix — and before that, Square — since 1983. He had helped design the first three Final Fantasy games. He had produced Secret of Mana, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears. He had led Final Fantasy XI, the company's first successful MMORPG, for nearly a decade. Now, at forty-eight years old, he was being taken off his own project.
Twenty-seven years earlier, in 1983, Tanaka was a student at Yokohama National University, studying electrical and information engineering. A classmate named Hironobu Sakaguchi invited him to drop out and join a small software division inside Den-Yu-Sha, a power-line construction company. The division was called Square. Tanaka left university and followed him. He started as a student part-timer. He was twenty-one years old.
Square at that time was a company with no hits and no reputation. The president, Masafumi Miyamoto, believed that games should not be made by one programmer alone — that they needed teams of designers, programmers, and writers working together. Tanaka joined that team. He worked as a designer on the first Final Fantasy, released in 1987. The game sold. It saved the company. Tanaka stayed.
He worked on Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy III. He became known inside Square for careful design and a taste for Western names — Norse mythology, European folklore. In Final Fantasy III, he designed the monsters and their data. The job system, which let players change their characters' abilities freely, was designed by others. But when a colleague later recalled that period, he remembered Tanaka for choosing the name Jörmungandr — the world-serpent — for one creature among hundreds. It was a small choice, but it was his.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, Tanaka worked on Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, and Threads of Fate. He served as producer or scenario writer on most of them. In interviews, he spoke about breaking the mold of conventional RPGs — about making battles feel real, not just touching an enemy and losing health automatically. He wanted gameplay that made the player feel like they were moving inside the world, not reading menus outside it. In 1998, he was promoted to executive officer at Square.
In 2002, Square released Final Fantasy XI, the company's first massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Tanaka was the lead developer and producer. The game launched on PlayStation 2 in Japan, then on PC. It was a risk — MMORPGs were unproven territory for Japanese developers, and building a game that ran continuously, with players from around the world sharing one persistent space, required infrastructure and design thinking that single-player RPGs did not. The game succeeded. It ran for more than a decade. Tanaka oversaw it.
In 2010, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV. Tanaka was producer. The launch was catastrophic. The game ran poorly on most computers. The user interface was confusing. Core systems were incomplete or broken. Players complained. The press savaged it. Three months after release, Tanaka was removed from the project and reassigned to Final Fantasy XI full-time. Naoki Yoshida was brought in to rebuild XIV from the ground up. Yoshida later had the game shut down, rewritten, and relaunched as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn in 2013. That version succeeded. Tanaka was not part of it.
On June 24, 2012, at the Vana'diel Fan Festival — an event celebrating Final Fantasy XI's tenth anniversary — Tanaka announced that he would be leaving Square Enix at the end of July. He cited health reasons. He had been diagnosed with a serious illness. He did not specify the details publicly. He had been with the company for twenty-nine years. He thanked the players and said goodbye.
After leaving Square Enix, Tanaka joined GungHo Online Entertainment as a freelance adviser. He continued working in the industry. The illness he mentioned was real, and it was severe, but he did not stop. He kept advising. He kept designing. He kept making.
The road from dropping out of university to being taken off your own project is not a straight line. It includes work that sold millions, work that won awards, work that failed, and work that no one remembers. Tanaka walked all of it. When his body could no longer carry him through the offices at Square Enix, he found another company and kept walking. He had chosen this work in 1983, when he left university to join a company that had nothing. Twenty-nine years later, when the company took him off his last big project, he did not stop choosing. He kept making it. The question the story leaves is not whether he succeeded. It is whether stopping would have felt more honest than continuing. And whether, at the end of a long road, the only thing left to prove is that you kept walking.