While Tactics Ogre was being made, its writer and director, Yasumi Matsuno, asked for a special animation for every class in the game. Hiroshi Minagawa made one for the Valkyrie: she spins her spear. For the archer, he says, he could not think of anything.
That is a small detail, and it comes from a 2020 anniversary interview where he looked back at the work. It shows what his job was. Minagawa was not drawing the famous faces. He was making the characters move, and he was making the screens people would read for hours.
He worked at Quest, beside Matsuno and the illustrator Akihiko Yoshida. Tactics Ogre came out in 1995 for the Super Famicom, a sequel in spirit to Ogre Battle, which had sold well enough to earn the team another game. Minagawa handled the pixel art, the sprites, the animations, the effects and the interface. Yoshida drew the backgrounds, the class illustrations and the portraits. Minagawa said he could never have made those portraits himself.
The machine gave him very little memory for video. So only the basic animations, walking and taking damage, stayed loaded. The attack and defence animations were swapped in during a fight. To make that workable he built tools: one for assembling poses and testing weapon and class changes, one for the maps. He said that building tools that fit the content of the game mattered even then.
The interface was shared work. Matsuno decided what information had to be on screen. Minagawa showed what would actually fit, and once built a prototype to see how many characters could be shown on the edit screen. He changed the text from white on dark, as in Ogre Battle, to black on light, and redid it all himself. He also designed the numerals, a slightly wide, flat face that he says he still uses.
In 1995 he moved to Square together with Matsuno and Yoshida. He was the art director of Final Fantasy Tactics in 1997 and of Vagrant Story in 2000. Players who remember the muted light of those games usually remember the story, or the music. The layer he made is the one they looked at longest.
Final Fantasy XII began in 2006 with Minagawa as a visual director. Matsuno left the project because of illness, and Minagawa stepped up to co-direct it with Hiroyuki Ito. In 2010 he directed the remake of Tactics Ogre and brought back the people who had made the 1995 game, some of whom had since moved to other companies.
Then Final Fantasy XIV was rebuilt after a poor first reception, and Minagawa joined it as the lead UI artist, not as a director. He had directed a Final Fantasy game. He took the job of making the screens readable. Which post would you take where you are now: the one with the title, or the one where something is broken?