In April 2020, for the thirtieth anniversary of Final Fantasy III, Square Enix interviewed two of the people who made it. Asked about the small white creature with a red pom-pom on its head, the Moogle, Hiromichi Tanaka said it was not a character he remembered being in a special or important position at the time. 'We didn't think it would become a mascot character,' he said.
The man who drew it was Koichi Ishii, born in Tokyo on July 9, 1964. He joined Square in 1986, when the company was still small, and on the first three Final Fantasy games he worked on characters, monsters and jobs. In the same 2020 interview, he gave an account of where the Moogle came from. It was not invented for the game. By his account, it was a character he had been drawing since elementary school.
According to the reports of that interview, the creature began as a white koala. Ishii has said he liked animals that were not popular, the way some children prefer the frilled-neck lizard to the lion. Nobody had asked him to draw any of it. When Final Fantasy III needed a creature to put in its caves, that old drawing was available, and it was turned into pixels.
The Chocobo has a similar origin, and it came first. It appeared in Final Fantasy II in 1988. Ishii has said it grew out of a childhood memory of raising a chick, caught in the awkward stage between chick and full-grown bird. He took the name from the Chocoball, a Morinaga chocolate snack he had loved as a boy.
After three Final Fantasy games, Ishii has said, he told the producer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, that he no longer wanted to work on the series. Sakaguchi answered that he could make whatever he liked for the Game Boy. The result was Final Fantasy Adventure, released in 1991, the first game Ishii directed. In a 2014 interview with 4Gamer, he said that while making it he had even thought he might leave the company afterward.
He did not leave. In the same interview he said that so many people played Final Fantasy Adventure to the end that he decided to stay at Square a little longer and keep making games. What he kept making became the Mana series: Secret of Mana in 1993, Legend of Mana in 1999. He explained its spirits and elements in plain terms. He had sensed, without quite meaning to, that gratitude and awe toward nature were fading, and the series grew from there.
In December 2006 he founded his own studio, Grezzo. The name comes from the Italian diamante grezzo, a rough, uncut diamond. The studio went on to lead Nintendo's remakes of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Majora's Mask 3D, and Link's Awakening. A man who had drawn what he liked, unasked, was now trusted with other people's most loved worlds.
Thirty years after Final Fantasy III, the Moogle was still there, in the caves, on the title screens, in the arms of players who never knew a schoolboy's drawing sat under the pom-pom. Ishii has said that he has never been a graphic designer. What did you draw, once, for nobody, that you have not thought about since?