Hironobu Sakaguchi
Sakaguchi joined Square in 1983 and stayed for twenty years, which in this industry counts as a geological era. He created Final Fantasy and steered it through the run of games that turned Japanese role-playing from a numbers exercise into something people cried at.
What he pushed for, consistently, was narrative weight. Final Fantasy IV replaced the silent, interchangeable party the genre had been using with a scripted cast carrying private motives. Final Fantasy VII spent its budget on cinematics and character rather than on scale for its own sake. Chrono Trigger, another project credited to him here, built its story around consequence in a way almost nothing else on that hardware attempted.
Then he directed Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a photorealistic CG feature made at enormous cost, and he left Square two years afterwards. He founded the independent studio Mistwalker in 2004 and has worked at a smaller scale since: Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Terra Battle, and a deliberate move away from home consoles toward mobile. He holds a Game Developers Choice lifetime achievement award, which in games usually arrives while the recipient is still shipping.
Movies (1)
Games (3)
Where to start with Hironobu Sakaguchi
Play Final Fantasy VII first, not because it is the best-designed game he worked on but because it is the one where his priorities are most visible: a plot that keeps interrupting the dungeon crawl, a cast written to be argued about, and a willingness to spend the whole budget on a handful of scenes.
Final Fantasy IV (1991) is the more instructive one, though, and it is short. Play it and you can watch the genre acquire characterisation in real time. Chrono Trigger is the tightest thing on this page by a distance, with no wasted hours in it at all.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is the curiosity: technically extraordinary for 2001, dramatically inert, and much easier to admire than to enjoy.