Final Fantasy XI

Koichi Ishii , sometimes credited as Kouichi Ishii, is a video game designer perhaps best known for creating the Mana series . He joined Square in 1987, where he has directed or produced every game released in the Mana series . He has also contributed to several games in Square Enix's SaGa and Final Fantasy series, and created the well-known chocobo and moogle characters. Ishii was the head of Square Enix's Product Development Division-8 but... has since left Square Enix after the release of the World of Mana series. He formed a new developer Grezzo Games, Inc in April 2007.
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Nobuo Uematsu is a Japanese video game composer, best known for scoring the majority of titles in the Final Fantasy series. He is considered as one of the most famous and respected composers in the video game community. Uematsu, a self-taught musician, began playing the piano at the age of eleven or twelve, with Elton John as his biggest influence. Uematsu joined Square in 1986, where he met Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. They have... worked together on many video game titles, most notably the games in the Final Fantasy series. After nearly 20 years in the company, he left Square Enix in 2004 to found his own company called Smile Please, and the music production company Dog Ear Records. He has since composed music as a freelancer for video games primarily developed by Square Enix and Sakaguchi's development studio Mistwalker. Soundtracks and arranged albums of Uematsu's game scores have been released. Pieces from his video game works have been performed in Final Fantasy concerts. He has worked with Grammy Award-winning conductor Arnie Roth on several of these concerts.
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Naoshi Mizuta is a Japanese video game composer and musician. He is best known for his work on Final Fantasy XI , but has also composed music for Mega Man & Bass, Street Fighter Alpha, and Parasite Eve II. He was formerly a composer for Capcom, but is currently a composer for Square Enix. Born in Kōchi, Japan in 1972, Mizuta's interest in music began to grow when he "was in the second or third grade". One of his biggest musical... influences was Ryuichi Sakamoto. Although still interested in music, Mizuta studied law and economics at Chiba University. He composed his first song while in his last year there, and after graduating went to work for Capcom in 1995 as a composer. He began his career scoring the Street Fighter series where he was involved in scoring Street Fighter Alpha in 1996 with Isao Abe, Syun Nishigaki, Setsuo Yamamoto, and Yuko Kadota. In 1998, while still working for Capcom, Mizuta applied to Square as a composer in response to an advertisement and was hired.
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Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. TYO: 9684 is a Japanese video game publisher and distribution company best known for its role-playing video game franchises, which include the Final Fantasy series, the Dragon Quest series, and the action-RPG Kingdom Hearts series. Its headquarters are located in the... Shinjuku Bunka Quint Building in Yoyogi, Shibuya, Tokyo. The original Square Enix was formed as the result of a merger between Square and Enix. The merger occurred on April 1, 2003, with Square stockholders receiving 0.85 shares of stock in the new company compared to Enix stockholders receiving a one-to-one trade. Enix was the surviving company of the merger. At the time, 80% of Square Enix staff were made up of former Square Co. employees. As part of the merger, many of the top officials within Square Co. assumed the leadership roles in the new corporate hierarchy, including president Yoichi Wada, who was appointed president of the corporation. The original founder of Enix, Yasuhiro Fukushima, is currently the honorary chairman and largest shareholder of the corporation.
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Square Co., Ltd. was a Japanese video game company founded in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto. It merged with Enix in 2003 and became part of Square Enix. Squaresoft was also a brand name used by Square to refer to their games, and is often used incorrectly to refer to the company itself.... Square was founded in Yokohama in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto after he graduated from Waseda, one of Japan's top universities. Back then, Square was a computer game software division of Den-Yu-Sha, a power line construction company owned by Miyamoto's father. While at the time game development was usually conducted by only one programmer, Miyamoto believed that it would be more efficient to have graphic designers, programmers and professional story writers working together on common projects. Square's first two titles were The Death Trap and its sequel Will: The Death Trap II, both designed by part-time employee Hironobu Sakaguchi and released on the NEC PC-8801.
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