He is currently the head of Square Enix's Creative Business Unit I and the Final Fantasy series Brand Manager, and vice president, a member of the board of directors and an executive officer at Square Enix Co, Ltd and Square Enix Holdings.[1]
He was the head of Square Enix's Business Division 1 during its entire existence as well as a Corporate Executive. He is also part of the Final Fantasy Committee that is tasked with keeping the franchise's releases and content consistent.[2][3]
Biography
In July 1978, at the age of 11, Kitase watched the movie Star Wars for the first time and was deeply impressed with it. He later examined the making-of video to it and became interested in the creative process of the film industry. Kitase decided to attend the
Nihon University College of Art and studied
screenwriting and
filmmaking. Although he enjoyed filming, he showed a much greater passion for
post-production editing as he felt it allowed him to give the footage a completely new meaning and to appeal to the viewers' feelings. In his first year after the graduation, Kitase worked at a small animation studio that produced animated television programs and commercials. When he played Final Fantasy for the first time, he considered a switch to the game industry as he felt that it had potential when it came to animation and storytelling.[4] Despite having no
software development knowledge, he applied at the game development company
Square and was hired in March 1990. In the ten years to follow, he gathered experience as an "event scripter", directing the characters' movements and facial expressions on the game screen as well as setting the timings and music transitions. He has compared this work to directing film actors.[5] Kitase continued directing cutscenes in spite of filling other roles in later projects; for example, he directed part of the event scenes in Final Fantasy VIII and was event planner for the Nibelheim section of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII.[6][7]
^"Beyond FINAL FANTASY – Interviews". FINAL FANTASY X Bonus DVD.
Square Enix Co., Ltd.
Archived from the original on 23 May 2014. Retrieved 4 April 2011. Yoshinori Kitase: For Final Fantasy VII and VIII, the setting was sci-fi and many players responded by saying that they preferred a simple fantasy world. They seemed to have a fixed notion of what fantasy means to them, and to them, it consisted of a medieval European world. I wanted to change that idea. I wanted to expand the definition of what the players thought the word "fantasy" implied.