This is an older article from this year, but it came up again recently and I thought it a good share here.
I don’t think it’s paywalled, but if anyone has trouble let me know.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When Sony’s first PlayStation console hit living rooms in 1994, it ushered in new ways for video game developers to tell stories: dazzling 3D graphics, pristine 2D sprite work, CD audio and vast troves of storage space thanks to ditching cartridges in favor of CDs.
The PlayStation era also marked the genre’s move from niche to mainstream in the West thanks to the release of “Final Fantasy VII” in 1997, which sold over 3 million units in North America — far more than any other Japanese RPG at the time.
The transformation began with some of Square’s most beloved 16-bit games like “Final Fantasy VI” and “Chrono Trigger.” These localizations by Ted Woolsey were, if not particularly sophisticated, at least quirky and eclectic, leading him to become a bit of a legend among JRPG fans.
Without direct access to the original creative team, Honeywood was left to make inferences and guesses — some of which, like whether the anime opening foreshadowed the game’s ending or was a complete non-sequitur, could drastically alter the shape of the story.
Given just a few months to complete the project, Smith joined editor Rich Amtower, writer Amanda Jun Katsurada, who was in charge of menus, items and similar ephemera, and unofficial team member Brian Bell, who provided expertise from the sidelines.
Even at his young age, Honeywood came to Square already seasoned at Nintendo, where he’d worked directly with legends like Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, which prepared him to win over the famously challenging creator of Final Fantasy, “King” Hironobu Sakaguchi.
The original article contains 3,215 words, the summary contains 258 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
