tabletop games. Its divisive reception caused Kawazu to create more conventional titles in the future, though they continued to use his gameplay philosophies. Throughout his career, regardless of the reception, Kawazu has striven for originality in his game design, drawing from unconventional sources compared to other video games. He played with Western tabletop games in his youth, and also manually translated them as they were frequently in English rather than Japanese. His favourite video game is Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. For the visual and narrative style of his games, he drew influence from the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy, which he greatly enjoyed in his youth. The SaGa series has consciously moved away from the typical storylines of other series such as Final Fantasy. When working on games, Kawazu often has duties and input beyond his credited role; an instance of this was SaGa Frontier II, where he was credited as producer and co-writer but ended up writing almost all the scenarios himself, but he ensures staff were given proper credit. Credits Credits exclude remakes of earlier titles References 1962 births Living people SaGa People from Kumamoto Prefecture Japanese video game designers Final Fantasy designers Tokyo Institute of Technology alumni Square Enix people