Even series’ like the Mana games have been boiled down to GREE-developed social offerings like Circle Of Mana, in which players have to buy individual cards to fight battles. Console games like Valkyrie Profile have largely been replaced with mobile games like Final Fantasy: All The Bravest and Demon’s Score, piecemeal adventures where iPhone owners have to spend top dollar to buy the games a little bit at a time.

Today there’s just one Japanese game publisher pumping out Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games, and the Square Enix of 2013 makes far fewer single-player epics than it once did. Takamasa Shiba, Drakengard series producer Both companies made single-player epics, games that pushed the medium’s narrative ambitions to new heights. Shiba’s career as a producer started back when Enix, the role-playing game company behind institutions like Dragon Quest and cult classics like Actraiser, was an independent entity whose biggest competitor was Squaresoft, the studio behind Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and others.

Even if his company bears a familiar name (Square Enix), and the games it makes bear a resemblance to those that Shiba was making when his career started in the ’90s, little about the man or his peers remains the same.

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