Daisuke Watanabe

is a Japanese video game writer employed by Square Enix. He is mostly known for his work on the role-playing video game series Final Fantasy and the action RPG series Kingdom Hearts.

Career

Watanabe first became interested in writing in junior high school in 1988, after reading the Wizardry novel Tonariawase no Hai to Seishun by Benny Matsuyama. Before he joined Square, Watanabe wrote manga novelizations. Final Fantasy X was the first Final Fantasy game that he worked on as scenario writer. Among others, he was responsible for the dialog in the Zanarkand Ruins which he almost wrote in one single night. The original scenario writer Yasumi Matsuno left that project in August 2005 due to sickness. Hiroshi Minagawa, the co-director of Final Fantasy XII, expressed his regrets that many of the story ideas by Watanabe had to be dropped so the game could meet the deadline for the release. In March 2006, Watanabe rejoined the Final Fantasy XIII team after Kazushige Nojima and Motomu Toriyama had conceived a mythology and story for the game, respectively. He was shown a rough outline of the plot until chapter eight and was asked by Toriyama to flesh things out and to correct how it would all connect. Watanabe decided how Toriyama's rudimentary cutscene ideas should play out, wrote the script and adjusted the personality of each character to emphasize what the story tried to express. He said that the Final Fantasy XIII series was an exhausting project with little time to breathe and that his feelings toward it were "complicated". Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

Itadaki Street: Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary