Artist: Hiroyuki Ito – Final Fantasy – Battle Designer

Hiroyuki Ito, Has worked on Final Fantasy for the whole series, originally as a Debugger, which basically means he played the game and worked out any errors. In his time at Square, he went up as his experience on the Team grew, he became a more valued worker and started designing, his First game he was lead designer on was Square’s Tom Sawyer, based on Mark Swain’s Novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and he then worked on the game Rad Racer 2, as the lead designer.

He continued to work on the Final Fantasy games, and on Final Fantasy 4, he became the Battle Designer and also came up with the Active time Battle system, which has been used in almost every Final Fantasy game since.

His biggest role in a video game could be argued, but personally would be his work on Final Fantasy 9, in which his contributions were Director, Melodies of Life lyrics (credited as Shiomi), Game designer and Tetra master, the original concept for the card game, which also featured as part of the Final Fantasy 11 universe, where you could play the game on-line with friends.

He also worked on the main song for that game, Melodies of life,

[Edit] Here is the Japanese version on Imeem (May need an account) : http://profile.imeem.com/mhNwkP/music/EImBqijB/emiko_shiratori_melodies_of_life_japanese/

I cant share the MP3’s of the English and Japanese, so have this link instead to something you’ll like

Live performed (yay ): http://www.crunchyroll.com/media-144141/Emiko-Shiratori-Melodies-Of-Life-live.html

The following video is an interview with Hiroyuki,

Hiroyuki Ito on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroyuki_Ito