He was the Head of Square Enix's Business Division 2[1] and part of the Final Fantasy Committee that is tasked with keeping the franchise's releases and content consistent.[2]
Tabata resigned from Luminous Productions and Square Enix Group on October 31, 2018.[3]
Career
While in middle school, Tabata played a historical role-playing game made by Koei and first imagined how much fun it would be to make his own game.[4] In his last year of university, he applied for jobs in the video game industry and in other media arts such as documentaries, television and film.[4] He worked at several different video game publishers prior to his being hired at Square Enix, which he said gave him experience making action games, arcade games, and role-playing games.[4]
Square Enix
In the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, the international outpouring of support for Japan was paralleled at Square Enix by fan letters about the then-upcoming release of Type-0, and encouraged Tabata to make something special for the fans and those living through difficult times.[5]
He became the director of Final Fantasy XV, taking over from Tetsuya Nomura in December 2013,[6] a change that was announced in September the following year.[7] He used to be co-director on the project.[5] During his work on Final Fantasy XV, Tabata joked about his busy schedule, mentioning he regularly got only three hours sleep.[5] Tabata, whose previous experience was with portable gaming devices, said that he was excited to work on console systems and wanted to "help players dive even deeper into their experiences".[5]
Tabata formerly served as producer for Final Fantasy XVdownloadable content.[8][9][10] His work on the downloadable content was planned to continue into 2019.[11] He and staff within Square Enix Business Division 2 were also working on a new intellectual property targeting the next-generation of consoles.[12][1] Development for this project began in earnest in 2018, after previously only having a small team of 20-30 people assigned to it.[13][12]
In March 2018, Tabata created a new Tokyo game studio for Square Enix called Luminous Productions, which consists of several key members from the Final Fantasy XV team.[14] He was the COO and Head of Studio for Luminous Productions.[15]
Tabata resigned from Luminous Productions and Square Enix Group on October 31, which was confirmed by Square Enix on November 7. In addition, 3 of the 4 DLCs for Final Fantasy XV were cancelled.[3]
JP Games, Inc.
With the announcement of his resignation from Square Enix, Tabata began starting his own company, JP Games, Inc., which was launched in January 2019, to create a new project.[16] The first project, The Pegasus Dream Tour, a game themed around the 2020 Summer Paralympics, was released in June 2021 for iOS and Android.[17]
