March 10^th, 2005 (12:28am) - The latest issue of Famitsu magazine has revealed that two former Square Enix employees are working under Hironobu Sakagichi at the newly formed Mistwalker development studio. These two developers, Daisuke Fukugawa and Hiroshi Arai, will be working on the two role-playing games that were announced exclusively for the successor of the Xbox platform.

Fukugawa is known for his work on the PlayStation games Final Fantasy Tactics and Legend of Mana. For this next-gen Xbox project, Fukugawa will act as project director, to organize the development of the game alongside studio head Hironobu Sakaguchi. At the current time it is unknown if whether or not Fukugawa will be working on both of the studio’s next-gen Xbox RPGs.

As for Arai, he had been one of Square’s first 3D modelers, with a resume that includes games such as Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy IX. Asai will be handling the modeling for one or both of the next-gen Xbox RPGs.

In addition to this piece of news regarding Mistwalker’s new recruits, in this latest isssue of Famitsu, Sakaguchi mentions that development on the two RPGs is going very well, although he stated that the pre-production stages of game development did take awhile. He also mentioned that the games are being co-developed by Mistwalker and Microsoft Game Studios. Mistwalker will work on the game’s content (story and music), while Microsoft Game Studios works on the actual coding and other technical aspects. There are over one-hundred employees involved with the development of these two games.

Sakaguchi has stated that these two RPGs are the only games that Mistwalker is currently making for next-generation consoles. He decided to support the next-gen Xbox due to the fact that Xbox Japan chief Yoshihiro Maruyama and Microsoft Game Studios Japan R & D chief Hiroshi Kawai were both former employees of Square and his fellow comrades.