CONTROVERSY: WHICH FF GAME RUINED THE SERIES?

Eventually, Sakaguchi was fed up. He had Kitase, Nojima, Hiroyuki, Nomura, and Uematsu all dragged into a conference room, supplied them with a week's worth of bottled oolong tea, Oronamin C, shrink-wrapped convenience mart sandwiches, and cigarettes, then locked them in, telling them they had three days to either come up with a plan for Final Fantasy VIII or tender their letters of resignation.

What nobody knew at the time, however, was that there was a gas leak in this particular conference room.

DAY ONE, HOUR THREE: Nomura sits in corner, surrounded by a pile of crumpled-up character sketches. No matter how much he tries, he can't come up with a hero who doesn't look like Cloud or Ramza. Nojima has just spent an hour plotting a story together, only to realize that he's just rewriting Final Fantasy V with more robots. Uematsu has been playing chopsticks on his Casio keyboard since Sakaguchi locked the doors.

DAY ONE, HOUR FIVE: Uematsu and Hiroyuki claw at the door, screaming to be let out. Kitase has already eaten half the sandwiches himself out of self-pity. Nojima is pacing and chain-smoking.

DAY ONE, HOUR TEN: Nomura has drawn a quick doodle in his notebook of Mickey Mouse dressed in a trench coat. For some reason, he can't stop staring at it. Hiroyuki asks Uematsu if he smells something funny. Uematsu says no, but then bursts into laughter and can't quite say why.

DAY ONE, HOUR FOURTEEN: Nojima announces that he's starting to feel kind of funky. Kitase can't stop staring at his own hands. Nomura has gone back to one of his discarded sketches and added a few extra straps and belts to the character's outfit. He decides he's definitely on to something now.

DAY ONE, HOUR TWENTY: Kitase, for reasons he cannot articulate, is feeling intensely nostaglic for his old college days. The only way they could have possibly been better, he muses, is if his campus floated through the sky.

DAY TWO, HOUR TWO: "I got it," Nojima tells everyone. "Final Fantasy VIII's story is going to be about a pair of fiercely-competing rivals."

DAY TWO, HOUR SIX: "It's like a sword...but it's also a gun," Nomura explains to Uematsu. "A blade that uses bullets! This is the best idea I've ever had. Don't you think?" Uematsu nods, only pretending to listen. He is secretly gawking at the enormous size of Nomura's dilated pupils.

DAY TWO, HOUR EIGHT: Kitase recalls the time his nephew showed him his collection of Magic: the Gathering cards. He now strongly believes that Final Fantasy VIII should be about collecting cards and dueling other players.

DAY TWO, HOUR TWELVE: Nojima has reconsidered. "Okay. This game should be about an evil witch. The fiercely-competing rivals will still be around, but the focus is really going to be on the witch."

DAY TWO, HOUR SIXTEEN: Hiroyuki, who has been in a near-catatonic state for the past few hours, begins speaking to Uematsu.

"I got an idea. What if your characters could, like, equip spells?"

"Huh. You mean like buying spell books in Final Fantasy III?"

"Nah. I'm saying they'd literally equip spells."

"I'm not following."

"Okay, okay, listen. Say that like, instead of having armor and accessories, your guys just used magic. For example: you know how in the past, you had your dudes putting on, for example, Mythril Armor? What if we had them, equipping - I dunno - Quake instead? They'd be wearing spells instead of armor. What do you think?"

"That doesn't make an ounce of sense, but for some reason it seems like the best idea I've ever heard in my life."

"Thanks. I am so fucking high right now."

DAY TWO, HOUR TWENTY: "No, wait. Now I'm sure," Nojima tells everyone. "Now I am certain this game needs to be about a magical girl with the power to send people's minds through time itself. How trippy is that, right? But I mean, there's still gonna be those competing rivals and evil witch around, and...no, wait! That's two witches. There will be two evil witches in this game!"

DAY TWO, HOUR TWENTY-THREE: "I never wanted to be a video game character artist," Nomura confides to Hiroyuki. "I wanted to be a fashion designer." Then he sits back down to draw some extra pockets on Selphie's dress and wonder if Seifer might look better in a black mallcore beanie and belly shirt.

DAY THREE, HOUR FOUR: Okay! Right! New and even better idea!" Nojima shouts. "So you got this high-tech isolationist civilization, yeah? And the moon, see - the moon is where all the monsters in the world come from. They just get together in a big bunch and just like, fall down from the moon. Get what I'm saying? Anyway, but these guys from this futuristic city build this giant floating monolith - you know, real Space Odyssey - that they can use trigger this effect. So its evil ruler - who's one of our two witches - is gonna use this thing to...to...guys, sorry, guys. Hold on. I am blasted." Then Nojima begins ceaselessly guffawing for five solid hours.

DAY THREE, HOUR SEVEN: Uematsu steals one of Nomura's pens and scribbles gibberish in Roman characters all over the walls. He realizes that a small part of it, reading "CESONIV SOCEW CESUL SOHTFI," spells out words in Latin when he looks at it backwards. Astonished by this coincidence (and the fact that he suddenly knows Latin), Uematsu has found his inspiration for Final Fantasy VIII's signature theme.

DAY THREE, HOUR NINE: "So I got it figured out guys," Nojima says, having collected himself. "There's a girl who sends people into the past and there's these two - fuck it - three witches out to get her. And there's also this high-tech country that builds a machine to make monsters fall from the Moon, And the main character is this guy from a flying school who has to battle his hated rival while playing card games - okay, Kitase? - and stopping the three witches and all the moon monsters and rescuing the time girl, who's also his sister. But I think what we got here - at its heart - is a love story. The greatest love story ever told."

DAY THREE, HOUR TWELVE: Nomura has been hording the remaining Oronamin C bottles for himself. Hiroyuki approaches him and demands he stop being such a miser and fork some over. Nomura tosses one over to him, which he promptly chugs down. Moments later, Hiroyuki asks for more. Nomura tosses him three bottles. Hiroyuki decides to hold on to them, thus increasing his Oronamin C stock by three. This exchange becomes the basis of Final Fantasy VIII's Draw mechanic.

DAY THREE, HOUR SIXTEEN: For the last hour, Kitase has been raving about how video games are the new cinema of the 21st Century. "Cutscenes are the new boss battles! FMVs are the new dungeons! Conversations are the new enemy encounters! Less random battles - more five-minute exchanges between party members talking about their feelings! THE OLD WAYS ARE DEAD! VIVA LA REVOLUCION!"

DAY THREE, HOUR NINETEEN: Nojima sits supine and motionless, gazing into the fluorescent lights and watching them spool and unspool in spiraling prayerbeads of pure spiritual essence. He is on the very threshold of revelation about the nature of time and space, and humanity's place in both. He vows to incorporate this epiphany into Final Fantasy VIII's story. Months later, when it comes time for him to introduce Ultimecia into the game and explain her ultimate goal of Time Compression, it will all somehow seem a whole lot less obvious.

DAY THREE, HOUR TWENTY-THREE: Circle jerk.

When it's finally been three days and Sakaguchi unlocks the doors, they all descend on him at once, babbling and screaming about all the amazing new ideas they have and how eager they are to get to work. Sakaguchi wonders how he ever became such a brilliant leader.