He has also contributed to several games in Square Enix's Final Fantasy and SaGa series, and created the well-known chocobo and moogle characters.
Ishii was also the original director for the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI and continued to be a central team member throughout the development of its first expansion, Rise of the Zilart.
[8] His guiding principle throughout the initial development cycle, according to a 2016 interview, was to both create compelling world and setting for the game as well as emphasize teamwork among players.
To support this design pattern, he claims to have deliberately spent time adding small atmospheric touches such as rainbows, hidden areas only reachable through exploration, auroras, flowers, and other "spontaneous events" that would draw the player into the game world.
The game economy was designed to make the player feel "insignificant" by emphasizing "production, consumption, and distribution," with the end goal of "understanding the importance of community."
In a similar fashion, Ishii enforced an EXP penalty upon character death in FFXI because the player would "feel empathy for [his or her] teammates when they got knocked out."
[3] Some critics felt that the constant switching between a battle screen and the world map made the games feel faster paced and "deeper".