Masato Kato

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Masato Kato (加藤正人 Katō Masato) (born March 28, 1963) is a Japanese game developer and scenario writer. He first worked for Tecmo on Captain Tsubasa and the Ninja Gaiden series. He went on to work for Gainax, then Square Co.. He is mostly known for having written parts of the stories for Chrono Trigger (in which he wrote in-depth material to complement the main story, and also personally scripted all events in the era of 12,000 B.C.), Radical Dreamers, Xenogears and Chrono Cross, all published by Square Co., Ltd..

Kato left Square Co., Ltd. (now Square Enix Co., Ltd.) in 2002 almost immediately after the initial release of Final Fantasy XI and continued to work in the game industry as a freelance scenario writer. In October 2005, an announcement revealed that he was working with Square Enix on the Children of Mana team.^[1] He went on working on the other World of Mana games.

In 2005, Masato Kato collaborated with Yasunori Mitsuda, longtime friend and music composer, to write a short story titled Five Seasons of kiRite, which Mitsuda accompanied with music on his album kiRite. The story and soundtrack have also been presented in opera form.^[2]

[edit] Works credited

Masato Kato has worked on the following games and stories:^[3]

• Captain Tsubasa (1988): animation sprites
• Ninja Gaiden (1988): pictures
• Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (1990): movie director, scenario, pictures
• Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom (1991): director of the action part
• Fushigi no Umi no Nadia (1992): assistant director, planner, script writer, graphics^[4]
• Princess Maker 2 (1993): planner, script writer, graphics
• Chrono Trigger (1995): story planner, script writer
• Radical Dreamers -Nusumenai Hōseki- (1996): director, scenario and script writer
• Final Fantasy VII (1997): event planner, script writer
• Xenogears (1998): event planner, script writer, lyricist
• Chrono Trigger (PlayStation enhanced port) (1999): supervisor
• Chrono Cross (1999): director, scenario and script writer, event planner, FMV storyboard
• Final Fantasy XI (2002): plot and events, lyricist
• Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (2003): scenario writer, screenplay
• Five Seasons of kiRite (short story) (2005): story writer
• Children of Mana (2006): scenario writer
• Deep Labyrinth (2006): scenario writer
• Dawn of Mana (2006): scenario writer
• Seiken Densetsu: Heroes of Mana (2007): scenario writer

[edit] References