Kazuya Niinou was previously at Atlus, where he worked on Etrian Odyssey, then at Imageepoch, where he worked on 7th Dragon, Last Ranker and Criminal Girls. Now, he's switched to that other RPG company, Square Enix.

At Twitter today, Niinou revealed that he's serving as assistant director on Final Fantasy XIV. He chose today to make this announcement because Square Enix showed an FFXIV video during a stage event at the Final Fantasy Gallery event in Shibuya.

Niinou later explained how he ended up at Square Enix. Last summer, he had some major health issues and ended up having surgery to remove one of his organs (he did not provide specifics beyond this). He felt that continuing as a director would be difficult, so he selected to restart from scratch working as a member of the FFXIV staff under Naoki Yoshida, who he refers to as an excellent boss.

Wrote Niinou, "If I get the chance, I would like to release my own game again, but for now I will give my all to Eorzea." (Referring to FFXIV's world.)