Hiroya Hatsushiba started out as a sound programmer for Wolf Team, a game development studio that employed such famous game creators as Yoshiharu Gotanda and Motoi Sakuraba. His first collaboration with Sakuraba was on the 1994 PC title Hiouden: Mamono-tachi tono Chikai. He also served as sound director on Tales of Phantasia.
After Wolf Team encountered creative difficulties publishing Tales of Phantasia under Namco, Hatsushiba joined his collaborators in the newfound company Tri-Ace. In 1999, he left Tri-Ace to found Tri-Crescendo. He has since directed the games Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, Baten Kaitos Origins, and Eternal Sonata.
The director said of his latest project,
In today's modern world all sorts of incidents are happening all the time, and I feel that in many of these cases games are implicated as the cause. Thinking it'd be good if playing a game could affect or improve that person's life, even if it's just a little bit, I wrote Eternal Sonata's story to be mainly about the precious qualities of life.
