Yasumi Matsuno

Yasumi Matsuno (松野 泰己, Matsuno Yasumi, born 1965)^[1] is a Japanese video game designer and writer. Matsuno was first introduced to video games in arcades while waiting for the train, and first played Space Invaders and Xevious there. He attended Hosei University for foreign policy but dropped out, and after working for a time as an economic reporter, he joined Quest Corporation.

As an employee at video game companies Quest in 1989 and later Square in 1995, Matsuno became well known for his work in the tactical role-playing game genre, specifically the Ogre Battle (1993) and Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) series, in addition to Vagrant Story (2000) and Final Fantasy XII (2006). After disruptions from staff leaving his development team, he resigned from Square Enix due to prolonged illness. During a freelance period, he worked on games for Nintendo's Wii such as MadWorld (2009). He joined Level-5 in 2011 where he helped create Crimson Shroud for the Nintendo 3DS.

In 2016, he created his own company called Algebra Factory, and during this period was asked by Square Enix to create a scenario for Final Fantasy XIV's expansion Stormblood (2017). He created a raid called "Return to Ivalice", the land of Ivalice being a setting from previous Final Fantasy games he had worked on. Matsuno was subsequently asked to create another scenario, which was titled "Save the Queen: Blades of Gunnhildr" and included in Shadowbringers, another expansion for the game.