Kazuhiko Aoki in 2004
Kazuhiko Aoki (青木 和彦 "Aoki Kazuhiko"?) (born November 6, 1961) is a well renowned Japanese video game creator and game producer, and one of the original developers of Square Enix. He is most famous for his work assembling the team that created Chrono Trigger, which he produced.
Aoki worked on several Final Fantasy games starting with Final Fantasy III, up to IX.[1] He also worked on various remakes such as Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS and the 2011 release of Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection.
Aoki's focus is on battle design and in-game event planning. During the development of Chrono Trigger, Aoki told Japanese game magazine V-Jump:
"I’m currently making adjustments to the newly developed “active time battle system”. While players are traversing through the different areas in the game, they’ll run into events in which trigger encounters with monsters. We’ve included hundreds of types of such events and they are all hand-crafted."[2]
An avatar of Aoki appears in Chrono Trigger's special ending in which the player meets the "Dream Team" that developed it.