Watanabe first became interested in writing in junior high school in 1988, after reading the
Wizardry novel
Tonariawase no Hai to Seishun by Benny Matsuyama. Before he joined
Square, Watanabe wrote
manga novelizations.
Final Fantasy X was the first
Final Fantasy game that he worked on as scenario writer. Among others, he was responsible for the dialog in the Zanarkand Ruins which he almost wrote in one single night. The original scenario writer
Yasumi Matsuno left that project in August 2005 due to sickness.
Hiroshi Minagawa, the co-director of
Final Fantasy XII, expressed his regrets that many of the story ideas by Watanabe had to be dropped so the game could meet the deadline for the release. In March 2006, Watanabe rejoined the
Final Fantasy XIII team after
Kazushige Nojima and
Motomu Toriyama had conceived a mythology and story for the game, respectively. He was shown a rough outline of the plot until chapter eight and was asked by Toriyama to flesh things out and to correct how it would all connect. Watanabe decided how Toriyama's rudimentary cutscene ideas should play out, wrote the script and adjusted the personality of each character to emphasize what the story tried to express. He said that the
Final Fantasy XIII series was an exhausting project with little time to breathe and that his feelings toward it were "complicated". Watanabe not only wrote the scripts for the games but also a three-part novella titled
Final Fantasy XIII Reminiscence: tracer of memories that was published in the Japanese game magazine
Famitsu. ==Works==