Yoshiharu Gotanda first worked as programmer at Wolf Team . His first work was Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Koudou in 1993 as an assistant programmer at the age of 17 years. His next work was Hiouden: Mamonotachi to no Chikai as the main programmer. Next he wrote the story Tale Phantasia which led to the Tales of Phantasia game for the Super Famicom in 1995 which he totally programmed as well.

Due to disagreements with developer Telenet and financier Namco regarding how to market the Tales series he left Wolfteam and co-founded , Tri-Ace with Joe Asanuma and Masaki Norimoto . Tri-Ace's first game was Star Ocean for the Super Famicom in 1996, again written and programmed by him.

Together with friends and other former Telenet employees he runs the hobby musician group @MIDI which released 12 CD's since. He now is the president and manager of research and development for Tri-Ace. He is said to have a friendly relationship to Motoi Sakuraba and to be the driving force behind Sakuraba's Star Ocean & Valkyrie Profile live concert.