Journey's End

Naoki Yoshida looks ahead to Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker expansion, and the future beyond

- Naoki Yoshida

By now, we’ve become accustomed to live events being cancelled and replaced with awkward digital substitutes. But still, the show must go on. After cancelling its 2020–2021 world tour, including what would have been a London stop this year, Final Fantasy XIV’s first Digital Fan Fest spared no expense (reportedly several hundred million yen) to bring the MMORPG’s developers and community together over two days streamed live from the Tokyo Garden Theatre.

We imagine that in-house band The Primals would have rather been playing its metal covers of the game’s songs in front of a rapturous, glowstick-waving crowd instead of a giant display of YouTube chat overlooking an empty auditorium. But if conditions were far from ideal, it didn’t seem to dampen spirits, with producer and director Naoki Yoshida having a grand time kicking things off in cosplay as the new Reaper job class, complete with a hefty scythe. Clearly, someone has managed to stay in shape through lockdown. Sitting down with Yoshida on a Zoom call, we resist asking him about his workout regime and focus instead on where this leaves the future of the Fan Fest event – and of the game he’s led for more than a decade.

“I do believe that for us there was really a huge amount of value in going through with the Fan Fest, and as far as I can see from the players’ comments as well, it resonated well with them,” Yoshida tells us. He also sees this digital event as an opportunity to try new approaches, such as the open cosplay corner, from which Square Enix can get ideas for how to evolve future Fan Fests. “We hope that our fans will be extremely glad and appreciate the amount of effort that we put into developing Final Fantasy XIV as a fun place for them.”