As part of the Final Fantasy XVI (FFXVI) Malaysia Pop-Up Event over at Sunway Pyramid, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Square Enix were kind enough to invite us over for an exclusive interview session with the legendary Naoki Yoshida, better known as Yoshi-P in the community.

Joining us in the interview was non-other than the FFXVI Localisation Director Koji Fox, who acted as an interpreter for Naoki Yoshida.

Naoki Yoshida

Naoki Yoshida is a man that needs little introduction within the Final Fantasy community. Prior to his work in FFXVI, Yoshida is both the director and producer of the beloved Final Fantasy XIV; helming through several critically acclaimed expansions and gaining a cult following, to the point where it was Square Enix’s highest grossing game.

It’s apparent that the success in his previous title also shone through in FFXVI, with the title selling 3 Million copies worldwide in under a week, as well as being one of the top rated Final Fantasy games in the franchise. In this interview, we ask Naoki Yoshida our burning questions now that the title has been out for a while.

Fan Expectations

Our first question that we asked was geared towards the intial announcement of FFXVI, where fans were immediately excited when they saw Creative Business Unit III (CBU3) and his name on it. We wanted to know how Naoki Yoshida felt to have that kind of expectation from the fans.

Yoshida replied that the team didn’t really think about it that much when the announcement was made. However, he knew that the players of FFXIV had very high expectations because of the kind of work they’ve worked on.

He did mention that most of the players were mainly just excited to see the next mainline Final Fantasy game finally coming out, and had a lot of expectations on the game’s graphics and story instead.

Feedback of FFXVI

Given that FFXVI has been out for close to a month now, we asked Naoki Yoshida how he felt seeing the project he worked on for so long come out to so much praise. To which Yoshida replied that he, the main director Hiroshi Takai, the main scenario writer Kazutoyo Maehiro, and Localisation director Koji Fox were just realieved that the game was finally out.

“But as you know, especially recently, players really look at Metacritic. They take those scores and they use those scores to look at it as a gauge of how good of a game is going to be. In the recent years, Square Enix has a lot of good Metacritic scores and a lot of not so good Metacritic scores, it’s been kind of a fluctuation there.”

“On top of that you add that it’s been 7 years since the last numbered Final Fantasy [game], and so there’s going to be a lot of people that will take a look at that score and judge it on that. Luckily, we got good scores, we got a lot of good feedback from fans all around the world. It looks like they’re really really enjoying the game and really enjoying the Final Fantasy franchise again, and that has us very very relieved.”

Despite being relieved, Yoshida said that the development team isn’t stopping and they’re currently looking at player feedback and making adjustments to make the game’s experience better moving forward. He also mentions taking the development process of FFXVI as a learning experience for the next project Creative Business Unit III will be working on.

MMO-isms in Combat

From our review of Final Fantasy XVI, when it comes to fighting bosses and using Eikonic skills, we realised that the approach was akin to rotations in an MMO. We asked Yoshida was it an intended design decision to combine those MMO styled gameplay elements with the action combat in FFXVI.

“A lot of players have kind of mentioned this, but I think that maybe they feel that because they know of our past work on FFXIV and that maybe if the same game, FFXVI was not created by CBU3, then maybe people wouldn’t be picking up on this. I think there’s maybe a bit of connecting our past work and this work, and that’s why people have recognised that. Because we didn’t go into it thinking we’re going to create something that was like XIV.”

“As you know, our combat director is Ryota Suzuki who joined Square Enix in the middle of the development of FFXVI, and had not worked on FFXIV and having that kind of skill rotation in the battle is all his idea, so obviously he wasn’t taking that from FFXIV. One thing though that was again kind of on purpose was that our main director Takai-san, he wanted to make sure battles in FFXVI was something easier to understand for players because this is the first time that Final Fantasy mainline has gone real-time action and we wanted to make sure players knew where attacks were coming from, and why they’re being attacked.”

Yoshida said that they had this great system in FFXIV that would show on the floor where attacks were coming from, which makes it easier for players that are new to action in FFXVI to understand what’s going on. He mentioned that was something the main director wanted to get across, but that wasn’t having the DNA of an MMO, but more of having the DNA of FFXIV, which had this very good system in it.

Confessions of a Black Mage Main

Producer Naoki Yoshida is famously known for being a Black Mage main in Final Fantasy XIV, and considering how much FFXVI involves players having to manage different things like Torgal, rotations, and combos, we asked Yoshida was that intricacy due to his Black Mage history.

To which, Yoshida laughingly replied with he was just the producer and not the director of Final Fantasy XVI and wasn’t up to him to decide the combat mechanics for the game.

“Personally, I’m a gamer and one of the most fun things for me was I got to be the first gamer to play FF16 in that testing phase, and I really really enjoyed the battles. But again, I want to put it out there that the battle in FFXVI is not how it is because I’m a Black Mage [main].”

He mentions that FFXVI is a full real-time action game, but in a sense you could call it a very speedy turn-based action game in the same vein, where player will still need to choose the enemy that they’re going to fight while having lots of things to manage.

He continued by saying that while FFXVI did not have an MP system, it has ability cooldowns and players will need to make the decision of whether they should immediately use a skill after it goes off cool down, or wait till the target is staggered before using their abilities. Yoshida says that that kind of balance was something that both combat director, Ryota Suzuki, and main director, Hiroshi Takai put a lot of effort into.

The Red Chocobo

In Final Fantasy XVI, players can pick up bounties from the Hunt Board at the HIdeaway, which has Clive go against mini bosses called Notorious Marks. One of the bounties that players can find is a particular Red Chocobo called the Dread Comet.

Considering how much the Red Chocobo caused so much trouble for FFXIV players, we asked Yoshida if they felt the need to tone down the Red Chocobo Meteor because it’s significantly easier to dodge it in FFXVI.

“Getting the nuance for this is a little bit difficult in the sense that, for those players who do know the Red Chocobo in the past, they can look at that and kind of laugh at that type of connection but there’s kind of a big difference between FFXVI and FFXIV.”

“FFXIV is always been about being a theme park of final fantasies where you take things from other FF [games] and you throw them in there, so everyone can enjoy that. But FFXVI stands of its own and not draw too much overdraw, and so having everything kind of be the same as past ones, it’s not going to be as fresh and original. That’s one thing I made sure to let the developers know is that we’re not just going to copy what happened in the past. That said, we do want to have some of those types of homages but we wanted to tone it down.”

DLC

We asked Naoki Yoshida about the one burning question that the internet has, whether or not they have any DLC planned for the future of FFXVI.

Yoshida answered that one thing that the team wanted to create a complete story where players can fully enjoy from beginning to end without any DLC, and he thought that they were able to do that. However, after receiving feedback, he understands that the players are eager to see more.

“For us, it’s about taking that and then thinking about what our options are moving forward, so hopefully in the near future we can have something that we can give to you.”

Message to the Fans

Naoki Yoshida ended the interview off by thanking everyone for their support of the Final Fantasy series of Creative Business Unit III, and that they’ve received so many kind messages over the past few months.

“Here we’re in Malaysia, in Southeast Asia for the first time for FFXVI. It has been great to meet and greet these fans and get this power of positivity that has shown through from everyone that we’ve met. We’re going to take it back with us to Tokyo and make sure that the entire development team knows that there’s so much love here for CBU3 and the franchise in SEA, and use that to help us continue developing FFXIV, and continue developing our new projects in CBU3 moving forward. Again, thank you for continued support.”

We would like to thank Naoki Yoshida for taking the time to answer our burning questions in regards to Final Fantasy XVI. We also like to give our thanks to both Square Enix and Sony Interactive Entertainment for setting this exclusive interview for us.

If you want to see the full interview session with Naoki Yoshida, check out our video here: