Yoshi-P Shows Us That This Fantasy Is Never Final

After a month of playing I finally feel that I have enough experience with the game to write this article.

Let me be clear: I love Final Fantasy XIV. I think it’s an absolutely incredible MMO and an incredible game well deserving of all the praise it gets. But I didn’t always think that way.

I was like most people when they announced that Final Fantasy XIV was getting resurrected. “There’s no way they can ever do it.” “No MMO has ever been brought back. What are the chances of it happening now?” “Square-Enix is floundering. They can’t pull this off.” But one man caused me to look at the game a second time. He caused me to follow the dev diaries. He influenced my purchase of the game. That man is Naoki Yoshida or as fans affectionately refer to him as, Yoshi-P.

Yoshi-P was assigned to the FFXIV re-creation project. Honestly most would’ve considered such a job a waste of time. Subscription numbers were low and the game was a laughingstock. What could be done?

But he didn’t give up home. The man worked long hours and gained the trust of his team. And when they discovered that nothing could be done he and his team scrapped the whole old game and started anew. It was considered outrageous at the time. But time passed and Yoshi-P did not simply keep his fans out of the loop. He updated them, regularly about all of the plans he had for the game. And the fans sat and they waited and they listened.

Then the beta was released and Yoshi-P kept the updates coming. He kept the populace informed and made it his own mission to listen to what the fans had to say. the game was tweaked and tweaked and tweaked some more. Fans gave it a very positive reception. Launch looked like it was going to be a piece of cake. But then….

Huge server issues were present. People couldn’t log in and those that could were just staying on the servers. It doesn’t really matter if your game is good if people can’t play it. Some devs would’ve just brushed it off. But Yoshi-P was apologetic. He took it all upon his shoulders and accepted all the blame for every issue promising people that he would do everything in his power to fix the issues. And he did. And his team did. And now the game is in a better place than it has ever been.

The industry really needs more people like Yoshi-P in it. With all of the people in the industry that are so quick to completely disregard what anyone else says about their product. With all of the people that are so quick to say “If you don’t like my product don’t buy it,” it’s good to know that there are more people like Yoshi-P out there.

I used to be like those people. He made me change my tune. And his hard work brought me an amazing world that I can feel immersed in. Thanks Yoshi-P.