Becoming Yoshi-P – Game Informer

Introduction

Naoki Yamada is an incredibly versatile man. Ask him any question, and he’ll answer in great detail. Which is terrific, because he’s had quite the career.

There’s no denying that Naoki Yoshida is a massively popular and important figure to the Final Fantasy franchise. Yoshida turned the tide for the series when it was at its lowest point. He helped transform Final Fantasy XIV from a disastrous launch to one of the most popular and beloved MMORPGs this generation. Nearly a decade later, he’s still finding ways to keep fans engaged with the content and returning for top-tier expansions like Endwalker. This consistency hasn’t gone unnoticed. XIV won awards in major categories from DICE, The Game Awards and Metacritic, including video game of year (SXSW), and best role-playing games (DICE) this year. Yoshida will also be serving as the producer for Final Fantasy XVI. He is responsible for bringing a new future to the franchise.

Yoshida has rightfully earned his place on the pedestal, but he didn’t get there by just being a smart and insightful developer. He was passionate about games and it allowed him to see things through the eyes of fans, which has been a huge asset in his professional career. This was evident in Yoshida’s in-depth interview. In it, he reflected back on how he got to be a videogamer and also shared some insights about himself beyond the gameworld.

Yoshida takes a break with Tokyo Fan Festival fans

Finding Games

Finding Games

Yoshida has a knack for storytelling. He grabs your attention immediately and makes you want to listen until the end. His frequent references to games make it clear that Yoshida is always referring back to world and narrative. He was raised by his mother who exposed him to mysteries novels when he was a child. [see For The Love Of Mystery Novels sidebar]. Yoshida believes that every game must have some surprise element, something he says is probably tied to his love for the mystery genre.

Ironically enough, Yoshida’s first encounter with a video game was typical. He discovered an arcade Rally-X machine when he was just five years old while on holiday with his family in a hot spring. Players raced through multiple-scrolling levels in order to earn flags. “It was very standard, so that was not surprising in any way,” he admits. “I was just there kind of playing around with the levers.”

It wouldn’t be until Yoshida was around seven years old that he really felt the magic of gaming, thanks to his neighbor, who Yoshida refers to as a “rich brat kid.” Yoshida went over to his neighbor’s one day and saw the NES hooked up to the TV, with the original Mario Bros. illuminating the screen. Yoshida was stunned by Yoshida’s immediate emotional reaction.

“That was my shocking entry into video games,” he says. “At that time, I thought television was only to watch something – a passive media as we put it nowadays. The interactive element had such an impact on me.”

Yoshida says even though Mario’s mechanics were simple, stomping on Goombas and going through pipes, he was struck by the cooperative element and how that changes the experience, despite it having the same rules as single-player. “So when I got to play it for the first time, I already knew somewhere in my heart that I am going to be a person who creates games one day,” he says.

Yoshida took a while to get used to the RPGs. In elementary and middle school, Yoshida recalls that he played a lot in action shooters and games, but his friends always talked about Dragon Quest. Yoshida remembered feeling “rather negative” about the series. He hadn’t played it, but based on what he heard, it didn’t seem like his cup of tea. “It’s this game where the CPU generates numeric random occurrences like dice, and I didn’t know what the appeal was,” he says.

That all changed when his friend lent him a copy of the game, and he came to a realization: “With these role-playing games, it’s not about the skill of the playerthemselves, but I noticed that you have this character who gains experience, and there’s a story behind it, and it was a very different experience.”

Yoshida was changed forever by Final Fantasy, which came out a little over a year after Yoshida. “[That’s when] I realized that this medium now tells a story and in a very dramatic way,” he says. “It changed my perspective; I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I want to be able to deliver a story through this video game medium to share with people out there in the world.’”

Yoshida always thought he’d make an action game, but his Final Fantasy experience made him change his vision for the future. It was then that he wanted to create an RPG. He was driven by the desire to tell a story using this interactive platform.

You Have to Do the Hard Work

The hard work is worth it

Yoshida was dead set on being a video game developer, but as he was graduating high school, he started to realize he hadn’t done much to put him on that path. “I never really studied any sort of programming or video game [design] at this point,” he says. “I just had this weird confidence in me, thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a game designer one day.’ It was just all talk at that time.”

Yoshida decided to pursue programming further and attended a Hudson Soft game-design school. Hudson Soft was a publisher of video games that thrived from 1980s through 2002. They created series such as Star Soldier, Bonk and Bomberman. It led him to take a temporary job with the company. This allowed him to start to learn about development. Yoshida was inspired to develop by the RPG Tactics Ogre, which also ignited his desire to be a developer. This gave him new goals to reach. [see Falling In Love With Tactics Ogre sidebar].

Super Bomberman 64 – The Second Attack

Yoshida improved his work ethic in order to be noticed and changed how he approached game development. Yoshida was no longer making games by just one person. He saw teams evolve and new roles open due to new hardware complexities. Yoshida knew it wouldn’t be enough to master one discipline; he needed to learn as much as possible about every aspect of game development. “I wanted to get experience in anything and everything,” he says. “I would actively seek out tasks that people would not want to tackle themselves.”

Yoshida was looking for problem projects where there were multiple directors or scripts that needed to be overhauled. He offered his assistance. “The reason why I wanted to do that is with game development, you do need various specialists, but there’s usually only one person that supervises it all as a director,” he explains. “And I wanted to get to that director position. To do this, I needed to win the trust and respect of everyone involved. I wanted to get my foot in the door by having them open up to me and want to continue working with me.” Yoshida said after a year, opportunities started coming his way, and eventually, he nabbed the role of story mode director on Bomberman 64: The Second Attack.

Yoshida’s time at Hudson Soft also served as a great way to acquaint himself with PC gaming, where the company got its start before shifting to console development. “The team was so well versed in developing for the PC platform, and we also had a good internet environment as well,” Yoshida recalls. Yoshida fondly recalls how he used his PC at work to play a little bit of gaming. He said that the team was hardworking but also gamers, and played lots of Ultima Online and Diablo.

Online players were what attracted him. It also made it easier to find programmers to help explain the process. Yoshida recalled playing Diablo 1 and seeing how gamers cheat the system by casting spells within safe areas. His colleagues quickly explained how the game was exploited to his surprise. He attributes this experience to helping him master the online game world, which will be a great help in his career.

Enix and the Fateful Meet

Enix: A fateful meeting

Yoshida left Hudson Soft to become an expert in the field. He then moved to Rocket Studio, a small company. This was where he got the chance that he had been looking for, to design his own game. For a PC RPG, he would create the whole scenario. This was something that he had always wanted to do. It was a chance to meet Yosuke, his future employer and a key figure in the industry. He is most well-known for being the producer of Nier.

Yoshida met pre-merger Enix to discuss his game idea. It was given the go ahead. Yoshida said that the RPG used the multiplayer aspect of the game. “It had a scenario that you’re following, but it was going to be set up so that you wouldn’t be able to see all of the different branches unless you teamed up with somebody else,” he explains. “So you would follow this one path, and then you’d have to team up with somebody else who has gone through a different history, or there was an item that you had to obtain in order to change your trajectory, but that item can only be obtained from somebody else.”

Yoshida hosts special livestreams for fans that last 14 hours.

In the middle of the title’s development, Enix merged with Square, and things started to change quickly. “There was a lot of transition,” Yoshida says. “Our project, which was supposed to be on PC, was told to also be developed for [PlayStation 2]. Then things just got messy, and the title was put on indefinite hold.”

It wasn’t all lost. When Saito approached Yoshida to assist with Dragon Quest in 2005, he realized that connections can make a difference. Yes, the juggernaut franchise Yoshida didn’t initially gravitate toward as a kid ended up becoming a huge part of his career. Yoshida worked on arcade games for the franchise, but his main project was Dragon Quest X – the first MMORPG for the beloved property. Saito served as Dragon Quest X’s producer and made Yoshida its chief planner.

Saito saw Yoshida’s potential early on and still has much respect for how he approaches his work. “I have always related to Yoshi-P’s ‘I love games!’ sentiment, and there are many things I respect him for, regardless of the senior-junior relationship,” Saito says. “There are many important aspects when developing a video game, but in the end, it all comes down to love. I think the best thing about him is that you can clearly see that he puts all his energy into a project with that love, both from the perspective of a developer and as a player.”

Yoshida’s work on Dragon Quest X got him experience working on a top Square Enix property and an MMORPG. Looking back on his time leading up to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, the game that would eventually put his name into the limelight, he laughs, saying it was “a lot of game development and playing a lot of online games, which doesn’t seem to be too different from what it is now.”

Final Fantasy XIV Glory

Final Fantasy XIV Glory

Final Fantasy XIV was launched in 2010 and received intense criticism from media and fans. It earned an awful 49 points on Metacritic. From server stability and a terrible user interface to hilarious bugs, the MMORPG was plagued by problems in all directions. Yoshida took over when the brand was in its worst state and XIV was unsalvageable. Yoshida faced a difficult task. A failure would have been enough to end his career. However, he handled it with the same approach he uses for everything: hard work, uncompromising honesty, and undeniable style. Final Fantasy XIV was the birth of the “Yoshi-P” moniker, a nod to his power as its producer and director. The game made the once-unknown developer a hero among his fans in many ways.

Yoshida didn’t earn the fanfare just for his success, but for how he embraced player feedback and was transparently open – something Square Enix wasn’t exactly known for at the time. “The original Final Fantasy XIV and its failure had a big impact,” Yoshida says. “This is just my perspective, but I feel there was a separation between the people who make the games and the people who play the games. I feel like trying to rebuild XIV was a turning point where I did sense that the atmosphere shifted to focus on trying to regain fans’ trust.”

Yoshida felt able to implement his personal philosophy after he took control of the project. As a gamer himself, he disliked what he saw as a divide between developer and fans – instead of working against each other, they should be working together. “I tried to be as honest and as transparent as possible to the players so that we would gain a mutual understanding,” he says. To achieve this, Yoshida releases “Letter from the Producer Live” broadcasts where he candidly replies to fans and details the changes coming to the MMORPG.

Final Fantasy XIV

Yoshida states that he views the players as friends and is always interested in what they have to say. He tries to explain the reasons behind a feature or request as honestly as possible. He credits this approach with helping the MMORPG build the tight-knit community it’s known for. “Yoshida-san is a very thoughtful person,” says Final Fantasy XIV global community producer Toshio Murouchi, who has worked alongside Yoshida for the past 12 years. “He is a person who values the perspective of the players and the fans, and I really respect that he is clear and decisive about what may not work and takes the time to carefully explain why.”

With nearly a decade of running the Final Fantasy XIV ship and four expansions under his belt, Yoshida thinks the MMORPG still has plenty of places to explore, teasing the numerous possibilities: “We know that we are in planet Etheirys, and we’ve only really explored about a third of that. And then, of course, with the Source’s reflections, we’ve only visited the First out of the 13 different mirrored worlds. Even if we have time travel, we’ve never gone to the future yet. We may never know. This may have actually been a multiverse.”

A Future Fantasy

A Future Fantasy

Yoshida has seen a lot of changes since his first day at Square Enix. Not only in terms their success, but in general, the industry. Yoshida says technology is constantly improving. He points out that the newer processing speeds and better performance have made the medium even more powerful. Yoshida notes the increased realisation video games offer. He says that they no longer require players to create the worlds of the imagination. It’s also upped the expectations and pressure to get every cinematic shot just right.

“The costs and the resources required for producing a modern game have become a lot more expensive, and the technology that sits behind developing these games have come to the point of scholarly levels,” Yoshida says. “I’m working on Final Fantasy XVI, and sometimes I look at what we’re trying to do and I think to myself, ‘Wouldn’t this be quicker and cheaper if we just film real people?’”

Part of why Yoshida is so good at what he does is he’s always paying attention and analyzing everything around him. The internet has played a significant role in our experience of games, Yoshida says. “The internet, in general, has become such a part of our lives that we don’t really think about connecting to the internet; it’s already [our] default,” he says. “A lot of the things that we utilize in our daily lives are just already working under the assumption that we are connected online somehow, and it’s sort of blurred the line between a physical place in a physical time and made everything more available outside of what we would normally be used to. That’s also made an impact on how we look at games as well.”

Yoshida’s role has also expanded. He’s still leading Final Fantasy XIV, but also serving as producer on Final Fantasy XVI, an important next entry in a series just beginning to regain its limelight after a difficult patch. Yoshida doesn’t mince words about the challenges of having two big titles on his plate. “It’s just so many things that I have to juggle, and I’m trying not to drop the ball, so when asked if it’s smooth sailing, I would assure you it is not smooth at all.”

However, Yoshida hasn’t shifted his strategy from years ago when he worked at Hudson Soft, saying it all comes down to mutual trust between him and his team. According to Yoshida, part of their job is to encourage them to trust in their decision-making. Success comes down partly to hard work but partially luck. His team must have solid reasons for every decision they make. “I want them to have some kind of belief behind what they’re trying to pitch,” he explains. “If they have a risk assessment that they’ve done and they have evidence that proves to them that they feel comfortable in moving forward in a certain direction, I want to know that. I want them to be comfortable with what decision they’ve come down to and be able to back that up.”

Yoshida plans to tackle the future with the same fearlessness he’s always had in his career. He answered a question about Final Fantasy XVI with the same spirit as his career and expressed his wish for every game to be filled with surprise, much like the mysteries novels he enjoys reading. “This applies to both XIV and XVI, but I want us to continue to push ourselves and take on new challenges with our approach,” he says. “We want to bring a varied sense of fun and good gameplay as well as elements of surprise that would make the challenges we take worthwhile. While we may fail, it is important to recognize that taking on new challenges comes with some risk. We will stumble. However, I believe that being scared of taking on a challenge and refusing to take it up is detrimental to all involved. Not taking a risk might mean you see a game that has already been done before.”

And, of course, before we close out the interview, Yoshida continues his philosophy of involving the fans in the game development process, stating: “We would love for people to join us in this endeavor. We’ll cry and laugh together through this adventure. And hopefully, it’ll be a worthwhile adventure in the end.”

Original publication of this article was Issue 345, Game Informer.