Naoki Yoshida is a man of many words. 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. When the series hit a low point, Yoshida helped turn its tide, most notably helping transform Final Fantasy XIV after its disastrous launch into one of the most successful and revered MMORPGs of 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. Just this year, XIV received awards from SXSW, DICE, The Game Awards, and Metacritic in big categories, such as video game of the year (SXSW) and best role-playing game (DICE). Yoshida is also serving as producer on the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, making him responsible for ushering in a new future for 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. His genuine passion for games allowed him to look at things from the perspective of a fan, and it has made all the difference in his career. We discovered this firsthand in our in-depth interview, where Yoshida reminisced about his path to video games and shared more about who he is beyond the zeitgeist.
Yoshida shares a moment with the fans at Tokyo Fan Festival
Finding Games
Yoshida is a storyteller, instantly grabbing your attention and making you hang on until his very last word. It makes sense that narrative and world building constantly come up when he refers to games. His love for story was fostered by his mother, who introduced him to mystery novels as a boy [see For The Love Of Mystery Novels sidebar]. Yoshida thinks every game should deliver some element of surprise, which he admits probably ties into his love of the mystery genre.
Ironically enough, Yoshida’s first encounter with a video game was typical. When he was 5 years old, he discovered a Rally-X arcade machine while he was on vacation with his family at a hot spring. The game had players race through multi-scrolling levels to collect 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 surprised by his immediate emotional response.
For The Love Of Mystery Novels
When he’s not working on games, you can usually catch Naoki Yoshida reading. His favorite genre is mystery, thanks to his mother collecting various Western mystery novels while he was growing up. Yoshida loved reading them and says there are way too many to list as his favorites, but singles out a few standouts, such as Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and Soji Shimada’s Tokyo Zodiac Murders. “The Sherlock Holmes series is definitely something that was very inspiring,” he says. “I read through them when I was in elementary school, and it really got me intrigued in that genre.”
Yoshida also fondly speaks about The Kennel Murder Case, a complex locked room murder mystery written by S. S. Van Dine in 1933 that was adapted into a film the same year. He says the depictions in the text still stick with him. “Sometimes it’s just a very simple singular line, ‘The dead body of Brisbane was laying there.’ [Van Dine] didn’t give a lot of exposition, but he described it so well that it’s burned into my memory. I was in elementary school when I read this, and it still left an impact on my mind.”
“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.
But it took Yoshida time to warm up to RPGs. During his elementary and middle school days, he recalls playing a lot of action games and shooters, but his friends kept talking 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.”
About a year later, the original Final Fantasy came out, and it changed everything for 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. His goal was now to make an RPG, and it was born from the desire to depict a story through this interactive platform.
Doing the Hard Work
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 then got more serious about pursuing programming and joined a game-design school run by Hudson Soft, a video game publisher that had its heyday from the 1980s to 2002, creating series like Bomberman, Bonk, and Star Soldier. This led to a part-time job at the company, which allowed him to get his feet wet in development. At the same time, the strategy/RPG Tactics Ogre came out, and it lit a greater fire in Yoshida to become a developer, giving him a new high bar to strive for [see Falling In Love With Tactics Ogre sidebar].
Super Bomberman 64: The Second Attack!
To get noticed, Yoshida upped his work ethic and changed his approach to game development. Games were no longer being made by just a few people; he was watching teams grow, with new roles opening due to new complexities in the hardware. 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 targeted problem projects, where he noticed they had multiple director changes or the script needed a complete overhaul, and offered his services. “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. So in order to do that, I wanted to gain the trust of all the people that are involved in the work. 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.
Falling In Love With Tactics Ogre
Naoki Yoshida lists the tactical role-playing game Tactics Ogre as one of his favorite titles, calling it “a great inspiration” for him as a game developer. Yoshida points to the realistic storyline and how, up until that point, the RPGs he played were usually about one hero or a small group coming to save the universe. He liked the more intimate approach.