Naoki Yoshida

• 1. Introduction

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  Naoki Yoshida, known to millions of players as Yoshi-P, inherited one of the most troubled games in the history of Japanese role-playing: a massively multiplayer online title so poorly received at its 2010 launch that players and critics openly wondered whether the franchise itself could survive. What followed was not a patch or an apology. It was a complete reconstruction, overseen by a director who had never produced a game before and who had been handed the job in December of that year. Who is the man behind that rescue? And how did a childhood spent in Hakodate, managing a toy store's game corner to fund his hobby, produce the person Square Enix called its most charismatic leader? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Childhood in Hakodate

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  Two games on the Nintendo Entertainment System set the course of Yoshida's life. Mario Bros. showed him that people could actually control what happened on a television screen, and it demonstrated the raw possibilities of multiplayer design. Dragon Quest III did something different: its story absorbed him more completely than books or films ever had, and from that absorption came a desire to become a writer. He grew up in Hakodate, working a part-time job at a toy store's game corner to pay for his hobby, because the Yoshida family had little spare money. Rather than play casually, he committed to completing as many games as possible and extracting maximum value from every coin he fed into an arcade cabinet. One title stood above the rest. Tactics Ogre, directed by Yasumi Matsuno, made such a lasting impression on him that he shaped his entire career around the ambition to one day work with Matsuno and build a game alongside him.

• 3. Hudson Soft and the Making of a Designer

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  Yoshida entered the video game industry in 1993, studying at a school run by Hudson Soft while simultaneously completing an internship at the studio. He had preferred Chunsoft, but the Hudson internship offered him a faster path to employment at a moment when his family needed financial stability sooner. His first assignment was PC Engine games, and a desire to write narrative earned him a place on the Far East of Eden series, working under Oji Hiroi. His role grew steadily, eventually covering all the villager dialogue for a title on the PC-FX. The game was cancelled when he was nearly finished. A different project brought an unexpected footnote to fighting game history: on a business trip to the AOU Show, Yoshida played a pre-release build of Street Fighter EX and recorded sixty consecutive victories, the final three against members of the Arika development team. The character he dominated with, Zangief, appeared noticeably weaker in the released version. Yoshida spent years on the Bomberman series, where programmers controlled productions and treated designers with suspicion. He learned to build trust through persuasion, aided by having studied coding beforehand, and he took on undesirable projects to earn the credibility he needed. His first encounters with online games, including Diablo and the Ultima Online beta test, converted him into an enthusiastic fan of the form. He submitted three internal proposals to Hudson: a multiplayer first-person shooter, a PlayStation 2 multiplayer revival of Dungeon Explorer, and a PC space exploration MMORPG. None advanced. After four and a half years, a direct confrontation with his superior's attitude toward the audience ended the relationship. When that manager said he saw the games purely as products for children, Yoshida quit on the spot.

• 4. Five Years Adrift, Then Square Enix

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  After leaving Hudson Soft, Yoshida spent five years working at several smaller studios. One of them was founded by a former Hudson executive who had recruited him directly. A partnership with Enix produced a Windows online action RPG: randomly generated dungeons, a Diablo-like structure, designed by Yoshida. After the merger that created Square Enix, management ordered the project to pivot to the PlayStation 2 and become PlayOnline-compatible. Staff from Final Fantasy XI offered advice and shared source code for garbage collection. Eventually management decided the game needed a story mode too. The team had already rebuilt the project twice to meet earlier demands, and the internal debate over how to break this news to developers ended with the game being quietly shelved. Yoshida joined Square Enix in 2004, arriving as the fourth member of a team then called Dragon Quest Online. His title was chief designer; alongside handling writing with Yuji Horii, he worked under a director whose name the source does not specify. He simultaneously ran the Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road series for arcades. When the director of Dragon Quest X was pulled away by the demands of Dragon Quest IX, Yoshida was named acting director for the project because of what that director described as his "indisputable competence" and trustworthiness. That arrangement lasted over a year and a half. Under Yoshida, the core systems were completed, numerous features moved from documents to working code, and time-consuming work on character and map graphics was finished. The idea to let players loan their characters as NPC party members came directly from his philosophy about the series: "When working in all Dragon Quest projects, the theme is not about complexity but having a game that's really easy to get into." Square Enix policy barred multiple directors from sharing a project, and once the original director could return full-time, Yoshida was removed from the team while he was away on a business trip.

• 5. The Rescue

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  By late 2009, Square Enix had identified something it called a "stray dog" problem: talented developers who were not attached to a flagship project. Yoshida, Hiroshi Takai, and Hiroshi Minagawa were sent to influential western studios to study HD game development techniques, because upper management felt pressure to compete commercially outside Japan. That team spent a year on a project whose visual and game design landed on something extremely similar to Bloodborne, with asymmetric multiplayer. Yoshida ran it as a training exercise for younger developers, which slowed everything down and led to repeated arguments between him and Takai. Final Fantasy XIV's problems reached a breaking point around the same time. The three were pulled into a task force to diagnose the game's issues. They held frequent nightly meetings with the struggling development staff, with Yoshida contributing analysis from both a director's and a player's perspective. Those meetings concluded early that a full solution would require a collective effort. After sessions that included the president and vice president of Square Enix, a decision was reached in December 2010: Yoshida would take over as both director and, for the first time in his career, producer. Then-president Yoichi Wada attributed the choice to Yoshida's experience, his "charismatic" leadership, and his "passionate" commitment to satisfying players. The HD western-style project was abandoned. The Chōsoku Henkei Gyrozetter team, still in pre-production at the time, carried on without him. Yoshida had never met any of the Final Fantasy XIV staff and knew he had to demonstrate his commitment before they would trust his direction. He spoke individually with developers to learn what improvements they envisioned, then set precise goals for the team. His enthusiasm for MMORPGs ran deep: he had played Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Guild Wars 2. Outlets including Game Informer credited his direction with rescuing the project that became Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. The Return to Ivalice raid in the expansion Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood brought Yoshida to his childhood ambition at last: he worked with Yasumi Matsuno, saying he "was able to fulfill his dream to work with Matsuno-san."

• 6. Writing, Columns, and Promotion

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  Between December 2013 and December 2019, Yoshida wrote a regular column for Famitsu, covering his thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV, the game industry, and game development at large. He ended it because he no longer had time to sustain it. The column was collected into three volumes published in 2016, 2018, and 2019 under the title Yoshida Uncensored. In 2014 he became part of the Final Fantasy Committee, a group responsible for keeping the franchise's releases and output consistent. In 2015 he was named an executive officer at Square Enix and placed at the head of Creative Studio III, previously called Creative Business Unit III. In September 2020 he took on the role of producer for Final Fantasy XVI on PlayStation 5, marking his first credit on a single-player mainline entry in the franchise.