Watch Final Fantasy’s creator grief XIV director Yoshi-P, get crushed by iconic series bosses and poke a gigachad in the arse

23.10.2023 - 21:31 / rockpapershotgun.com

Final Fantasy XIV’s latest Fan Festival took place in London over the weekend, running two days of panels with the MMO’s development team, its director Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida and legendary series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. In-between announcing a new job for expansion Dawntrail, revealing anecdotes from the early days of Final Fantasy and a whole bunch of crossovers on the way, Yoshi-P and Sakaguchi found time to kick back with some very silly hijinks during the game’s boss battles.

Sunday’s on-stage events opened with ‘A Stroll with Yoshi-P’, billed as a fun way for Yoshida and Sakaguchi - a noted XIV fan, who has apparently cleared several of its hardest Ultimate fights - to play some of XIV’s trials together while providing some insight into the creation of iconic Final Fantasy monsters and how they were adapted for XIV. That was the plan, anyway.

Things went off the rails almost immediately as Yoshi-P and Sakaguchi were joined by a party of players to go up against Golbez, Final Fantasy IV’s big bad who recently appeared in A Realm Reborn’s post-Endwalker questline. With Sakaguchi as a lalafell tank and Yoshi-P as a black mage, the party - including a character literally called Alan Partridge, which seemed to fly over both developers' heads - got to work on battling the armoured villain.

Within minutes, Sakaguchi was targeted by a tankbuster which he proceeded to drop on Yoshi-P, killing him - the first casualty of the run. Not long later, Sakaguchi himself went down, all while rejecting questions about the wider series thrown his way by persistent XIV producer-turned-host Toshio ‘Foxclon’ Murouchi, as the veteran developer insisted he needed to concentrate on playing. (Using an Xbox controller with a custom keyboard adjusted to remove all of the button except specific hotkeys, no less - Sakaguchi doesn’t mess around.)

Just before Golbez fell, the revived Yoshi-P was sent flying off the edge of the arena by a combination of his own Aetherial Manipulation ability and a healer’s cast of Rescue, leaving him KO’d as the victory cutscene played and the crowd roared.

“I was gonna say Golbez, but now this has left me in a trauma,” Sakaguchi wisecracked in a response to being asked his favourite bosses from the series, as Yoshi-P asked, “Why the hell did I fall there?”

A second fight against Proto-Carbuncle went a little smoother, despite Sakaguchi pleading for his fellow tank to provide cover against the reimagined Final Fantasy V boss.

With the chaos subsided, Sakaguchi found time to reveal that tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons influenced the creation of iconic Final Fantasy summon Bahamut, with Yoshida adding that the eikon’s key role in A Realm Reborn’s story was inspired by his love