Naoki Yoshida

, also known by the nickname Yoshi-P, is a Japanese video game producer, director and designer working for Square Enix. He is best known for his work on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), mainly as director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and its expansions.

Commentators such as Game Informer credit Yoshida with the revival of the original Final Fantasy XIV project, a game which was previously notable for its negative reception after its 2010 release. Yoshida became a part of the Final Fantasy Committee, a group tasked with keeping the franchise's releases and content consistent, in 2014. In 2015, he became an executive officer at Square Enix and the head of Creative Studio III (formerly Creative Business Unit III).

Biography

Early life and career Yoshida decided to work on video games in elementary school. His career choice was influenced by two Nintendo Entertainment System games. Mario Bros. introduced the idea that people could control television content and showed the possibilities of multiplayer design. Dragon Quest III inspired him to become a writer because he became more engrossed by its story than by books or films. He spent his formative years in Hakodate, balancing high school studies with a part-time job running a toy store's game corner.

The Yoshida family had little money; Naoki worked to fund his hobby, which led him to complete as many games as possible, and get the most out of coins spent on arcades. He has been deeply involved in games since childhood, when he would spend hundreds of hours playing a single title. Tactics Ogre, directed by Yasumi Matsuno, is one of his favorites. It made such an impact that he built his career in order to have the opportunity to work with Matsuno and create a game together.

Yoshida joined the video game industry in 1993. He studied at a school run by Hudson Soft, where teaching came from many senior developers, concurrently with an internship at the studio. He preferred Chunsoft, but the internship allowed him to start at Hudson earlier. Because Yoshida was facing personal difficulties at the time, he chose Hudson to provide his mother with financial peace of mind sooner. He loved the company's games as a child, and wanted to help the company regain its former energy as its influence waned. His desire to be a scenario writer got him placed to work in the Far East of Eden series. His role kept expanding, eventually working under Oji Hiroi's supervision on the original , which was ultimately moved to the PC-FX. Yoshida was happy throughout the production with his position, writing all the villager dialogue, but the game was cancelled when he was almost done.

An avid fighting game fan, Yoshida indirectly influenced the balance of Street Fighter EX. A business trip to the AOU Show had a pre-release build of the game available to play where he achieved sixty consecutive victories, the last three against members of the Arika team developing it. On the released version, the character Yoshida attained all those wins with Zangief, which was drastically weaker than before.

Yoshida participated as a designer in the Bomberman series. He faced a harsh environment; programmers held control over productions, saw designers as useless, would not realize documents if they found them boring and had no patience for people that did not understand or tried to broach their field. Yoshida had to develop his persuasion skills to handle that dynamic; communication in his case was easier than with other designers because he studied coding beforehand. To make the games he wanted to, Yoshida built trust with management and among his colleagues by taking on undesirable projects. Yoshida submitted three proposals to Hudson's internal new project contests: a multiplayer first-person shooter, a PlayStation 2 multiplayer Dungeon Explorer revival and a PC space exploration MMORPG. After four and a half years at the company, Yoshida left Hudson due to creative differences. Yoshida saw all titles he worked on as fun for all ages, but his superior only thought of them as made for children: "I couldn't work in a company that'd allow a person like this to be a manager. As soon as he told me that, I answered that I quit".

While working on the game, Yoshida proposed a tool to run different variations of events in online games by combining preset settings, to aid Toshio Murouchi, a then new member of the PlayOnline operations team.

Career at Square Enix Following the game's shelving, Saito invited Yoshida to "take his revenge" by moving to Tokyo and working on what was then called Dragon Quest Online. Frustrated at how MMORPGs had not become popular in Japan, Yoshida felt that if Dragon Quest could not do it, nothing else would, which drove him to join the project.

His work on the franchise at the time extended to arcades, as he concurrently helmed the Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road series. Yoshida intended to stay with Dragon Quest X until it went gold, but Square Enix policy prohibited multiple directors from working on the same project. Once Fujisawa could return as a full-time director on the game, Yoshida's superiors removed him from the team while he was away on a business trip. Game Informer and other commentators have credited Yoshida's direction with "rescuing" the Final Fantasy XIV project. He went on to work with Matsuno in creating the Return to Ivalice raid for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, saying he "was able to fulfill [his] dream to work with Matsuno-san". It has been collected into three published volumes. Yoshida ended the column in December 2019 due to a lack of time to write it. In September 2020, Yoshida served as a producer for the PlayStation 5 video game Final Fantasy XVI.

Works

Books Year TitleRef. 2016 Yoshida Uncensored Volume 1