The blitz for Final Fantasy 16 has been heating up as Square Enix ramps up activities before the big name RPG launches in just a month's time. Final Fantasy is an event release in video game and it'll be the debut of the series on the PlayStation 5 so it's understandable. Meanwhile, its producers recently told TheGamer about the challenges involved with the game, especially as Naoki Yoshida (affectionately known as Yoshi-P) made his name with a Final Fantasy that's very different to the main series.
Yoshi-P is the producer on the upcoming Final Fantasy 16, which we have previewed here at TheGamer, and has recently been talking up his game, as can be expected, but also revealing certain difficulties involved. Besides having to contend with the fact that we're now on the sixteenth numbered entry, which apparently causes the marketing team problems, there's also the matter of the producer's reputation. Yoshida's renown among FF fans has been earned through his intervention on Final Fantasy 14, which is an ongoing MMO.
Speaking to our Lead Guides Editor (and one of our resident Final Fantasy experts) Meg Pelliccio, were producer Naoki Yoshida, art director Hiroshi Minagawa, and localisation lead Michael Christopher Koji Fox, who revealed that Yoshida's involvement with Final Fantasy 14 has been a stumbling block when it comes to getting the word out about Final Fantasy 16.
"The biggest thing that it's hampered is the promotion of the game moving forward, because with 14 being there and everyone having focus on that, that trying to promote 16, everyone wants to bring it back to 14," Koji Fox told TheGamer. "Because people have this strong image of Yoshida as the 14 guy."
Yoshida commented: "When people first found out that I was gonna do this [FF16], all these people were saying, 'if Yoshi-P is going to make it, then it's going to be an MMO'. That was something I was a little bit worried about. I'm not a person who has only made MMOs. Before [Final Fantasy] 14, I did a lot of single-player games."
While Yoshida is known as the resurrector of Final Fantasy 14, and has previously worked on the MMO Dragon Quest X Online, the producer has worked on a number of Dragon Quest titles that were single player. Elsewhere in our interview, the producer spoke about the name of Final Fantasy 16's protagonist Clive and his faithful hound Torgal who shares his name with a character from Square Enix's The Last Remnant. "It's not just Torgal in Final Fantasy 16," Yoshi-P told us. "You're gonna see a lot of stuff from The Last Remnant." To read more, head on over to our interview here.