“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.īut it took Yoshida time to warm up to RPGs.
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. The interactive element had such an impact on me.” “At that time, I thought television was only to watch something – a passive media as we put it nowadays. “That was my shocking entry into video games,” he says. I was in elementary school when I read this, and it still left an impact on my mind.” “Sometimes it’s just a very simple singular line, ‘The dead body of Brisbane was laying there.’ didn’t give a lot of exposition, but he described it so well that it’s burned into my memory. He says the depictions in the text still stick with him. Van Dine in 1933 that was adapted into a film the same year. Yoshida also fondly speaks about The Kennel Murder Case, a complex locked room murder mystery written by S. “I read through them when I was in elementary school, and it really got me intrigued in that genre.”
#FINAL FANTASY XVI GAME AWARDS SERIES#
“The Sherlock Holmes series is definitely something that was very inspiring,” he says. 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. His favorite genre is mystery, thanks to his mother collecting various Western mystery novels while he was growing up. When he’s not working on games, you can usually catch Naoki Yoshida reading. Yoshida was surprised by his immediate emotional response. 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. “I was just there kind of playing around with the levers.” “It was very standard, so that was not surprising in any way,” he admits. The game had players race through multi-scrolling levels to collect flags. 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. Ironically enough, Yoshida’s first encounter with a video game was typical. Yoshida thinks every game should deliver some element of surprise, which he admits probably ties into his love of the mystery genre. His love for story was fostered by his mother, who introduced him to mystery novels as a boy. It makes sense that narrative and world building constantly come up when he refers to games.
Yoshida is a storyteller, instantly grabbing your attention and making you hang on until his very last word. 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. 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. Yoshida has rightfully earned his place on the pedestal, but he didn’t get there by just being a smart and insightful developer. Yoshida is also serving as producer on the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, making him responsible for ushering in a new future for the franchise. 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). Nearly a decade later, he’s still finding ways to keep fans engaged with the content and returning for top-tier expansions like Endwalker. 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. There’s no denying that Naoki Yoshida is a massively popular and important figure to the Final Fantasy franchise. Which is terrific, because he’s had quite the career. Ask him any question, and he’ll answer in great detail.