FFXIV: Dawntrail as a “Starting Point for the Next 10 Years”

It’s a June Friday evening in Tokyo and Naoki Yoshida has plans for the weekend.

Pretty standard, you might think. But Yoshida-san, the director of Final Fantasy 14 (FF14), knows that this will probably be his last chance to rest for a while.

Speaking to BBC Newsbeat, it’s a week until the release of Dawntrail, the latest expansion to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

After a “disastrous” launch in 2010, FF14 has become the most profitable title in the franchise’s history, according to publisher Square Enix.

The game turned things around so much that the servers struggled to keep up with demand when the previous Endwalker expansion launched in December 2021.

It’s not the only change since FF14 first came out. The industry, and Japan’s place in it, has also shifted over the past decade.

Final Fantasy is a massive cultural export for the country, and Square Enix has said it wants to focus more on the “global market” and its fans around the world.

This approach is evidenced in Dawntrail, a significant moment for Yoshida-san and his team, which he calls “the starting point for the next 10 years of Final Fantasy 14.”

Endwalker concluded a ten-year story arc, and Dawntrail opens a new saga. It also adds a graphical overhaul to the game along with new character classes and other features.

It’s billed as “Summer Vacation” with the action taking place in the sunny, Latin American-inspired region of Tural in the FF14 world.

Yoshida-san says that Final Fantasy games have previously taken inspiration from Europe and East Asia, and his team wanted to try something different.

He says Central and South America provides a “huge area” with “a wealth of history” to draw from.

Authetic representation of other cultures is something Square Enix has been criticized for in the past, and its recent games have tried to address it.

Yoshida-san says he’s always seen FF14 as a “global game”, but agrees that the influence of social media has grown and “it’s easier for people to gather and make their voices heard”.

He admits that “discovering other cultures comes with risks,” but his team made sure that “we learn about the culture, read the texts that are available.”

“The world is diverse,” he says.

“There are people who have many different values, many different religions, many different senses of relationships.

“And that’s why it’s really important, I feel, that we understand those points.

Final Fantasy games have always mixed Japanese sensibilities with Western influences, but some have suggested that the series has recently gone through an identity crisis.

Yoshida-san tells Newsbeat Square Enix earns “50% to 80%” of its profit from “overseas fans” who are “really important to consider when we’re making the game.”

But he believes a balance needs to be struck.

“We were born in Japan, we grew up in Japan. So the things we were brought up with were part of Japanese culture,” he says.

“So if we focus too much on foreign audiences, we don’t have that kind of background and context.

“If we focus so much on the overseas audience, then whatever we do will not be successful.”

However, Yoshida-san says that developers cannot live in a bubble.

“I think that knowing the world is very important for us in our development,” he says.

Final Fantasy recently underwent another significant change.

Square Enix makes games for many platforms, but has a history of making exclusive deals that guarantee certain titles will only appear on certain consoles.

Sales of two recent PlayStation 5-only games, Final Fantasy 16 (FF16) and Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, have reportedly disappointed in Japan.

After their release, CEO Takashi Kiryu told investors that the company would “aggressively pursue a multi-platform strategy” to get its games onto more PCs.

Yoshida-san knows the exclusivity arguments, this year he released the long-awaited Xbox version of FF14.

It’s a sign of a wider shift in the industry, where companies are becoming less selective about where their games appear.

“We want to have players no matter what device they play on,” says Yoshida-san.

“We want them to play our game and all connect and join and then play together in the same world.”

Yoshida-san says that Xbox CEO Phil Spencer “dedicated a lot of his time” to bringing FF14 to Xbox.

“Thanks to his hard work, I’m super, super happy that we were able to pull this off,” he says.

“But of course there are platforms that remain.

When asked which they might be, Yoshida-san doesn’t hesitate.

“Of course,” he says. “It goes without saying that it will be a Nintendo platform.

“I’m sure people are waiting for an answer to that question.”

Currently, however, Yoshida-san has a more pressing matter on his mind – to give Dawntrail “the best possible launch”.

After a weekend of rest, he anticipates he will be busy.

“I’m sure there will be sleepless nights, just focusing on the state of the service,” he says.

The player will think of Endwalker’s rough beginnings, but Yoshida-san says he’s not one to dwell too much on the past.

“It’s already happened,” he says. “And that doesn’t really move us forward.

“Looking into the future is our job.”