Actually, Final Fantasy minigames rock

destructoid.com:

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Final Fantasy XVI is coming out in a few months, and producer Naoki Yoshida has had a lot to say about it. Yoshida, along with director Hiroshi Takai, combat director Ryota Suzuki, and localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox had a very interesting chat with Destructoid. You really should go read it.

But I’m a little more interested in something Yoshida said in an interview with Gematsu. During that interview, Gematsu’s Sal Romano asked whether or not FFXVI would feature any lighter diversions from the seemingly quite heavy main storyline—something like Final Fantasy X‘s blitzball. Yoshida responded, “We have some very dark themes that the story revolves around. We have countries at war—we can’t really have some blitzball matches going on when people are killing each other.”

Hmm.

Let me make something clear before I dig into that: I don’t think Naoki Yoshida, director of Final Fantasy XIV, hates fun. The man has spent the last decade heading up a game that’s 50% world-ending, stakes-raising intensity, and 50% dress-up simulator. FFXIV features god-slaying and goofing off in equal measure. I know a lot of folks have already heard Yoshida’s words and elected to paint him as an anti-minigame tyrant who wants to erase fishing from role-playing games. I don’t think that’s a fair representation of what he’s saying here.

That being said, I still think what he’s saying is wrong. Yoshida appears to be suggesting that Final Fantasy XVI will be too bleak to sustain minigames; that taking a break to play some cards would be too severe of a tonal break for the game. In general, I find this hard to believe. Final Fantasy VII, a game about eco-terrorists preventing a rogue member of a