FF14's director Naoki Yoshida gets griefed by the series' creator live on stage during a bossfight: 'This tank is big trouble'

pcgamer.com:

Final Fantasy 14's London Fanfest 2023 might be over, but it's still produced a lot of great moments—like confirmation that Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy franchise, has cleared some of the hardest raids in the game.

Those are some impressive chops. With the game's director Naoki Yoshida also being an active raider (on a black mage—one of the hardest jobs in the game to optimise), it follows that they'd want to play together some. They hopped online, using the game's Party Finder system on a first come, first serve basis to do some fights with the community. A good bit of fun. Or so one would think.

Sakaguchi readied up as a Paladin, a tank job, which is where the problems start. In FF14 there are boss attacks called «tank busters», which are designed to challenge the tank's stack of hitpoints, strong enough to outright kill anyone else. Sometimes, these tank busters hit in an area around their target.

Cut to their first fight against Golbez in The Voidcast Dias trial. It's normal mode, no stress for this pair of hardcore raiders, but the moment Sakaguchi is targeted by a tank buster he peels from the boss and charges for Yoshida like a shark sensing blood in the water.

w pic.twitter.com/3S9h3qxe58October 22, 2023

Thanks to some interface settings, you can actually see Yoshida's poor little Black Mage icon frantically scrambling away from Sakaguchi, but it's to no avail. A barrage of meteors falls on Yoshida, turning his lalafell into paste while Sakaguchi's beefy tank stats handle the fireballs just fine. 

«You are K.O'd!» quips Global Community Producer Toshio Murouchi like a court jester. He's sat just down the row providing occasional translations, watching the laughter-stunned father of Final