Watch Final Fantasy’s creator grief XIV director Yoshi-P, get crushed by iconic series bosses and poke a gigachad in the arse

rockpapershotgun.com:

Final Fantasy XIV’s latest Fan Festival took place in London over the weekend, running two days of panels with the MMO’s development team, its director Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida and legendary series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. In-between announcing a new job for expansion Dawntrail, revealing anecdotes from the early days of Final Fantasy and a whole bunch of crossovers on the way, Yoshi-P and Sakaguchi found time to kick back with some very silly hijinks during the game’s boss battles.

Sunday’s on-stage events opened with ‘A Stroll with Yoshi-P’, billed as a fun way for Yoshida and Sakaguchi - a noted XIV fan, who has apparently cleared several of its hardest Ultimate fights - to play some of XIV’s trials together while providing some insight into the creation of iconic Final Fantasy monsters and how they were adapted for XIV. That was the plan, anyway.

Things went off the rails almost immediately as Yoshi-P and Sakaguchi were joined by a party of players to go up against Golbez, Final Fantasy IV’s big bad who recently appeared in A Realm Reborn’s post-Endwalker questline. With Sakaguchi as a lalafell tank and Yoshi-P as a black mage, the party - including a character literally called Alan Partridge, which seemed to fly over both developers' heads - got to work on battling the armoured villain.

Within minutes, Sakaguchi was targeted by a tankbuster which he proceeded to drop on Yoshi-P, killing him - the first casualty of the run. Not long later, Sakaguchi himself went down, all while rejecting questions about the wider series thrown his way by persistent XIV producer-turned-host Toshio ‘Foxclon’ Murouchi, as the veteran developer insisted he needed to concentrate on playing. (Using an Xbox controller with a custom