What Final Fantasy 14 Taught Hironobu Sakaguchi About the Series He Helped Create
Hironobu Sakaguchi knew what he was getting into the first time he picked up Final Fantasy 14. An avid gamer himself, he had once forced members of Final Fantasy’s development team to play EverQuest under the guise of doing research.
“My first [MMORPG] was EverQuest. I got absolutely addicted to it and forced a dozen or so SquareSoft staff members at the time to play as well, telling them it was required knowledge. Incredibly, most of them got hooked too, which led to [Final Fantasy 11],” Sakaguchi remembers.
“Actually,” he laughs, “some of the staff never made it back to the real world.”Sakaguchi knew that would be his fate if he were to ever play Final Fantasy 14, which has steadily grown in popularity since its 2014 reboot. But the desire to feel prepared for an on-stage discussion with director Naoki Yoshida in September 2021 finally pushed him to venture into Eorzea. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.“Part of why I'd never played [Final Fantasy 14] is because I've always liked MMORPGs,” Sakaguchi says, “and just like I feared, I got addicted to it once I started.”
Early game developers who manage to stick around the industry tend to fall in two buckets. On one end there are the developers who become executives and develop a mercenary outlook on the business; on the other there are the developers who retain a hobbyist’s appreciation for the medium. Sakaguchi seems to fall into the latter category.
Sakaguchi has been making games since the 1980s, one of his earliest projects being The Death Trap – a text adventure released for Japanese PC. Polygon’s Oral History of Final Fantasy 7 describes Square’s office in those early days as less a company than a room where people came and went, and where Sakaguchi designed
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