Naoki Yoshida

Yoshida joined the video game industry in 1993 and started his career at Hudson Soft, where he was assigned to the creation of PC Engine games at first.[6] Later, he participated as scenario writer in the Far East of Eden series and as game designer in the Bomberman series.[7] After he left Hudson Soft, he worked at several smaller game studios for five years.[6]

One of Yoshida's favorite game is Tactics Ogre directed by Yasumi Matsuno, who worked at Square Enix at the time and went on to create games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII. Tactics Ogre had made such an impact on him that he built his career in order to have the opportunity to work with Matsuno and create a game together.[8] Yoshida eventually joined Square Enix in 2004, but Matsuno had left the company soon after. He became the head of the Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road series as well as a game designer of Dragon Quest X in its early stages.[6][7] In December 2010, he was taken off the Dragon Quest team and placed in charge of the staff that developed the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Final Fantasy XIV, which had been unsuccessful since its launch several months before.[2][9] Then company president Yoichi Wada attributed this decision to Yoshida's experience, "charismatic" leadership skills and "passionate" will to satisfy customers.[9] Yoshida was not acquainted with any of the Final Fantasy XIV team's members and thus had to demonstrate his dedication to the project first to gain their trust as director. He then talked with the individual developers to find out their ideas for improvements to the revised version known as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. He proceeded with describing to the team the precise goals to achieve.[2] Yoshida drew some inspiration from his long-lasting enthusiasm for MMORPGs, having played such titles as Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2.[6][10] As a result of his direction, reviewers and commentators have credited Yoshida with "rescuing" the Final Fantasy XIV project.[11][12][13][14] He went on to work with Matsuno in creating the Return to Ivalice raid for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, saying he "was able to fulfill [his] dream to work with Matsuno-san".[8]

Between December 2013 and December 2019, Yoshida wrote a regular column for Famitsu titled "Yoshida Uncensored" (吉田の日々赤裸々), discussing his thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV, video games, the game industry, and game development in general.[15][16] It has been collected into three published volumes. Yoshida ended the column in December 2019 due to lack of time to write it.