With Patch 5.3, the story arc of the Shadowbringers expansion for Final Fantasy XIV came to an end. This conclusion was so emotional that even the game’s director, Naoki Yoshida, had to cry because of it.
What did the FFXIV director say? In an interview with colleagues from Polygon, director Naoki Yoshida talked about the previous Patch 5.3 and the story of FFXIV: Shadowbringers.
The expansion was released on July 2, 2019, and reached the end of its story a year later on August 11, 2020. Accordingly, Patch 5.3 was very important for the development team. After all, it was the absolute highlight of the expansion and had to match the quality of the high points of previous expansions at least.
Yoshida was also a bit nervous about the players’ reactions:
I can’t say that I wasn’t worried about how the players would react to Patch 5.3. But I also had a certain trust.
That came from my own playthroughs of Patch 5.3 and its story during the development checks – Every time I played it, tears flowed from my eyes.
Yoshida to Polygon
Why did Yoshida cry? Even though Yoshida did not explicitly say why he cried in the interview, one can deduce the reasons from the players’ reactions to Patch 5.3.
In the community, people collectively cried on August 11, the release day of the patch, and in the days that followed. At that point, players had already gone through a years-long journey alongside their guild friends and NPCs. There were many sad farewells from beloved characters in the story and beautiful moments that brought tears of joy.
On reddit, in the official forums, and also on social media, players expressed their feelings about the patch freely. Many reported that they also burst into tears, so moved were they by the ending of the expansion.
And apparently, the ending was so emotional that even director Yoshida had to cry.
The story of FFXIV is far from over. Yoshida has already announced that the team is working on the next expansion. The transition to this expansion will be expanded in the upcoming Patches 5.4 and 5.5.
Fans can therefore expect more emotional moments.
FFXIV Makes Its Developers Cry
Naoki Yoshida and some other FFXIV developers seem to be quite emotional when it comes to their MMORPG child. When the team released the reboot of FFXIV 7 years ago, tears were also shed during the launch event:
The reboot cost the developers a lot of strength and effort and a lot was riding on the success of the new version of FFXIV. So it’s no wonder that the development team in the video tried to hold back tears.
Another major moment was the release of the third expansion, Shadowbringers. The story of the expansion received high praise from both critics and fans and earned FFXIV a score of 91 on Metacritic. It was the first Final Fantasy game to receive a score of 90+ in the last 14 years.
Accordingly, the developer Natsuko Ishikawa, who was responsible for this story, was enthusiastically cheered by fans at PAX West 2019. And once again, tears were shed:
Indeed, the FFXIV developers are so beloved, that their office was showered with chocolate on Valentine’s Day.
