Naoki Yoshida (吉田 直樹), also known by the nickname Yoshi-P, is a Japanese video game producer, director and designer working for Square Enix.
He is best known for his work on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), mainly as director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and its expansions.
Yoshida is credited with the revival of the original Final Fantasy XIV project by commentators like Game Informer, which was initially criticized for poor quality.
1993
Yoshida joined the video game industry in 1993.
He studied at a school run by Hudson Soft, where teaching came from many senior developers, concurrently with an internship at the studio.
He applied to Chunsoft, his preferred choice, but the internship meant he could start earlier at Hudson: since Yoshida was going through difficulties at the time, he opted for the latter to give his mother peace of mind faster.
He loved the company's games as a child, and wanted to do something for it to find back that energy, as its power faded.
He was assigned to the creation of PC Engine games at first.
His desire to be a scenario writer got him placed to work in the Far East of Eden series.
His role kept expanding, eventually working under Oji Hiroi's supervision on the original Far East of Eden III: Namida, which was ultimately moved to the PC-FX.
Yoshida was happy through the production with his position writing all the villager dialogue, but the game was cancelled when he was almost done.
An avid fighting game fan, Yoshida indirectly influenced the balance of Street Fighter EX.
A business trip to the AOU Show had a pre-release build of that game available to play.
He got sixty consecutive victories there, the last three against members of the Arika team developing it.
On the released version, the character Yoshida attained all those wins with, Zangief, was drastically weaker than before.
Later, he participated as a designer in the Bomberman series.
He faced a harsh environment: programmers held control over productions, saw designers as useless, would not realize documents if they found them boring and had no patience for people that did not understand or tried to broach their field.
Yoshida had to develop his persuasion skills to handle that dynamic; communication in his case was easier than with other designers because he studied coding beforehand.
To make the games he wanted to, Yoshida built trust with management and among his colleagues by taking on undesirable projects.
His first experiences playing online games such as Diablo and the Ultima Online beta test, left a huge impression and turned him into an avid fan.
Yoshida submitted three proposals to Hudson's internal new project contests: a multiplayer first-person shooter, a PlayStation 2 multiplayer Dungeon Explorer revival and a PC space exploration MMORPG.
After four and a half years at the company, he left Hudson due to creative differences.
Yoshida saw all titles he worked on as fun for all ages, but his superior only thought of them as made for children: "I couldn't work in a company that'd allow a person like this to be a manager. As soon as he told me that, I answered that I quit".
After he left Hudson Soft, he worked at several smaller game studios for five years, one of them founded by a former Hudson executive who actively recruited him.
A partnership with Enix saw them develop a Windows online action RPG with randomly generated dungeons and a Diablo-like system, designed by Yoshida and produced by Yosuke Saito (producer).
After the merger, higher ups ordered a pivot to make it cross-platform with the PlayStation 2 and PlayOnline-compatible.
The heads of Square's business divisions had high hopes for his game; those involved in Final Fantasy XI offering support, advice and that game's garbage collection source code.
A sales meeting by management concluded a story mode was required, but since the team already had to rework it twice due to their demands, a debate ensued over how to inform the developers, which ultimately led them to shelf it instead.
While working on that game, Yoshida also proposed a tool to run different variations of events in online games by combining preset settings, to aid Toshio Murouchi, a then new member of the PlayOnline operations team.
Following that game's shelving, Saito invited Yoshida to "take his revenge" by moving to Tokyo and working on what was then called Dragon Quest Online.
The former Hudson executive encouraged him to take the offer, if he promised to climb the corporate ladder and bring work to that studio.
2004
Yoshida joined Square Enix in 2004 as the fourth member of the Dragon Quest X team; as chief designer, besides handling the writing alongside Yuji Horii, with Jin Fujisawa as director.
2015
Yoshida became an Executive Officer at Square Enix in 2015, the Head of Square Enix's Creative Business Unit III and part of the Final Fantasy Committee that is tasked with keeping the franchise's releases and content consistent in 2014.
Yoshida decided to work on video games in elementary school.
His career choice was influenced by two Nintendo Entertainment System games: Mario Bros. shocked him with the idea that people could control what was shown on television and the possibilities of multiplayer design; Dragon Quest III made him want to become a writer due to how engrossed he became by its story, more so than those of books and films.
His formative years were lived in Hakodate, where he balanced high school studies with a part-time job running the entire game corner of a toy store.
The Yoshida family had little money; Naoki had to work for play, which led him towards beating as many games as he could and getting the most out of coins spent on arcades.
He has been deeply involved in games since childhood, where he would spend hundreds of hours playing just one title.
Tactics Ogre, directed by Yasumi Matsuno, is one of his favorites.
It made such an impact that he built his career in order to have the opportunity to work with Matsuno and create a game together.
