He’s chronicling his journey
Hironobu Sakaguchi has been known by many monikers: one of the most popular is “the father of Final Fantasy.” He’s been in the industry for decades, and helped cement Square as an eminent JRPG force worldwide. While he works at Mistwalker now making games like Fantasian, he still has plenty of love for Final Fantasy in his heart. As evidenced by this Sakaguchi Final Fantasy XIV Twitter playthrough.
As spotted by ResetEra, Sakaguchi started the MMO recently and has been enjoying it to the point where he’s rapidly clearing content (make sure and get some sleep!). Earlier this month he kicked off the Heavensward expansion, and managed to clear it in a few days. The kicker? Based on his screenshots and commentary on Twitter, it looks like he’s actually watching all of the cutscenes. At the time of publication, it seems like Sakaguchi is in the throes of Stormblood.
If you’re interested you can check out Sakaguchi’s timeline, where he chronicles moments in Final Fantasy XIV‘s main questline with comments. You won’t get the full impact, but you will get the gist of a lot of lines like “I have two hours left until my meeting, I hope I can log in a little.” He even role-plays a bit, it’s adorable.
It must be an absolute trip for him. Not only is Final Fantasy XIV a fantastic game nearly all the way through for a few hundred hours, but Sakaguchi also gets to see a lot of classic designs that he helped bring to life reimagined for a new era. He hasn’t been directly involved in the production of a Final Fantasy game since he was an executive producer for X-2 in 2003, so a lot of this is probably a fine trip down memory lane.
Building off of the Twitter angle, I think there’s a lot of potential for “playthrough podcasts” featuring industry experts and designers who worked on the series. While these projects have been around for a while for television series, they’re starting to gain even more traction in the wake of shows like Office Ladies (there’s even a Veep one with Jonah and Mike). There’s room for a story beat-by-beat MMO “replay” concept!
