Massively Exclusive: A dinner with Final Fantasy XIV's Naoki Yoshida

Having a conversation with Naoki Yoshida can be a very intimidating exercise. It's not because of his demeanor; he's friendly, genial, and has an obvious sense of humor. No, it's because there's an unmistakable level of energy to him, a huge amount of passion and ambition that drives everything he talks about.

He's exactly the sort of person who would try something completely insane like remaking a game from the ground up after burning the first version to the ground, for example.

I had the opportunity to sit down for a one-on-one dinner with Yoshida at the Final Fantasy XIV preview event, during which we talked a great deal both about the upcoming relaunch of the game as well as hisown experiences in remaking everything. For those of us who play Final Fantasy XIV, it's obviously an exciting time, but for Yoshida, what's happening now is the culmination of work that started only a month after he took over control of a game that he had to revitalize after a horrible flop on launch.

As Yoshida remembers it, after he'd been working with the game for a very short time, he knew what he wanted to do with both the story and the game. It needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. So in January of 2011, he sat the team down and showed a full presentation explaining, in his own words, how he wanted to drop a meteor and wipe everything out. Wipe the slate clean completely