Naoki Yoshida (吉田 直樹, Yoshida Naoki; born May 1, 1973), also known as Yoshi-P, is a Japanese video game producer, director, and designer who works for Square Enix. He is noted for his work on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), especially as director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and its expansions.
Game Informer and other commentators credit Yoshida with helping to improve the original Final Fantasy XIV project, which had received poor reviews after its 2010 release. In 2014, Yoshida joined the Final Fantasy Committee, a group responsible for ensuring consistency in the franchise’s games and content. In 2015, he became an executive officer at Square Enix and was named head of Square Enix’s Creative Studio III (previously called Creative Business Unit III).
Biography
Yoshida began working on video games during elementary school. His career choice was influenced by two Nintendo Entertainment System games: Mario Bros. showed him that people could control what appeared on television and introduced him to the idea of multiplayer games; Dragon Quest III made him want to become a writer because its story was more engaging than those in books or movies. He lived in Hakodate during his formative years, where he balanced high school studies with a part-time job managing the game corner of a toy store.
The Yoshida family had limited money, so Naoki worked to earn playtime, which led him to beat as many games as possible and get the most value from arcade coins. He spent hundreds of hours playing a single game as a child. Tactics Ogre, directed by Yasumi Matsuno, was one of his favorites. This game had such an impact that he built his career to work with Matsuno and create a game together.
Yoshida joined the video game industry in 1993. He studied at a school run by Hudson Soft, where senior developers taught classes, and he also completed an internship at the studio. He applied to Chunsoft, his preferred choice, but chose Hudson instead because he was facing difficulties and wanted to give his mother peace of mind faster. He loved Hudson’s games as a child and wanted to help the company regain its strength. He first worked on PC Engine games, then moved to the Far East of Eden series as a scenario writer. His role expanded, and he eventually worked under Oji Hiroi on the original Far East of Eden III: Namida, which was later moved to the PC-FX. Yoshida was happy writing villager dialogue for the game, but it was cancelled when he was nearly finished.
A fan of fighting games, Yoshida indirectly influenced the balance of Street Fighter EX. During a business trip to the AOU Show, he played a pre-release version of the game and won sixty matches in a row, including three against members of the Arika team developing it. In the final version, the character he used to win, Zangief, was much weaker than before.
Yoshida worked as a designer in the Bomberman series. He faced challenges because programmers controlled production and often dismissed designers. He had to develop persuasion skills to work with them, which was easier for him because he studied coding beforehand. To achieve his goals, he built trust with management and colleagues by taking on difficult projects.
His first experiences with online games like Diablo and the Ultima Online beta test left a strong impression and made him an avid fan. He submitted three proposals to Hudson’s internal contests: a multiplayer first-person shooter, a PlayStation 2 revival of a Dungeon Explorer game, and a PC space exploration MMORPG. After four and a half years at the company, he left due to creative differences. Yoshida believed the games he worked on were fun for all ages, but his superior only saw them as children’s games. He said, “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 leaving Hudson Soft, he worked at several smaller studios for five years, including one founded by a former Hudson executive who recruited him. A partnership with Enix led to the development of a Windows online action RPG with randomly generated dungeons and a Diablo-like system, designed by Yoshida and produced by Yosuke Saito. After a merger, higher-ups ordered the game to be cross-platform with PlayStation 2 and PlayOnline compatibility. Square’s business leaders supported the project, offering advice and code from Final Fantasy XI. A sales meeting concluded that a story mode was needed, but after two reworks, the team debated how to inform developers and ultimately shelved the project.
While working on the game, Yoshida proposed a tool to run different event variations in online games by combining preset settings, helping Toshio Murouchi, a new member of the PlayOnline operations team.
After the game was shelved, 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 accept the offer if he promised to climb the corporate ladder and bring work to that studio. Yoshida joined Square Enix in 2004 as the fourth member of the Dragon Quest X team, serving as chief designer alongside Yuji Horii, with Jin Fujisawa as director. Frustrated by the lack of MMORPG popularity in Japan, Yoshida felt that if Dragon Quest could not succeed, nothing else would, which motivated him to join the project.
At the time, his work on the franchise included arcade games, as he also led the Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road series. Fujisawa was involved in Dragon Quest IX, but the team struggled to decide the project’s focus. Eventually, Yoshida was appointed acting director for Dragon Quest X for over a year and a half due to his “indisputable competence” and trustworthiness. His involvement lasted from the game’s early stages to the internal alpha test. Under his leadership, core systems were completed, and time-consuming tasks like character and map graphics were made. The idea to loan player characters as NPC party members came from preserving the series’ integrity: “When working in all Dragon Quest projects, the theme is not about complexity but having a game that’s really easy to get into.” Yoshida wanted to work on Dragon Quest X until it was finished, but Square Enix policy forbade multiple directors on the same project. Once Fujisawa could return as full-time director, Yoshida was removed from the team while he was on a business trip.
Ordered to create something new, Yoshida worked on two projects. As one of Square Enix’s “stray dogs,” he, Hiroshi Takai, and Hiroshi Minagawa were sent to influential Western studios in 2009 to study HD game development techniques. Upper management wanted to compete with Western games outside Japan and asked them to make a project using Western methods. They spent a year working on a game with visuals and design similar to Bloodborne, featuring asymmetric multiplayer. Yoshida guided the project as a learning experience for younger team members, but the process was slow and led to arguments between Takai and Yoshida. Separately, a desire to create a card game for parents and children led Yoshida to design the car-themed Chōsoku Henkei Gyrozetter for arcades.
At the same time, Final Fantasy XIV faced challenges before and after its launch. The “stray dog” trio was pulled into a task force to address the game’s issues. They held frequent nightly meetings to solve problems.