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THE first Final Fantasy was made back in 1987 under the direction of Hironobu Sakaguchi, who led a small group of developers.

At that point in time, Japanese role-playing games weren’t exactly common and Sakaguchi’s company, Square (now Square Enix), had its fair share of hesitation about making a game in the genre due to the risk of low sales.

Now, 35 years later, Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy became the foundation of an entire franchise consisting of multiple main games, spin-offs and various media that fortified the brand name into a household name in the industry.

After leaving Square in 2003, Sakaguchi stayed away from the intellectual property he founded and seemed to want nothing to do with it.

However, at the recent FFXIV Fan Festival, the storied game developer revealed that he was deeply invested in Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV), not as someone involved with the game’s development but as a fan.

Initially, Sakaguchi tried the game to prepare for a talk on the series that he would do with FFXIV’s director and producer, Naoki Yoshida (also the producer behind the recent Final Fantasy XVI), but quickly found himself spending 12 hours a day being engrossed in the game.

Sakaguchi’s foray into FFXIV’s world of Hydaelyn apparently began towards the end of 2021, and he quickly blazed through the base game and three expansions in almost a couple of months, all the while tweeting about it.

The game’s development team was also keeping a tab on the “Father of Final Fantasy” through Twitter, presumably to see how long he would keep playing.

It was also revealed that Sakaguchi’s in-game progression has reached a level where he is tackling the hardest battles in the game.

Towards the end of the festival, after Yoshida thanked Sakaguchi for creating the series, the latter then thanked him for making Final Fantasy “even better”, which moved Yoshida to tears.

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