Early 2017, I decided that I wanted to send Yoshida a birthday greeting. After watching and reading interviews, PLL’s and events over the years, it was clear how much he loves the XIV community and how he has worked for us all. I spoke with friends at the time and they said they wanted to do something also. So my plan to try and bring the XIV community together to thank him as one came to Light.

For his 44th birthday, the community came together to produce a message book. I promoted and completed it over a very short period and despite having help from the likes of Reddit’s moderators and a few blogs to assist in the promotion, the project was missed by some who wanted to take part. With requests to do it again for Yoshida’s 45th, I decided ..why not?

After Foxclon updated the XIV forums of Yoshida receiving the book, I was already trying to think what to do the following year (2018). I had already included in the letter that accompanied the gift that he should be prepared to receive something, but I didn’t want to just duplicate the same gift. I was aware the main focus should remain on bringing the community together to send their love and well wishes, so I tried to think of how best to do that whilst still being different from the book. In the end, a DVD of video messages seemed to fit the objective nicely.

Preparations and promotion began in late October and entries were quick to start arriving which was promising. Having Kon be part of the team as translator from early on really helped get interest from the Japanese community, which is something we struggled with in the previous project. In fact having this connection ended up being crucial to this projects success. XIV forum posts didn’t get the traction they got the previous year, probably to do with the fact we were asking for vlog entries. We edited the original plan to also include text entries and this seemed to help things along. We still struggled on the likes of Reddit where we failed to get moderator promotion this time around, and posts about the project were pretty much instantly downvoted off the front page, but we got some great support from some Japanese blogs and Youtubers who mentioned the project on Twitter. Another big boost was having the Chinese community manager reach out to us who organised the translation of Chinese fans entries to be included.

In conjunction with the DVD plans, I contemplated the possibility of having a secret extra gift. The thought to have some custom music for the background of the DVD to play while Yoshida read the text entries sounded appealing. I reached out to Anthony Berlin, a friend I had worked with before, to discuss the possibility of composing a song. We decided how the song should sound and he went to work with composing partner Luca Delle Fave while I tackled the lyrics and the hunt for a singer. The initial plan was to have the lyrics be as much in Japanese as possible but as time passed I had struggled to even find any singer who was interested. I even approached Soken to see if he had any one in mind, and he suggested to try to reach Teru from GLAY but in the end it didn’t work out.

Initially the lyrics were intended to be humorous, poking a little fun at things Yoshida has said or done. But once a few verses had been complete, it didn’t feel right. It felt as if we were mocking rather than being sincere and showing our thanks and affection. I struggled with the lyrics for a while until I decided to put them aside and write the script I would record for my vlog entry on the DVD, this script soon evolved into what I used for the lyrics. I’ll be the first to admit they are cheesy at times, but I think they get the message across nicely.

We finally found a singer, Caroline Johansen, and that would be some of my stress sorted. It took so long to find a singer who was as passionate about the project as we were and who was up for the challenge. Unfortunately it wasn’t the only thing that was stressful. With only a few weeks left until deadline, the video editor who was putting it together quit..because he didn’t like Eureka. This was the third editor we lost, and I was beginning to think it was doomed to fail. I purchased Adobe Premier myself even though I never touched it before, in a desperate move to get it completed, but thankfully at the last-minute Sara Salazar jumped on board to save the day. In fact Yoshida complimented her editing work on the test stream when he mentioned he received the gift: “The hospitality of the editor was amazing…the time entry of each entry was considered and calculated how long it would take me to read each message. I felt a lot of effort and I greatly appreciate it.” She did it all in a couple of weeks, it was over 2 hours in length, this women deserves a medal!

The initial plan was to have the gift in the mail by the first week of April at the latest. I planned the deadline for everything to be done in March, giving me plenty time to get artwork printed up and prepare it for mailing so not to get caught at customs or during Golden week. However we missed the deadline by a few weeks, getting everything complete in mid-April. Thankfully the artwork supplied by the amazing Luiza printed beautifully and we had it shipped and it arrived to Square Enix on Yoshida’s birthday of May 1st.

After a frantic panic whether he actually got it or not, we heard on the test stream for the 44th Live Letter than he did and planned to have a blog wrote about it. He kept his promise.

..So why “Thanks, Our Knight?” Well our translator told me of a story of Yoshida playing Ultima Online and a guild mate thought he was a young girl because of his avatar and he would play the roll saying “Thanks, my knight” after being helped to complete quests etc. I liked that. It made me smile and thought it might make Yoshida smile if we named the project and thank our own knight for his help :).

A huge thanks needs to go to all the community who joined in and made this possible. You’re all awesome!

Though we cannot share the Blu-Ray here because of some of the personal messages within, we will try and share some of the videos and screenshots soon.

The song can be heard here with lyrics

Video by Denmo (Mr Face) and Midgardsormr

Project Manager & Lyrics: Carol Todhunter

Composer: Anthony Berlin & Luca Delle Fave

Singer: Caroline Johansen

Translations to Japanese: Kon

Video Editor: Sara Salazar

Artwork: Luiza