All of these things has found its way in Final Fantasy XIV 2.0. Not just in the fact that Ivalice itself is a part of the world of Eorzea as of recently, but how it permeates the whole adventure. However, all these things applies only starting from the rebuilding of the game called A Realm Reborn (or 2.0/ARR). The original FF14 hardly applies as its FF11 inspiration was much stronger in gameplay but also in storytelling and world-building. The only big commonality at that point was Akihiko Yoshida , who was the art director of FF14, and turned into the main character designer of ARR.

FFXIV, from its rebuilding to its consecration didn’t follow in the footsteps of Tetsuya Nomura , Yoshinari Kitase , Hironobu Sakaguchi or Hiromichi Tanaka. It followed in the footsteps of Yasumi Matsuno and his team and the strides they’ve made for the Final Fantasy brand. Some of the inspiration is obvious, as Matsuno and his team were obvious online MMO fans and they even worked at the forefront of Square’s foray in online games (he had worked on the PlayOnline game service before). But others are more representative of their work in the Final Fantasy brand that was barely attempted in the franchise before and has pushed the limits of what a Final Fantasy could be, such as:

But Final Fantasy XIV follows a very different trajectory than the “ Golden Age ” of Final Fantasy that is considered to be between FF6 and FF10 (included) by many fans. A huge part of FFXIV’s success is that its biggest inspiration from the Final Fantasy franchise are from FF games that are either barely considered like an FF game, or have been said to be the beginning of the end by a vocal part of the fanbase. And by that, I mean Final Fantasy XII and Ivalice games in general such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story . Not just in the design philosophy, but also in the team that has worked on rebuilding the game.

Final Fantasy XIV has achieved great success. Its newest expansion has become the current game of the year in two platforms. Its popularity keeps growing and the signs of excellence that many fans have been awaiting from the series can be found inside this game. By looking at what the competition has been doing, they have been able to bring the MMO to modern standards and deliver a great product. However, that alone wasn’t enough to make FFXIV such a great MMO, and it had to draw on its own history in order to deliver a great Final Fantasy product, even if they already had a great game.

For those not familiar. Yasumi Matsuno worked at Quest and made the hugely influential classic games known as Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre, to join Squaresoft with a core team to make Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII. All highly received games, the last two even receiving 40/40 on Famitsu, at a time where a perfect score was really impressive to people.

The core team that would make Ivalice games was:

Yasumi Matsuno , creator, designer and main writer

, creator, designer and main writer Hiroshi Minagawa , UI Lead and Art Director of FFT, Vagrant Story and FFXII

, UI Lead and Art Director of FFT, Vagrant Story and FFXII Kazutoyo Maehiro , planner and battle system engineer of FFT, Vagrant Story and FFXII

, planner and battle system engineer of FFT, Vagrant Story and FFXII Akihiko Yoshida , artist and character designer. He worked on 1.0 as Art Director then became a freelance illustrator for 2.0+

, artist and character designer. He worked on 1.0 as Art Director then became a freelance illustrator for 2.0+ Jun Akiyama , planner and cutscene director. He made the fantastic cutscenes of Vagrant Story and FFXII. He also worked on 1.0. The High-Quality cutscenes of 1.0? They were made by him.

, planner and cutscene director. He made the fantastic cutscenes of Vagrant Story and FFXII. He also worked on 1.0. The High-Quality cutscenes of 1.0? They were made by him. Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata, composers who always worked with Matsuno. They didn’t work on XIV but their music are featured during the Ivalice raids.

Now let’s look at the lead people who crossed over to ARR and their impact to the game:

Kazutoyo Maehiro

Main writer of A Realm Reborn and Heavensward 3.0

The main writer of ARR and Heavensward. He worked alongside Matsuno as a planner and battle system engineer since FFT but also cut his teeth writing some things. He wrote the item description of FFT and the map names of Vagrant Story.

Maehiro had stated in an official FFXIV podcast that Matsuno was his number one influence on his work:

Maehiro: I love to read, and I read works from a lot of different authors, but I’d say the number one influence on my work is game designer Yasumi Matsuno. For more than half of my career I’ve worked with Matsuno. Originally, I was actually in charge of battle systems, he was a huge influence for writing dialogue and game scenarios. Yoshida: Right, but in between that you were also writing a lot of item text and flavor text. A lot of the detail text you see in FINAL FANTASY Tactics and such was written by Maehiro.

The influence of Ivalice games has been a cornerstone of building the world and story of Eorzea. FF14 is obviously filled with references to many other Final Fantasy, but the structure, shape and overall feeling of the story and world of Eorzea finds its footing in FF12 and Ivalice in general instead of just being a string of satisfying references to stay in line with its FF theme park philosophy

The way the story is structured as shades of grey in terms of morality instead of a clear-cut good vs evil is something that is extremely Ivalician in FF history. As you are the Warrior of Light, you realize that even the states that you protect are guilty of committing crimes or straight up denying the agency of other races (how Ul’dahns refused to host Ala Mhigan refugees inside, leaving them to die outside of the city walls). Heavensward is even more similar, as your journey to solve a millennia-old conflict ended up with uncomfortable truths at the source of this struggle.

Some things are even closer to FFXII than they did in the original 1.0. The Ascian threat has been totally changed in 2.0, as they become god-like figures aiming to change the course of history to their liking, a setup that is especially similar to the Occurians in Final Fantasy XII, and how the party works to wrestle their control of history back in their hands. Ascians now are a prominent figure, and on top of that features the names of the FFXII’s Scions of Light. Their glyphs are even the FFXII glyphs from the Espers but reversed. On top of that, Hydaelin’s opposite is Zodiark, another god-like figure that takes its name from Ivalician history, not to mention its emissary is called Elidibus (a Lucavi who could summon Zodiark in FFT).

Furthermore, the Empire of Garlemald has also been re-shifted to be closer in tone to the Archadian Empire (FF12). A technology-minded, mono-cultural people who seeks to bring everyone under their might. The subsequent stories that happens focus on the damage they’ve done in terms of oppression, colonization and overall cultural cleansing has also been a huge focus of the FFXII storyline as the party sought to liberate and rebuild themselves which was a new kind of Final Fantasy story at the time. On top of that, the Empire’s use of armor is incredibly reminiscent of the armor of Judge Magisters.

The role and importance of Maehiro is considerable as he was the one to shape the direction FFXIV should follow in terms of story and use a different kind of storytelling as 1.0 used (no path companion, your character gets to interact directly, a broader focus of secondary characters, reshifting the Primal, Ascian and Garlean threat into something more political in nature). A direction that was directly influenced by his career working on Ivalice games.

Maehiro isn’t working on FFXIV since Heavensward, but is probably working on a new project inside Yoshida’s division.

Hiroshi Minagawa

UI Lead of ARR, Heavensward (created the cross-hotbar)

Art Director of Stormblood and Shadowbringers

Hiroshi Minagawa’s relation with Matsuno goes even before Square. As he was the UI and Art Director of Matsuno’s games even during his time at Quest, where they have made Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre together. He is part of the team that have left Quest to join Squaresoft and make Final Fantasy Tactics: Hiroshi Minagawa, Yasumi Matsuno, Akihiko Yoshida and Hitoshi Sakimoto. All four of them ended up occupying huge positions within Square-Enix to the point that Sakaguchi personally appointed Matsuno to helm FFXII after the large success and triumph of FFT.

Minagawa occupies a special position in the history of FFXIV, probably one of the most important one that has seen the game bounce from failure to success. He was one of the original people who was tasked to address what was wrong with the original Final Fantasy XIV release and find ways to fix it, even before Naoki Yoshida was tasked to step in. He was part of what was called the “Task Force“, a group of people that had to find the root of the problems and find solutions fast. He had found 100 issues by the time he had reached the starting city. As Naoki Yoshida was thrust upon leading the project to salvage the game, Hiroshi Minagawa remained alongside Yoshida and Hiroshi Takai to rebuild the game, as he was worried about Yoshida’s health who was made producer and director of the game, two positions that required a lot of work hours under a lot of pressure.

As the restructuring of the team happened to rebuild the game, Hiroshi Minagawa became the lead UI designer of Final Fantasy XIV. He was tasked to make an usable UI for both mouse/keyboard and controller in less than three years. He used his experience in previous Ivalice games to create things like the cross-hotbar, which has become the primary way to play the MMO on a controller, but also a more intuitive UI design. You can find many inspirations from the way the FFXIV UI was laid out in his previous games such as Vagrant Story, or Tactics Ogre (Crimson Shroud in the screenshot shows how Matsuno uses a similar UI style despite Minagawa not working on it). Especially his focus on using icons as menu tabs, or the way FFXIV uses targeting lines to show which monster is targeting who and the dotted blue lines that indicates a zone transition, the last two directly being a holdover from FFXII.

Hiroshi Minagawa was also the one to create this first real-time concept art of FF14 2.0 in 2011 using 1.0 models. Showing a vision of how the new game would look and it is impressive how the result ended up being close to this picture.

Starting from Stormblood, Hiroshi Minagawa became the art director of Final Fantasy XIV, a position he has also occupied in many Ivalice games and the game has featured some gorgeous art over the years.

Hiroshi Minagawa’s role was crucial, and was present on the very first day when it was acknowledged that something had to be done for the game. His experience in Ivalice games has undoubtedly been extremely valuable in transforming FFXIV into a great product.

Banri Oda

Main co-writer of Heavensward (3.X), Stormblood and Shadowbringers

Lore Supervisor

Banri Oda has a huge influence over FFXIV’s story alongside Ishikawa since Maehiro’s departure. He also supervises the lore of this game, now an important aspect of the game for many fans. In a recent, post-Shadowbringers interview, Oda claims that FFXIV’s approach to reflect issues in the real world was influenced by Tactics Ogre, a cult Matsuno game that is also Naoki Yoshida’s favourite game:

Oda: Final Fantasy XIV’s approach to reflecting real-world issues is influenced by Tactics Ogre. There is an element of massacre there, and if I didn’t play this game the approach to Final Fantasy XIV’s story would have been different. Tactics Ogre has a story that includes ethnic cleansing that greatly influenced my desire to reflect real-life conflicts and issues to make Final Fantasy XIV more realistic.

He was also in charge of making Ivalice a place inside the source without feeling jarring, using all the references that Maehiro provided as a crutch to make it fit naturally.

Takeo Suzuki

Art Team Lead

Oversees everything 3D

Takeo Suzuki was one of the lead animators of FFXII and became a lead for FFXIV as well. In a Shadowbringers interview, Suzuki would go on to say that FFXII was influential in expanding his horizons for his career.

The reason why I expanded my vision as that I was able to work with such a large group of talented animators and developers on the Final Fantasy XII team such as the former lead animator from The Bouncer and lead animator from Vagrant Story and developers from the Final Fantasy XI team and Brave Fencer Musashi, there was just so much talent around me. At the time, there wasn’t a job position that involved technical artist, but I felt there was a need to learn how to utilize the technologic advances we were making so we can provide a better visual representation. It’s because of this that I wanted to expand my expertise.

Now, he oversees things like characters, background designs, cutscenes designs and technical designs. He basically oversees how characters will be modeled, how races are introduced and how cutscenes will play out with the tools at his disposal.

Ayumi Namae

Character designer

Ayumi Name was part of the art design team of FFXII and is one of the lead character artists in FFXIV who worked on characters like Ysayle and Yotsuyu, giving them a distinct and memorable look to them.

Naoki Yoshida

The architect behind FFXIV’s rise from the ashes. Yoshida has never worked alongside Matsuno and his team before that as he started his career much later, and joined Square when Matsuno had left. However several interviews and his Famitsu column displays his love for Ivalice games and Matsuno games in general. To note, some of these interviews were made much earlier, when the idea of making an Ivalice raid wasn’t even in the cards, if some were to doubt his sincerity and think they were just signs of courtesy.

Yoshida: So of course, I love the great game that creator Yasumi Matsuno makes. And around the time I joined the company, one of his favorite games was “Tactics Ogre.” And that had made such an impact on myself that I felt that one of these days I want to work with Matsuno-san. And to create a game together. And so I tried to work really hard to build my career in the gaming industry. But the timing didn’t match at first. Matsuno-san created “Final Fantasy XII” but by the time I joined Square Enix, Matsuno-san had already left the company. So they were not able to work together at the time. But in “Final Fantasy XIV” we were able to create the alliance raid, “Return to Ivalice” series, which lasted for about two years. So through that experience, I was able to fulfill my dream to work with Matsuno-san.

In this interview, Yoshida claims that one of his favourite games was Tactics Ogre, and that he build his career in the gaming industry for the opportunity to work with Matsuno one day. Creating the Return to Ivalice raid was his opportunity to fulfill his dream to work with him.

Yoshida: It’s thanks to FFXIV that I was able to meet people like this, which means that it’s also thanks to all of the players who have been supporting us ever since 1.0. Aside from those two [GARO director and Level-5’s CEO], there’s also a game designer I’ve always looked up to, Yasumi Matsuno, as well as other people from my small assortment of friends that I would like to introduce, but it’ll have to wait for another time (because I’m out of space).

Also, Koji-Fox (lead localizer) went on about in a 2014 interview about how the team featuresa lot of people who worked on XII, and how Yoshida is himself a fan of FFXII

MCKF: Final Fantasy is about borrowing, taking things other Final Fantasies did and adjusting it and making it your own. The fact that the XIV team has a lot of people that worked on XII—our main scenario writer, Maehiro-san, also worked on XII, Minagawa-san, the guy that did all of the UI, also XII, he’s working with us, and also Yoshida-san himself being a fan of Final Fantasy XII—this is one of the games they wanted to borrow heavily from because they thought it was really cool, and they really liked the imagery and lore that it had. So they want to borrow from it, and of course they know Final Fantasy XII has its story, and they don’t want to take that story and put it into XIV, because it’s not XIV, it’s XII, but they want to draw on that imagery and those connections.

Naoki Yoshida isn’t a person who is oblivious of this side of Final Fantasy games as he seems to come from a generation of players who played Matsuno’s games and deeply respects them as a valid and very important part of Final Fantasy’s history and culture. Instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, it becomes a cornerstone of how FFXIV would evolve, and it seems to be a similar feeling among part of the staff.

In the Ivalice IGN interview, Yoshida would go on to say:

I had a chance while working on FFXIV to meet Mr Matsuno. As a gamer, I had always greatly respected him, and I saw him as a godlike figure. Other than myself, the team includes many younger members. A lot of them grew up on Mr Matsuno’s games, and they are so happy to have the opportunity to work with him.

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On top of that, we had the Return to Ivalice raid, an immensely fun but weird choice as Ivalice isn’t even one of the most popular settings (Midgar would have been immensely more popular), not only that, it has become an actual region fo the world. The raid would feature a reenactment of the Zodiac Brave story of FFT that was refurbished for the world of Eorzea, and is now even crossing over as a part of the main story quest.

Other things that are present in FFXIV that were inspired from Ivalice:

Viera is now a playable race within FFXIV’s universe

Three other races are now a part of Eorzean lore: Bangaa, Nu Mou and Seeq.

The Gnath tribe closely resembles the Urutan-Yensa in spirit and design

Several monster models were taken straight from FF12

Similar user interface

Similar blue-dotted lines between areas

Gaius’ conquest of Eorzea with the help of Ascians is a super similar setup to FF12’s conquest of Dalmasca with the help of the Occurians

The hunt system uses a similar setup to FF12 (much closer in spirit than the NMs of FF11)

Looking at the FFWiki page, the number of allusions to FFXII is huge. Not only that, a huge amount of 3D were directly lifted from this game. Though this case happened for FFXI and XIII, the number is much higher for XII. These were put into the overworld and dungeons of Eorzea, lending to the credence that they were seen as a perfect fit for FFXIV on top of being a cost-effective measure.

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Final Fantasy XIV (1.0 and 1.X) was built on the back of Final Fantasy 11 and owes a lot to this game in particular as 1.0 took massive inspiration from it in order to become its successor. However, the failure of 1.0 (for things mostly unrelated to FF11 itself) has thrown things into disarray, and the game was rebuilt with a new management team and new leads. This new team did the same thing as FF12 did at the time: instead of constantly going back to the past, It looked at how the world evolved around them in order to bring a modern product that looks to the present, and aim for a promising future.

Final Fantasy XII itself had done away with random encounters when looking at how Final Fantasy XI and other MMOs like Everquest and it became clear that the future was one of a seamless world with no transition between exploration and battle. Seven years after the original release of FFXII, Naoki Yoshida and his team released a new product that feels more current, drawing from World of Warcraft and other modern MMOs to provide a new Final Fantasy experience. The same design philosophy had applied in both games.

A lot of the people who saw the need to change in order for Final Fantasy to evolve back in 2006 became the same people who managed to identify what went wrong in the original release of FF14 and provide something new and forward-lookng in 2013. Of course, it needs to be acknowledged that one of the most important member of this rebuilding was Naoki Yoshida himself, who had the insight and skill to draw out the talent of the best people on the best positions. Alexander O. Smith (FF12 Localizer) had said of Matsuno that his biggest skill was to find talent and nurture them under his leadership. Naoki Yoshida, in rebuilding a whole MMO, surrounded himself with a hugely skilled team that has done the same several years later, even when dealing with the crushing legacy of the original FFXIV. Heartwarmingly, Matsuno had put a liner note in Yoshida’s second book where he says that Yoshida is as much of a god designer as any, in recognition of his skills.

Now Final Fantasy XIV enjoys great success and great critical acclaim. And whereas FFXIII became the direct successor of the kind of experience FFX delivered at the time, to me FFXIV represents the future that was shaped by FFXII 13 years ago: a sprawling, story-focused adventure that puts a huge emphasis on lore, writing and political motivations and ideologies while becoming a modern experience by adjusting to the advances and the needs of the world around them. It has attempted something new and largely succeeded instead of just drawing on the past and thinking it would suffice. These were the things that had defined Final Fantasy XII, just like FFT had also redefined the Japanese Strategy RPG genre. And now FFXIV is following in these footsteps.

It is important to acknowledge this part of history, especially considering FFXIV wasn’t made by the usual stars of Square-Enix but by a different team that made FF games that a non-negligible part of the fanbase pointed fingers as spelling the doom of the franchise. Now FFXIV has become the most acclaimed Final Fantasy game…since Final Fantasy XII itself.

It only took 13 years.