Naoki Yoshida, also known by the nickname Yoshi-P, is a Japanese video game producer, director and designer working for Square Enix. He is known primarily for his work on massively multiplayer online role-playing games, as chief planner on Dragon Quest X, and as director and producer of . He is credited with rescuing the original Final Fantasy XIV project from its disastrous launch. Yoshida is an Executive Officer at Square Enix, the Head of Square Enix's Creative Business Unit III and part of the Final Fantasy Committee that is tasked with keeping the franchise's releases and content consistent.
Early career
Yoshida joined the video game industry in 1993 and started his career at Hudson Soft, where he was assigned to the creation of PC Engine games at first. Later, he participated as scenario writer in the Far East of Eden series and as game designer in the Bomberman series. After he left Hudson Soft, he worked at several smaller game studios for five years.
Career at Square Enix
One of Yoshida's favorite games is directed by Yasumi Matsuno, who worked at Square Enix at the time and went on to create games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII. Tactics Ogre had made such an impact on him that he built his career in order to have the opportunity to work with Matsuno and create a game together. Yoshida eventually joined Square Enix in 2004, but Matsuno had left the company soon after. He became the head of the ' series as well as a game designer of Dragon Quest X in its early stages. In December 2010, he was taken off the Dragon Quest team and placed in charge of the staff that developed the massively multiplayer online role-playing gameFinal Fantasy XIV, which had been unsuccessful since its launch several months before. Then company presidentYoichi Wada attributed this decision to Yoshida's experience, "charismatic" leadership skills and "passionate" will to satisfy customers. Yoshida was not acquainted with any of the Final Fantasy XIV team's members and thus had to demonstrate his dedication to the project first to gain their trust as director. He then talked with the individual developers to find out their ideas for improvements to the revised version known as '. He proceeded with describing to the team the precise goals to achieve. Yoshida drew some inspiration from his long-lasting enthusiasm for MMORPGs, having played such titles as Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Rift, and Guild Wars 2. As a result of his direction, reviewers and commentators have credited Yoshida with "rescuing" the Final Fantasy XIV project. He went on to work with Matsuno in creating the Return to Ivalice raid for, saying he "was able to fulfill dream to work with Matsuno-san". Between December 2013 and December 2019, Yoshida wrote a regular column for Famitsu titled "Yoshida Uncensored", discussing his thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV, video games, the game industry, and game development in general. It has been collected into three published volumes. Yoshida ended the column in December 2019 due to lack of time to write it.
