Yoichi Wada: FFXIV greatly damaged" the Final Fantasy brand

Final Fantasy XIV’s launch was rough, even by MMO standards. Reviewers and players alike complained about the game’s lackluster UI, grind-heavy gameplay, and overall lack of any sort of polish. We gave it a 4/10, but hoped that future updates would fix the issues and make it a game worth playing. Now here we sit, in said future, and Final Fantasy XIV is still absolutely crap. But Square-Enix CEO Yoichi Wada isn’t hiding from his company’s mistakes – he’s willing to admit that the game was not only half-baked when it released, but that "The Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged" by its release.

For as disappointed as we were by Final Fantasy XIV, we don’t know if we’d go as far as to say it has actually “damaged” the brand much all that much. Heck, we doubt most people even consider the Final Fantasy MMOs as part of the Final Fantasy core series, instead casting it off in the same section as other spin-offs. Sure, it was bad (really bad), but it didn’t do any more damage to the brand than Dirge of Cerberus did, right?

But that’s not the point for Wada, who isn’t content with the game dying a slow, painful death. The CEO says that the company plans on fixing Final Fantasy XIV, even if it means tearing it apart and putting it back together. “We'll continue with our reform work,” he said in a Tokyo press conference, “which basically amounts to fully redoing the game, and hope to revive the FFXIV that should have been released."

Sep 28, 2011

Hollander Cooper

Hollander Cooper was the Lead Features Editor of 12DOVE between 2011 and 2014. After that lengthy stint managing GR's editorial calendar he moved behind the curtain and into the video game industry itself, working as social media manager for EA and as a communications lead at Riot Games. Hollander is currently stationed at Apple as an organic social lead for the App Store and Apple Arcade. 

Latest in Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail cinematic screenshot showing Alphinaud Leveilleur, an Elezen boy with short white hair
Final Fantasy 14's funniest speedrunning beef continues as runner who lost a world record to its original champ in just 1 day returns, beats record, is promptly dethroned again
Final Fantasy 7
Sony finally managed to pry Final Fantasy 7 away from Nintendo thanks to a "schmoozer" of a former employee who hung out with Square Enix executives at his parties, according to one former PlayStation boss
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition
Square Enix kills Final Fantasy game's mobile version after being unable to "completely fix" a bug stopping fans from accessing their additional paid content
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster
Final Fantasy creator says the original JRPG's programmer was "like a god" to him: "I still strongly feel that the core program itself is the ‘life’ of a game"
Final Fantasy 14 producer Yoshi-P interview's the series' founding father Hironobu Sakaguchi
After 3 years of playing Final Fantasy 14 "almost every single day," series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi reckons the MMO "might be the game that I've played the most in my life"
Final Fantasy 14 patch 6.4 The Dark Throne
As the Final Fantasy 14 devs "continue to take a firm stance" against mods that can enable harassment, Yoshi-P says improvements are starting in patch 7.2
Latest in News
Atelier Ryza 3 protagonist closeup
JRPG producer says people prefer their anime girls to have thick thighs when the economy's in the tank, and he's not even joking a little bit
Diego Luna as Cassian Andor in Andor season 2
Andor season 2 showrunner talks the much-anticipated Star Wars moment that we haven't seen on screen before: "It's a very significant part of our show"
Skyrim
It took Skyrim players nearly 15 years to discover ingenious loot hack that completely changes the game and, uh, requires you to desecrate a couple corpses
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Indy hanging onto a vine as in Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle PS5 release date reportedly set for April after ESRB leak
Fallout
Fallout season 2’s dazzling and dystopian New Vegas is coming to life in a new leaked video
an ai chatbot plays a modded verion of pokemon red and jumps down a ledge to talk to an npc
An AI's mission to 'teach' itself Pokemon Red is going as well as you think - after escaping Cerulean City after tens of hours, it went right on back