It cannot be overstated how drastically Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn differs from the original version of the game, which launched with the slightly simpler title Final Fantasy XIV. While the game nowadays is something many other MMORPGs aspire to, the initial release was an absolute mess of a game, suffering from unintuitive controls, menu hell, and a story that seemed to be confused with itself. This last point and more was the recent topic of discussion for Final Fantasy XIV game director Naoki Yoshida and main scenario writer Banri Oda.

In a recent interview with Twinfinite, Yoshi-P and Oda-san opened up about the trials and tribulations involved with the 1.0 release of the game, revealing that not all was considered lost when they transitioned to A Realm Reborn. “Back then I gave Oda-san one piece of advice: in case the interpretation of certain elements of the story by the players wasn’t in line with what the original developers wanted, if we needed to strain things in order to make them understand accurately, we didn’t really need to put too much effort into that,” said Yoshi-P. “Even if we pushed, there was no guarantee that the players would understand completely, anyway. Rather than making things too complicated, we should simply stick to our direction to make things more accessible for players.”

For instance, even among the development team there were moments in the story that happened ten years before, but some interpreted them as happening in the present. That’s why we needed to make sure that everyone was on the same page.”

Thankfully everyone did, in fact, end up on the same page, and the team recently released the absolutely stellar Shadowbringers expansion, which features arguably one of the best Final Fantasy stories in recent memory. Here’s hoping Final Fantasy XIV has many, many more years ahead of it.

Final Fantasy XIV is now available for PC and PlayStation 4.

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