I loved this last part. I didn't expect that Yoshida interview at the end to be so candidly said, owing in particular to my personal perception that speaking up critically within Japanese corporate structure seems like a breech of etiquette faux pas.
Can't say I disagree with him, though. Square-Enix seems to be on something of a mend, but it's not perfect, and I feel that it would be extremely misguided to become complacent now. I just hope that Yoshida isn't going to suffer any sort of huge backlash at Square for his words in the doc, now public to all. Also feel a bit bad about how exhausted he seems, all these years later, of working on 2.0 and beyond. It truly is a workload that never seems to stop, making MMOs. I hope there are aspects of the success that make it gratifying for the team, because in my eyes on the consumer end, it's been one hell of a turn-around.
I got nothing against people who like FFXIII and even kind of envy the feeling, but between FFXIII and FFXIV 1.0, FF really did feel dead for the vast majority of a generation for me. XIII just wasn't my style either from a story standpoint or a gameplay one, and FFXIV 1.0 was such an upset as a lapsed XI fan hoping to rekindle the feeling of the MMO that started me on MMOs. 2.0 was so great when it came out, server issues aside, and really did a lot to restore my faith in the FF franchise in general. I lapsed out after the first major content patch due to some RL stuff, and just came back about a month ago in anticipation of Stormblood/4.0, and I kind of regret not being there the whole time -- everything I missed out on has seemed pretty great, though I feel like I'm just flying by and getting the tourist version of the experience.
Still, one of my favorite stories in gaming. I bought the collectors edition of 1.0 on day 1 with no beta experience and just blind faith that the team that had nearly a decade of experience on XI couldn't possibly mess it up. That turned south for me quick. 2.0 felt just incredible as a turn-around, and felt like a reasonably modern and good MMO on top of that, as well as a reasonably good FF game as a fan that had previously played XI and was more accepting of the MMO titles as part of the mainline games.