Final Fantasy XIV’s story doesn’t spring out of Yoshi-P’s mind fully-formed, there’s other people involved! …a lot of them, actually! And since I know at least I like knowing where the writers of a story I like are coming from, today we’re taking a break from talking about FFXIV’s story, to better understand how the sausage gets made; because this time, people actually were in the room when it happened!
(I won’t apologize for the Hamilton reference, you’re about to learn how bafflingly important it is.)
Section timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
1:45 – The writing process
11:28 – The writers
19:22 – Localization
29:30 – Other questions
That Sufficient Velocity post I mentioned, going over Dark Knight’s French localization, is worth a read if you’re curious about the real subtle stuff! https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/final-fantasy-xiv-endwalker.7029/page-139?post=25013740#post-25013740
Questions, suggestions, other Extremely Normal Credits Yoshi-P has? Drop a comment here! You can find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Cleretic/ if you want to hear my thoughts on 6.4, at least until June 2nd at which point Street Fighter takes over my brain!
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I would love to see a list of all of the threads that they left dangling just for the purpose of pulling on them later if needed. Like the morse code at the end of the crystal tower.
Awesome!
I was so excited when this come up on Twitter! Thanks to this video, I learned more about the writing process!
So much of this feels obvious and then I remember how easy it is to pick out in various threads those that have only a vague familiarity with writing in general, with writing collaboratively, with adding onto an existing story and working on something that is meant to be continued by others after your particular quest-line is done- without getting into writing a product that happens to be a mainstream MMO. Also that the main writers are Japanese.
Also re: Banri Oda's interests- nonavian dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters crop up more in FFXIV than anywhere short of a Jurassic Park game, it shows
One thing that I will always give props to FFXIV writers is that they're working on an on-going, serialized, story, with a team of tens of writers, and still manages to be mostly cohesive (I say mostly because by Hera there's some stuff I'm salty about, looking at you, Blessing of Light/Echo). Part of this is from that oft-mentioned way of working: "Look at what plot threads we threw at the wall during ARR, see if we can tie some together in a nice little bow, add our own plot points."
I wonder if they'll take the chance to make 7.0 a complete new beggining and thus be unburdened from the 1.x/ARR by-the-seat-of-the-pants writing process
Well, the YT algorithm wins this time. Great video, been a fan of FFXIV, FFT, and Matsuno for a long time and I had no idea that one of the major Team Quest writers was working on ARR and HW. That def explains the more grounded feel and body count. Have a like and a sub for teaching me something interesting about the stories I love.
No I hated the Namzu. Also the English Haurchefant is the best. Good vid though.