RPG Site spoke with Naoki Yoshida at the Japan Expo in Paris. Yoshida made a big announcement about the addition of Lightning into Final Fantasy XIV. Lightning, for those who don’t know, is the main character of Final Fantasy XIII. She is also the push out the door for the Final Fantasy XIII-2 story, even though she isn’t actually a playable character in the natural story line.
When asked about details on how she will be incorporated and why she will be added, Yoshida sidestepped giving any exact details of Lightning’s role in Final Fantasy XIV. The excuse Yoshida gives is that since most of the fans haven’t played XIV yet, they won’t understand what he is talking about. Yoshida did say he would probably make a long forum post about it once he got back to Japan, so for now we’ll just have to wait.
Why even bother including her at all?
Yoshida goes on to talk about how Square Enix wanted to bring its teams together. Any good company would want its employees to work together, and what better way to do that then to intermingle the games the employees are working on? I mean it sounds good on paper right? Is this what fans want though? I’m not sure, but I think it sounds interesting personally.
Future links to the past of Final Fantasy?
So far Final Fantasy XIV has seen a few nods towards previous games; the limit break system gets its base design and some of the attacks from Final Fantasy VII. Yoshida has made off handed comments about how you could see characters like Sephiroth and Cloud appear in the game, but at the same time maybe not.
“As a company and as a group, we wanted to make sure that the FF projects have a strong relationship between the dev teams of the numbered titles. We’re not necessarily planning to bring back all the characters.”
So whether we will see some more iconic figures from the past resurface in Final Fantasy XIV is yet to be seen but the possibility is there.