Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida was unsure about adding so many Final Fantasy 9 nods to the MMO's Dawntrail expansion because the game is plainly "a masterpiece." Hear, hear.
Final Fantasy 9's fingerprints are pretty much all over the MMO's latest expansion – locations like Alexandria Castle are central to both, you can draw clear parallels between certain characters, FF9's iconic sword-fighting minigame is definitely referenced in Dawntrail, and the expansion includes wind-up cameo minions of the classic's leading pair, Princess Dagger (Garnet) and monkeyman Zidane.
Speaking to Game Watch in an interview translated by Automaton, Yoshi-P made some incredibly based comments about feeling "rather torn" about referencing Final Fantasy 9 so much because it's "a masterpiece and everyone has a strong emotional attachment to it, so I wanted to avoid consciously pulling the story too much in that direction."
As Dawntrail's narrative and general structure started to become more concrete during development, those nods just seemed natural, though.
"When we first decided on the main storyline, Alexandria Castle was not so important. But once we decided to incorporate more FFIX elements, we made sure to create them with proper meaning and intent," Yoshi-P explains.
"I thought it might be best to distance ourselves a little from homages to FFIX and was going to go with that approach," he continues, but with patch 7.2 coming in two weeks and 7.3 heading towards the expansion's big conclusion, Yoshi-P seems to me more comfortable with callbacks to the best Final Fantasy of them all (fight me).
Despite what some fans might hope for, all the references don't seem to be part of some shadowy plan to tease a Final Fantasy 9 remake under our noses, if Yoshi-P is to be believed. Last summer, he said he wasn't working on such a project and didn't know if the game was even being remade.
More recently, Yoshi-P expressed wariness about a potential Final Fantasy 9 project since it would probably balloon into another multi-game saga, like the Final Fantasy 7 remakes.
Regardless, Final Fantasy 9's remake was part of those prophetic Nvidia leaks from years ago and rumors about its existence have continued to swirl online since then.
