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It took more than a decade, but Final Fantasy 14 is finally lifting the glamour restrictions that have kept the MMO's fashion devotees from living their best life. As of patch 7.4 later this month, "you'll be able to equip any glamours regardless of your class/job," and while that's been cause for celebration among players, director and producer Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida was against the idea – until the rise of mobile RPGs forced him to reconsider his gamer principles.
"I've been in charge of FF14 for 12 years since A Realm Reborn," Yoshi-P tells Famitsu, as translated by GamesRadar+, "and as I prepare for the next expansion and beyond, I think compared to 12 years ago the number of MMORPGs has decreased, and the number of online RPGs on smart devices has increased. If you look at any of these games, you won't really see the same restrictions on fashion that FF14 has."
Final Fantasy 14 is still a premium game – despite the generosity of the free trial that all the memes will tell you about – but like a free-to-play title, it does sell optional cosmetic items. Yoshi-P says that if he were the producer of an F2P game, he "would be thinking of how to get everyone to want to buy items, and of course I wouldn't want to put restrictions on how your equipment will look."
Online mobile RPGs are rising as the traditional MMO market declines, and "if you grew up playing these other types of games, then started playing FF14, you would think 'Why are there restrictions on how my gear looks?'" Yoshi-P muses. "I think there are people out there who feel that way."
Yoshi-P hints that he personally believes that gear should still be restricted to the classes and jobs it was meant for, but he no longer wants to impose that principle on FF14 players. "'When I am a gamer I can make my own rules, but it's not the time to push those ideas onto players,' I thought." He adds, "I came to the conclusion that it didn't make sense for me to hold back the ability to roleplay from the people who say 'I want to be more fashionable.'"
Either way, Yoshi-P held to his beliefs for so long that even the dev team at Square Enix seems to have been shocked by his change of heart. "When I told the team they responded like 'Is that really okay?'" he explains. "I wonder if they thought 'Yoshida's refusal to change the look of equipment is final.'"
