Final Fantasy XIV’s Monster Hunter collaboration was a decade in the making

WHEN Square Enix announced earlier in the week that a Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy collaboration was on the way, fans were shocked but excited.

The two much-loved franchises are two of the biggest in Japan, and their most recent games are among the most successful in the world right now. The idea of the two coming together really is huge.

What no-one realised at the time was that the collaboration didn't just come from nowhere, or from the accountancy offices of the two firms looking to cash in on each other's popularity--it had been a decade in the making.

Talking to Sun Online, series producer and director Naoki Yoshida -- known to his fans as Yoshi-P -- explained how it came about.

To understand it, you need to go back to 2010 when Final Fantasy XIV was first released. It was Square Enix's second major foray into the massively multiplayer role-playing game market after Final Fantasy XI, and it was bad. Not just slightly bad, but terrible.

Fans were outraged, the media was utterly scathing, and the project looked doomed. Yoshida was swiftly brought on board as a new director to try and fix the game. At the time, a friend who he had met two years earlier, Ryozo Tsujimoto, tried to talk him out of what he saw as career suicide by taking on this broken mess of a game.