Producer and director Naoki Yoshida usually doesn’t make appearances outside of those specifically for Final Fantasy XIV, so to learn that he was invited as a guest of honor to this year’s Anime Expo might strike you as quite a surprise. However, he did indeed attend and sat for an interview with RPG Site about the MMORPG, despite the primary focus of the convention he was attending.

Yoshida remarked several times about how he and his team were always gun shy about attending events that weren’t about games or XIV, and he even pointed out that the runners of Anime Expo approached Square Enix to get him to visit. Ultimately, though, his worries appear to have been wholly unfounded. “I think we’d made a barrier for ourselves by trying to separate our audience into anime fans, manga fans – and of course, game fans,” he says. “I think there’s a real benefit in breaking that wall down. Rather than limiting our presence to corporate-facing or business-facing events, I think it’s nice to spend more time interacting with these communities directly.”

As for the game, Yoshida discussed the challenges his team has faced in attempting to make content for both casual and hardcore fans, pointing out that the devs at Creative Studio III work within “a specific timescale” and that doubling the team’s headcount would not translate into double the output. He also remarks on the admitted “misstep in development” of the initial rollout for the Forked Tower raid in Occult Crescent, saying that it was never meant to be hardcore content but that the team had ended up making it too challenging to even get into the instance, while also admitting that the impact of one player’s failures affecting the whole team was bad balancing.

As for his panel at Anime Expo, that wasn’t about XIV at all: It sounded like a very tongue-in-cheek discussion about the anime and games that influenced his early career, the “trauma” of receiving the wrong gunpla (he wanted a Gouf but got a Zock instead), and how an old colleague of his talked his ear off about Neon Genesis Evangelion to the point that he hasn’t spoken to them in 30 years.