‘We are such a perfect fit’: Final Fantasy 14 and Monster Hunter Wilds bosses discuss their latest collab

Monster Hunter Wilds and Final Fantasy 14’s collaboration content officially arrives in both games on September 29 and October 7, adding themed activities and items to each game.

It’s the second time Capcom and Square Enix have collaborated in this manner, after a similar themed event for Monster Hunter World and FF14.

According to Monster Hunter Wilds producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, the two Japanese giants’ modern relationship began after a chance meeting in a bar with Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida, who was playing Monster Hunter on a PSP at the time.

The two development teams are said to be full of players of each other’s games, and their latest collaboration, agreed at a dinner at Gamescom last year, sees content from Monster Hunter Wilds appear in Final Fantasy 14, and vice versa.

Full details on the collaboration content can be found on the Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy 14 websites.

Ahead of the collab launch, VGC attended a Tokyo Game Show press conference where members of the media quizzed Monster Hunter Wilds producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and director Yuya Tokuda, and Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki Yoshida.

Yoshida-san, recently you mentioned that you like Final Fantasy 14’s content to be capable of satisfying both casual and hardcore players. How does this collaboration play into that?

Yoshida: As you know, Final Fantasy 14 does offer content for casual gamers all the way up to end-game content for hardcore gamers as well. So again, we had this chance to do this big crossover with Monster Hunter, and we have a lot of stuff planned for this. I have a stage appearance on Sunday where I’m gonna be talking about this, so I can’t say everything here, but we have a lot of great rewards for all different kinds of players, whether they be casual players or high-end players.

We also have a lot of different difficulties as well, so that players can play at the level that they want to play at, and they will feel most comfortable at. But what’s going to be different with this collaboration for Wilds that’s different from our collaboration with Monster Hunter World is that this one will feel more 14-like, in a sense. Yes, the battles are gonna still be crazy, but it’s gonna play and have that Final Fantasy XIV feel, so you don’t have to go into it thinking you’re gonna get something completely different from that 14 stuff.

Tsujimoto-san, did you have any difficulty implementing the elements from Final Fantasy XIV into Monster Hunter Wilds, since Monster Hunter is an action game, and Final Fantasy XIV is an RPG?

Tsujimoto: It was the same case as when we made the Monster Hunter World and XIV collab, but it was actually more of a fun challenge for us rather than a difficult kind of challenge. The Monster Hunter development team has a lot of Warriors of Light among us who love Final Fantasy XIV and play the game, and they had a good time talking to each other and coming up with creative ideas, especially because, as you said, there are two different genres at play here.

But that’s actually kind of a positive creative thing because we can do things in this collab that are not possible in Monster Hunter normally without the Final Fantasy XIV elements included in the collaboration, so I think you’ll agree when you take your hands on the collab that the results are great and the dev team ourselves have been really enjoying testing and playing it, and we’re looking forward to seeing the reaction whenever it releases.

How much work was this collaboration for both sides to do? How much time did it take? Did you get to reuse assets?

Tsujimoto: I’ve known Yoshida-san for a very long time – I think our relationship goes back 10 or 15 years – and I’ve always had a great deal of respect for his creativity and commitment to game development. We were finally able to work together, as you know, for the Monster Hunter World and Final Fantasy 14 collab. It was almost a casual approach, seeing if there was anything we could do together in our respective games, and that was how we ended up doing the original World collaboration.

Last year at Gamescom, in Cologne, in Germany, I had dinner with Mr. Yoshida and my team, and again, we just kind of got casually on the topic of, ‘it was really great fun last time collaborating with you’. Monster Hunter Wilds wasn’t out at that time, but we were showing it off at Gamescom. We didn’t decide it on the spot, but we agreed to have more productive discussions about working together again.

Ultimately, at the Tokyo Game Show, he’s quite a group-trotting man, so I finally managed to catch up with him the following month in Tokyo, and we set in stone that we would work on something together. I know that doesn’t answer your question, but I wanted to add context first.

Yoshida: Like Tsujimoto-san said, we’ve known each other for a long time. Back when I first took over Final Fantasy XIV, and the remake of this, and the re-assessment of the game, the rebuilding of the game, I remember he came to me and said, ‘Why are you taking on such a crazy plan? This seems like so much to take on, but if there’s anything that we can do to help from our team, we would love to help you’.Having this opportunity to work with them is because they’ve been with us since the beginning, and that’s the reason Final Fantasy XIV is here, because of that support from their team.

As for the question about the assets, and whether the assets are being reused or not, there is one scene where we have a potion that we reused, but everything else we’ve completely created new, and so this will feel completely different from the Monster Hunter World collab.

As for the length of development, things really kicked off at TGS last year, and we started off with contract talks. We didn’t get into development until later, the main reason being that Monster Hunter Wilds was still being developed, and we didn’t want to get in the way of that. Also, we wanted to play the game ourselves, so after it came out is when we really started development. So it hasn’t even been a year, but that said, we’ve had a lot of people working on it on both sides, so you’re going to see a large volume of content.

Actually, they did let us go down to Osaka and play a pre-release build, so we could start working on it earlier, but that just kind of shows how much both teams were excited about getting started on the work.

This is the second time that you’ve collaborated for Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy. You’ve both got very different games, but also very different development styles. Over the course of both of these collaborations’ development, what has each team collectively learned from the other in terms of development processes, in terms of just approach to game design that you may be brought into your own development moving forward?

Tokuda: As you’ll know if you’ve played the original Monster Hunter World collaboration, some of Final Fantasy 14’s core elements were included for the first time, like the ability for one player to pull agro and be treated like a tank, and have other roles like DPS. That’s very Final Fantasy-like, and we never really implemented anything like that in Monster Hunter before.

“I’ve known Yoshida-san for a very long time – I think our relationship goes back 10 or 15 years – and I’ve always had a great deal of respect for his creativity and commitment to game development”

Even things like the boss mechanic of stacking range attacks, which flow out over a certain amount of timing, and you need to figure out how to avoid damage… that was a really unique approach that we hadn’t implemented in Monster Hunter before then.

In a sense, it gives us a chance to test out these mechanics in a little bit of a safe space, and if it didn’t seem to go down well with the playerbase, we might not have implemented it in Monster Hunter going forward. But actually, players thought it was a really refreshing take on the Monster Hunter battle system, so we ended up including things like that with other monsters since then.

Yoshida: On the 14 side, beginning with our first collaboration with Monster Hunter World, we approached it by trying to figure out how we could recreate the Monster Hunter feel within the Final Fantasy 14 world, but as you know, the games are completely different. You have Monster Hunter, which is an action game, whereas Final Fantasy 14 is completely different with completely different mechanics.

During that first collaboration, we tried to get something that was close, but we felt that we didn’t get something that felt as good. A lot of players seemed to like it, but for us, it was a challenge of, what can we do next time to get it even closer? So when the talks came up to have a second collaboration, the first thing that we did was discuss with our own developers how we could do it differently this time.

So what we decided was that, you have this great game in Monster Hunter Wilds, you have this great monster in Arkveld, but rather than create a battle closer to Monster Hunter, we decided we would go a different path and make it feel as 14 as possible. One thing that won’t change is that, rather than watching the casting bar, you get to watch the monster instead.

What we’re creating here is something that will introduce players from 14 to the wonderful lore that Monster Hunter has, but try to make that feel natural in Final Fantasy 14, whether that be housing items, or gear that players are able to equip, and the battles as well. So we’ve created something that has that Final Fantasy 14 feel, but that covers Monster Hunter.

There are of course many differences between Final Fantasy and Monster Hunter, but over the course of this collaboration with Capcom and Square Enix did you identify any elements from both franchises that they had most in common with that really made this collaboration worth pursuing?

Yoshida: I think that the one obvious thing is that it’s just the passion of each dev team. The Monster Hunter development team and the Final Fantasy IV team have this passion for creating games and they have a passion for games, and not just for each other’s games but for games in general. As a producer, this makes it so much easier for me that they’re going to be putting their all into the creation of this, and that goes not only for the amount of time but also for the amount of dev cost that we’re putting into both of our sides’ collaboration.

“During that first collaboration, we tried to get something that was close, but we felt that we didn’t get something that felt as good. A lot of players seemed to like it, but for us, it was a challenge of, what can we do next time to get it even closer?”

Tsujimoto: I think as well, something that I felt a great commonality between our two teams approaches was that we respected eachothers’ content enough not to use it as just set dressing for the same old thing, but we wanted to respect it enough to have the play feel be really interesting and unique, and make the content as good as possible, because we are, after all, borrowin something which is a very precious creative element of their game, and they’re getting that from us.

Making sure that each of them is going to be a good fit for each title, and make fun content for our own players, and have the other side’s players also get on board and feel like we did a good job implementing the content that we did, is something that we felt like we did in our own approach, and I know that the other side did as well. So we were each respectful of each other’s creations, and I think it made for a very fruitful collaboration.

The Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy XIV teams have a long history of collaboration so I wondered if you could speak a little bit about what qualities you admire about each other’s teams and how you work.

Tokuda: For me, what I admire most about Mr. Yoshida and the Final Fantasy 14 team is just how they treat their fans… it’s something that’s always in their mind when they’re creating their content. So even something like Omega, it’s essentially this beloved character on the XIV side and that’s not something we took lightly, this kind of content that their fans love being implemented into our games.

But since we were able to develop a deeper level of trust over the years since we worked on the original collaboration, we were able to gratefully borrow that beloved content and do something that we hope that the Final Fantasy XIV fans will agree that we did a good job of maintaining the respect for them that the development team obviously has on the XIV side.

Yoshida: Like Tokuda-san said, it’s about how they treat their fans and the respect that they have for fans for the content. We can feel that because pretty much my entire team, we’re all Hunters as well. Seeing their team take this Final Fantasy XIV content and taking that and trying to do something that has never been done before, coming up with all these crazy ideas and figuring out how to realize these ideas and how to relay that to the fans in the best possible way. All the work and effort that their team put into that is something that we really, really expect.

Tsujimoto: The compatibility we have as teams is really the reason that we were able to make this collab happen, especially given the amount of work we had to do in a relatively short amount of time. The level of communications and approach of development worked really well with the Capcom team. We were such a perfect fit for each other that there’s really no other way that we could’ve made this happen.