Even Naoki Yoshida can be tempted Zelda.
Yoshida is a busy, busy man. Not only is he in the middle of a press tour to release the soon Final Fantasy XVIbut he is Also working on the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. Of course, that leaves him little time for personal pursuits, but apparently he hasn’t let his demanding schedule come between him and this summer’s launch of the game.
During the downtime prior to today’s Final Fantasy XIV developer livestream – a regular event where game director Yoshida and community manager Toshio Murouchi talk about new additions and updates to the game – Yoshida played a Switch.
Naturally, fans assumed he was playing Zelda because… who isn’t. And he was! Yoshida turned his attention to the camera and turned his Switch over to show that he was playing Tears of the Kingdom on the beautiful new ZeldaOLED switch with theme.
Yoshida donned his producer hat to conduct the Live Letter stream without distraction, but the event was enough to popularize the hashtag “吉田ゼルダ” or “Yoshida Zelda” in Japan.
If you look at a close-up of the Switch screen, it looks like Yoshida has two rows of hearts. That means he’s either just started the game when Link still has his full power, or he’s tucked into it a lot of time to improve Link up between now and the game’s launch in Japan about 24 hours ago US time. As someone who spent an unholy amount of time playing the game in an equally unholy time frame…mood.
If Zelda isn’t your thing and you’re more worried about emotionally unavailable villains turned allies and the upcoming patch 6.4 for Final Fantasy XIVyou can watch the Live Letter here on YouTube.
