Final Fantasy XI producer leaves Square Enix

I played FFXI daily for almost 7 years, and it's without a doubt the greatest game I've played in 30+ years of gaming. I wish I was still playing it today!

I'm very sorry to hear this. I hope his illness isn't what I'm thinking and that he will be cured.

Wishing him the best, hopefully this is a recoverable illness. I have enjoyed a lot of his games, especially FFXI. We're just going to pretend FFXIV never happened :)

shame...... ff11 was the last good game they made.

hope he gets better and makes some good stuff in the future.

Man, what time is it?

*looks down at watch*

Strange, it's 6:50, and I don't give a damn.

Square made me stop caring about them.

I group them up with EA, except EA's done some good stuff two or three times.

Square's ONLY (And I do mean only, as every Chrono Trigger and SMRPG are ass) good game was FF6

Surprised that neither the article nor comments mention this, but many FFXI players don't think Tanaka's resignation is due to illness. He's reviled among the playerbase, likely the single most hated employee (now ex-employee) of Square Enix, and his poor direction of FFXI in the past 2 years or so reduced the playerbase by thosuands. Right now, the hottest topic on the official FFXI forum is BYE TANAKA! (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/24637-BYE-TANAKA!). A poster in that topic articulates what many players believe is the real story:"Tanaka would be forced out of the game due to his inability to listen to players and poor vision for a MMORPG [if he had not resigned]. He has proven to be very capable at making single player console RPGs, and completely inadequate at making MMORPGs. He treated FFXI and FFXIV as just another single player console RPG, but with many players, and look what it did to both of those games. Community members stated several times that things were broken and their "vision" of both games were flawed, he refused to listen, even to his own test server / beta players. They took him off FFXIV to get that game fixed, and so far it's worked extremely well. Now that he's messed up FFXI even more (since abyssea) their pulling him off to increase profitability. His choice was retirement or being humiliated by being made the executive manager for archival of file 13."

Tanaka was also the demon behind FFXIV.

Final fantasy 1, 2, 3 and 4 were my favorites. I hope they're going somewhat to that direction again

Could be the radiation from Japan's blow reactor core in Fukishima?

I heard the food is contaminated over there and nobody is steping up about it.

I wish him the best. Never played FFXI but I know quite a few fans of it and it's always a shame to see an industry veteran leaving the company he helped define.

the same Tanaka that butchered XIV and wanted to rename Chocobos to "Horse Birds"? good riddance.

What can one say to this, except to wish him a speedy recovery?

People, please try to keep petty gaming politics out of this.

Hope you recover quickly. I would say first, but I don't care about that.