An MMO like Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn can take 100+ hours to complete, and that’s not even considering its growing list of huge expansions, which add anywhere from another 50 to 100 hours. This is seemingly no problem for Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, who has reportedly played through the entirety of Final Fantasy 14 in a month, setting himself up for the Endwalker expansion that releases on November 23.
As reported by PCGamesN, Sakaguchi started playing Final Fantasy 14 in late September, sharing his progress and screenshots on Twitter. Sakaguchi only needed 16 days to complete the base game and just two days for Heavensward (an estimated 73 to 150 hours on HowLongToBeat). He then completed Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and smaller patch content by October 29. He even managed to squeeze in some time to attend his daughter’s wedding, the madman.
A conservative estimate, just counting the base game plus three expansions, puts Sakaguchi at 300+ hours of playtime according to HowLongToBeat. That’s assuming he touched absolutely none of the side content in the expansions or smaller patch content updates, which could put him up to a maximum of 1567, which is literally impossible to pull off in a month and change.
Sakaguchi initially started playing Final Fantasy 14 in preparation for a discussion with the game’s director Naoki Yoshida at this year’s Tokyo Game Show. The chat was hosted on October 1, but Sakaguchi clearly kept grinding beyond that.
Sakaguchi has been playing as a gnome-like Lalafell, but he’s been sharing a ton of screenshots on his Twitter account, noting similarities and references to the classic Final Fantasy games he worked on decades ago. Sakaguchi seems particularly fond of calling out classic monster designs, like the appearance of “Mr. Typhon.”
テュポーン先生も登場。
やっぱ「鼻息」だよね。#FF14 #FFXIV pic.twitter.com/igAukLVADQ— 坂口博信 (@auuo) October 31, 2021
Sakaguchi notoriously left Square Enix on pretty rough terms in 2003, with his last official credit on Final Fantasy X-2. He’s since founded Mistwalker, which released Blue Dragon in 2006 and most recently the iOS RPG Fantasian.
Read up on Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion in our huge hands-on preview, where we dive into several new areas, two new job classes, and changes to the house hunting process. In the meantime, Sakaguchi is in good hands with Final Fantasy 14, which just cracked 24 million players and has become the franchise’s most profitable game to date.
Image Credit: Mega64/YouTube
Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/chocobro for IGN.