69-year-old Final Fantasy 14 streamer gets a surprise visit from series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi while tackling Endwalker's final raid

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The drop-in was later confirmed by Sakaguchi on Twitter.

Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker
(Image credit: Square Enix)

Final Fantasy 14's Savage raids are pretty tough—they're focused, 8-player brawls with teeth that are learned like choreographed dances. One slip-up can spell doom for your whole crew, and dying is pretty common. What's less common is the series creator of Final Fantasy showing up to cheer you on while you're doing them.

As spotted by GamesRadar, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy Series, randomly dropped into the chat of a 69 year old streamer who goes by the name of pokochii_bigmum on Twitter. He came to offer support while Pokochii took a break between attempts, as they were tackling the final fight of Final Fantasy 14's Anabaseios raid series on Savage difficulty. 

Regrettably I can't speak Japanese, so I'm using Google Translate here, but you can hear the hype and disbelief in the streamer's voice when the father of Final Fantasy posts a straightforward "Nice to meet you, I'm Sakaguchi" in the chat, at around 2:31:00 on the VOD below. He also tweeted about it later, just to remove any doubt.

Sakaguchi's a Final Fantasy 14 player himself, having started the game back in October 2021. He's wasted no time getting into the game's harder content, however, even taking on the hilariously difficult Dragonsong's Reprise Ultimate last year. For the uninitiated, Ultimates are deadly, 20-minute long agonies that can take months to learn and complete. They're about as hardcore as you can get.

He's just nine years younger than Pokochii, and came ready to offer some veteran-gamer solidarity in tackling some of the game's hardest content. When discussing how many fights in the raid series he'd beaten, he replied: "Just the 4th [fight], around the same point. Let's do our best!" Then dipped to get a haircut.

Pokochii proceeded to queue up their next attempt while struggling to contain their elated laughter, going on to stream attempts for around another hour with the energy Sakaguchi gave them.

I'm very pleased to see that the creator of Final Fantasy is still enjoying its 14th entry, which is basically a love letter to the series he helped create, flooded with references and nods to the whole series. I'm also happy to see him popping out of nowhere like a Warrior of Light summoned from beyond the rift, sending words of encouragement to his fellow adventurer.

Harvey Randall
Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.