Apparently, Naoki Yoshida isn’t about that pop girlie life…? Final Fantasy 14’s lead director and producer admitted at Gamescom that he wasn’t a fan of Honey B. Lovely for basically that reason.
Honey B. Lovely is the second boss in FFXIV’s latest raid series, The Arcadion, and she’s about as cheery (for the most part) as her name implies. Designed to be an “idol,” Honey B. Lovely (whose name we type out in full in this neck of the woods), is accompanied by not only a slew of fans, but also a whole catchy song with cheery lyrics that add an oddly inspiring layer of depth to her character motivations. Plus, the mechanics integrates both idol- and bee-themed quirks.
As idols do, she also does little cutesy motions, including little head tilts and making a heart with her fingers—which are mannerisms that apparently Yoshida isn’t personally fond of embracing, it seems.
“Not in terms of mechanics, but in terms of character, Honey B. Lovely is not really to my liking, sorry,” he explained in an interview with PCGamesN at Gamescom. “Because, you know, I don’t really like characters who do this,” which he chased with the little heart-hands, head-tilt motions, something I think the entire industry wishes we could have witnessed if only for his signature openness.
Admittedly, a lot of people are between varying phases of Honey B. Lovely tolerance right now as they repeat and progress through this particular boss’s Savage configuration. There definitely have to be people who genuinely do like her, because her entire design scheme from visuals to mechanics to music are actually impressive.
But there’s also a bit of tongue-in-cheek ‘admiration’ for her, because she’s got a lot of bee puns, and that song is an earworm, and, well, she’s an idol, so admiration is sort of part of the territory. Some raids even dress in bee-colored schemes to match. Given he seems to like the mechanics, in this case, we suspect Yoshida would just mute the music and lower the voice lines to the minimum necessary. Also, it’s safe to say he won’t be blasting the fanmade ten-hour loop mix.
The good news is, the man does have some taste, as he’s more biased towards the fourth raid’s track, a full-on rock banger featuring Chrissy Costanza alongside the in-house rock band The Primals, and he likes the “power experience” of the third raid. But he feels, “overall, it was a really good raid tier”—something we concurred with not long after its release
He also got a bit into community character favorites in the piece, his own preferences aside.
