Greetings, everyone.

Foxclon from the Community team here to share another report from gamescom 2017 which took place in Cologne, Germany from August 22 to 26! Boy, what a long convention! Early mornings, too!

FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn has been attending gamescom for six years now, and every year is bigger and better than the last. This time around, we invited the main scenario writer Natsuko Ishikawa over to join us on the gamescom stage, where she had her first interview along with Yoshi-P.

We received many scenario-related questions from media outlets around the world. Keep an eye out for those interviews!

This year, FFXIV spanned across two booths once again! We had a battle challenge that alternated between Susano to Lakshmi every day.

If you won the battle challenge by successfully clearing within a set time, you received a t-shirt of that primal as your loot!

General admission began on day two, and the line to participate in the battle challenge reached four hour waiting time right after the doors opened... Sorry for making you all wait! But at the same time, I'm really grateful to see this many people gathering as well, thank you!

At the other booth, known as the Battle Arena, we had the familiar Primal Roulette. Players had to spin a roulette to see which primal they would face, and what handicaps they would be challenged with.

Handicaps included hardcore ones, such as Extrene mode or item level sync. There were various other handicaps as well, the "Healer Killer", where you had to hide the Focus Target and Party List, and five actions only mode. You may have seen it during the live broadcast, but there was a handicap called "strike a pose!" where participants had to do the Hildibrand emote or the ranger pose emotes whenever the staff called it out. Everyone was very energetic!

The Primal Roulette has been done every year at gamescom so far, but this year, they completely digitized the roulette for the Primal Selection. I was rather impressed. I told myself that we need to steal apply this to our events in Japan as well!

If you successfully won the Primal Roulette, you received the following prize:

These keychains are beautiful! I want to take this idea to Japan one day...

We tried new things at gamescom this year as well. During the event, we had a majority of the activities live streamed on Twitch.

We had various programs for the stream, such as Twitch streamers commentate during gameplay, hosted a PvP tournament, and the interview session with Yoshi-P and Natsuko. There were some information I haven't heard of, and some talks about the future popped up as well. I got a little worried listening to them talk!

Personally, the exhibition-style, Yoshi-P and myself vs Susano (Extreme), Lakshmi (Extreme), and Primal Roulette stage was very exciting. (Really glad he didn't pull extreme in the roulette!). Since I was playing, I wasn't able to get many photos, but...

He's hiding his face? Guess playing live on stage is a different beast, and it looks like the lightning from Susano (Extreme) was nice to Yoshi-P. Scary, very scary!

We also held a cosplay contest for the first time at gamescom! I was judging the costumes, so I have no photos from this event, but I believe the European team is planning to post up a blog with this, so please look forward to it!

Judging is certainly a difficult role. The Yotsuyu cosplay won the grand prize, red mage took second place, and the third place went to a level 50 monk cosplay. There were many high quality cosplays!

And to finish it off, we had some signing sessions.

Natsuko joined in on the signing along with Yoshi-P this time. Aside from the signing sessions, they were signing and taking pictures near the booth; however, we had about 150 attendees for the signing session. We also had those known as the Ambassadors, who were the Warriors of Light that helped the booth, and we had a brief moment of exchange with them as well.

Outside of the gamescom venue, there was a large-scale fan gathering event at a club as well.

The Warriors of Light seem to be bringing more hype and excitement every year. This year was no different. We've seen familiar faces, who greeted us kindly since the last time we met the previous year. I wasn't able to stay until the end, but looks like the party took place until late night once again.

Oh Benyamin Nuss, who performed an amazing piano performance at the Fan Festival in Frankfurt in February, and the Fan Festival in Shanghai the other day stopped by as well. Yoshi-P called him out to the stage, and we had him speak as well (laugh).

I would love to see his performance again if we have the chance!

Gamescom is probably one of the world's largest scale consumer show with over 350,000 attendees, that spans five days, and 11 event hours. FFXIV attended the event with full force! We received a lot of energy from the players to give it our best for the fifth year of FFXIV moving forward!

Coming back from Cologne, we traveled back to the airport on a train, but at the central station, there is a well-known national treasure, the Cologne Cathedral.

Out of nowhere, Natsuko, who's attending this event for the first time mentioned how she wanted to climb to the top!

We ended up climbing up the endless hallway with 533 steps (Natsuko was all hyped up, while Yoshi-P and I looked afar, trying not to think). However, once we got to the top, it didn't feel that long, both Yoshi-P and I felt that it was shorter than the last time we climbed up. We probably imagined it was going to be tiring and scary from our previous visit (laugh).

Next up, we have the 14-hour broadcast this weekend! Hopefully I don't get any late muscle pains!

- Foxclon, aka Morbol from the Japanese Community Team

P.S. I received a comment from Natsuko as well, so here it is!

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Greetings, Natsuko here. Yoshida asked me "Hey while you're still energetic, want to come to gamescom? They have a cathedral too!" I was so excited, I accepted. I would like to take this moment to thank everyone who attended and watched the broadcast, thank you!

During the event, we had the Unending Journey: Storytelling in FFXIV broadcast, with Yoshida and myself talking mainly about the scenario. During the show I was asked "What was the best story in FFXIV?", and I replied back saying I would love to hear that from everyone else, so please let us know by adding a hashtag! Later on, I realized I mentioned hashtag, but didn't say what hashtag to use, so I was regretting my own answer... But, players started using the hashtag "#FF14のストーリーのここが好き" themselves on Twitter, and a lot of Warriors of Light started posting their comments.

Yoshida, myself, and everyone else in the team was very surprised with this. We were very pleased to read through all these comments. While completely different scenarios were being brought up, there were scenarios done by the same person, so those made us laugh. There were comments that brought back the hard times we had had during development, and made us teary, and some which we want to say "if you like that one, just wait a bit longer, and you might get to see the continuation." There were a lot of various comments. I want to thank from the bottom of my heat the person who started this, and to everyone who posted their comments.

If you haven't checked it out, be sure to check out the wonderful comments posted under the hashtag "#FF14のストーリーのここが好き". It does include a lot of spoilers as well, so be careful!

I received this surprising reward, a lot of energy from gamescom and from participating in the "Stroll with Yoshi-P" show. The reward I received for working hard in 4.0 is much greater than what I imagined. Now I shall put my head and heart back to work, and hope that another day comes where I can successfully complete my job, and meet with everyone once again!

Main Scenario Writer (one of them!) Natsuko Ishikawa

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