The guy who made FFXIV into it's original mess that needed a whole new development team to clean up is stepping down from Square Enix.
But before you celebrate, allow me to make you feel bad about it. Supposedly the guy is stepping down due to health reasons. Rumor is that he's contracted some form of cancer (eye cancer or something maybe?).
Still, the FFXI lot are probably rejoicing right now. FFXI was always an incredibly grindy game, everything was a huge massive timesink to get anything done. From original exp parties, farming dynamis coins, to camping HNMs against a dozen other linkshell's claim bots for 3 hours every night for a chance at near-zero drop rates.
Word is (I'm going mostly on hear-say, I dont play FFXI but I read news about it occasionally) that around two years before the launch of FFXIV, FFXI got a lot better. The so called Abyssea team came and turned the game around, finally increased the level cap, made it much faster and casual friendly. This was of course because Tanaka left the FFXI team to helm FFXIV. And we all know how that turned out. While at the same time, the Abyssea team was actually helmed by our very own Yoshi-P.
Once Tanaka stepped off the FFXIV team to let Yoshi-P and his team take over though, he quietly went back to FFXI. Supposedly over the past year FFXI has had a shift back into being an incredibly grindy game again. I can't really explain how because, as I said, i haven't played it in years, but that's what I've heard people say. Something about "Voidwatch" or something I dunno.
Incidentally, did you know Tanaka was actually one of the designers for Final Fantasy 2 (NES)? The horrible grindy one where you didn't have exp and levels but instead gained SP in skills by hitting monsters or curing each other?
Yeah.
So anyhow, despite his ability to ruin games, he was a part of the core Square Enix team for almost 30 years and therefore helped make the games what they are today. Godspeed.