Naoki Yoshida (aka Yoshi-P), the producer of Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XVI, wanted to do something different, so after the dark fantasy style of the latter, he wanted to work on something lighter.

The two games differ not only in genre (the former is an MMORPG, the latter a single player), but also in style (the former is a lighter fantasy, the best of the franchise with stories, the latter is a dark fantasy like Game of Thrones). Michael-Christopher Koji Fox worked on both games, as he was Square Enix’s senior translator, and in an interview with MinnMax he said that Final Fantasy XIV was a lighter, crazier story with, for example, Hildebrand’s madness, and Final Fantasy XVI was about slavery, the end of the world, and the loss of people’s will, which raised very serious themes.

For Koji Fox, the transition from one game to the next wasn’t easy because he couldn’t use the jokes he used in Final Fantasy XIV because they didn’t fit in the new game, but he wanted to include some of them. The story in Final Fantasy XIV can be intense, but it gives a more hopeful feel to the overall picture (and the Hilebrand adventures he mentioned don’t involve the laws of physics, and are quite a comic drama). Koji Fox sometimes looks at Yoshi-P and says you can tell he’s had enough of the dark fantasy genre and would prefer to do something with a lighter tone.

According to Koji Fox, whatever his next project is going to be, it’s going to be a paradigm shift because he’s going to have to change his tone again, because he’s been used to the darker, edgier tone of Final Fantasy XVI for the last five years. You have to throw all that out the window because you can’t use it with a lighter tone. It’s also clear that he didn’t work on Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail because the localization manager was Kate Cwynar…

Source: PCGamer