Final Fantasy 14's Savage Raid is pretty tough: an eight-player, focused brawl with a crunch that you learn like a choreographed dance. One wrong move can spell doom for the entire crew, and death is common. It is not that unusual for the creator of Final Fantasy to show up in support.

As GamesRadar discovered, Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi randomly dropped by to chat with the 69-year-old streamer, who goes by the name pokochii_bigmum on Twitter. Pokochii, who was taking on the final round of Final Fantasy 14's Anabaseios Raid series on Savage difficulty, took time out from his challenge to come cheer him on.

Unfortunately, I do not speak Japanese, so I am using Google Translate here, but you can sense the hype and disbelief in the streamer's voice when the father of Final Fantasy posted straight up in chat, "Nice to meet you, I'm Sakaguchi. He also tweeted later to dispel suspicion.

Sakaguchi himself is a Final Fantasy 14 player, having started playing the game in October 2021. However, he does not spend much time with the game's challenging content, and last year he took on the delightfully difficult Dragon's Song Reprise Ultimate. Ultimate, for the uninitiated, is a 20-minute, life-threatening slog that takes months to learn and complete. It's hardcore fun at its best.

He was just nine years younger than Pokochii and ready to offer the solidarity of a seasoned gamer taking on the game's most difficult content. Talking about how many rounds of the raid series he had beaten, he replied: "Just the fourth round, around the same. Let's go for it!" Later, I went for a haircut.

Pokochii, struggling to stifle his exuberant laughter, proceeded to cue the next challenge and continued the challenge stream for another hour or so with the energy he received from Sakaguchi.

It is great to see the creator of Final Fantasy still enjoying this, his fourteenth work. It is essentially a love letter to the series he helped create, filled with references and nods to the series as a whole. It is also nice to see him appear out of nowhere like a warrior of light summoned from beyond the rift, sending words of encouragement to his fellow adventurers.