What the hell happened?
How did we got from the golden age in the 90s to unplayable shit today?
What the hell happened?
How did we got from the golden age in the 90s to unplayable shit today?
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You bitched about Spirits Within and led them to bankruptcy for not fulfilling your autistic expectations.
Enjoy your cake.
The devs drank the independant studio koolaid and fucked off from Square, only to realise you need money in order to publish.
They tried fixing something that wasn't broke
oh go play ff 1-9 again, whiner.
the games were worse then than now
take off your fucking goggles
They merged with Enix
They're still one of the best studios who is working closely with Sony. I don't know what you mean.
>What the hell happened?
the merger happened, dummy. how did you forget?
>the games were worse then than now
lol
No
Nomura gained too much control and made everything broody emo shit with pretentious pseudophilosophy.
FF11 was a weird step to take after X. Then they started marking soulless shit.
No what? No, they're not closely working with Sony? Sure, they still develop games for Nintendo and rarely for Microsoft, but most of Square's huge projects are exclusively for Sony, and they realize most of their profits on Sony consoles.
Merged with their biggest competitor.
>You bitched about Spirits Within
I saw it in theaters the day it came out. It wasn't even that bad, I don't get what everyone's problem was.
If I remember, Square lost a huge chunks of money from that certain Final Fantasy movie. I personally think the movie isn't that bad, but it doesn't mean it's good either.
Maybe people were complaining that they should have dedicated their time making games and not movies
They were dumb enough to move away from a formula that worked, and now they spend 10 years developing their games and don’t advertise them until they’re already out. Dumb management is why they are flopping. Don’t forget XIV was their biggest flop and siphoned every single resource from XI to make it not a total loss
XI was just their answer to the growing popularity of MMORPG back then, I don't know what in the world made them develop XIV
It was a decent movie but at the budget they had it was unmarketable.
Too much anime/eastern spiritualism stuff turned off the mainstream audience. A lot of Final Fantasy nu-fans refused to see it because it wasn't a movie version of FFVII.
The movie was basically tailor-made to old Final Fantasy fans of Sakaguchi's work and nobody else. Also weirdly adding the title Final Fantasy to the movie's name (instead of just The Spirits Within) would have weirded out the mainstream audience.
But Square is the man in their relationship. Enix is too fucking small to make decisions for Square.
The people who say this are usually the ones who don't have a clue who Enix is.
They took the AAA pill too hard overtime.
The dragon quest guys, I don't even know what else they do
Dragon quest games have a shoestring budget compared to final fantasy and they sell very well in japan. In fact the series is still quite popular. I thought Enix made better games than squaresoft, personally. But definitely not the reason for their woes.
>Final Fantasy 7
>Kingdom Hearts
>Dragon Quest
Literally only 3 long running ips have been keeping them alive, 2 if we remove Enix
I don't know why they stop making new ips or experimenting like they did back then
FF7R is their last chance and from what we've seen so far they're fucking it up
Square has no talent left.
They would have been better served with a complete graphical overhaul of XI. You’ll never get the WoW crowd (who is going to walk away from thousands of dollars and months worth of playtime) so I don’t know why people make wow clones
>They're still one of the best studios
that's just blatantly false
>who is working closely with Sony
funnily enough the only good games they've put out in recent years were on nintendo consoles
Out of touch higher ups I think
>Don’t forget XIV was their biggest flop and siphoned every single resource from XI to make it not a total loss
Wasn't that XV? I thought the new mmo was supposed to be somewhat playable
they did have money they just weren't willing to invest in their bullshit
Final Fantasy VII is the best game ever made and the best game it is possible to make. Once you have done that its hard not to go downhill. 1997 was the pinnacle of human civilization. Everything after has been shit.
What happened? The Spirits Within bombed like crazy and it forced the main creative mind behind the FF series to leave the company. Furthermore the turn based RPG genre, which was hot stuff in previous generations has become "outdated" according to most gamers and developers and so we have SE stuck in an identity crisis on all of their rpg's, trying to find some shit hybrid between turn based and real time. Also a greater focus on pretty graphics than ever before. It seems to take precedence over most things. That is why.
>someone told them a feature-length FMV was impossible
>they wasted all their money on spirits within
>had to merge with enix
Final Fantasy became popular with westerners
>I don’t know why people make wow clones
They're banking on the name of FF of course. They thought that making MMORPG with FF element is instant money, but people back then would rather play on RO, MU and WoW private servers.
There was also no auction house for like the first 6 months, beginner story quests would crash peoples games and were u completely, some people were barred from making characters, high end systems ran the game at less than 30 fps. It was truly a disaster and my story telling cannot do it justice. Maybe try to find a YouTube video
Yea 14 was garbage for a while but I thought their 2.0 or whatever made it not shit and it started making money
FFXVI will save them if they learned anything from FFXV
The initial release of FFXIV was so bad that Square publicly apologized for it.
Yea but I meant the re-release, or was it even worse than I thought.
>was so bad that Square publicly apologized for it.
did they explicitly apologize for 15 or did they just cancel the stuff and not comment
It still had to make up with the amount of money lost during previous years
They essentially had to build another entire mmo from scratch. There is essentially nothing from 1.0 that was able to carry over to ARR
>I meant the re-release
Ah that's fair. I do think that's received decently and has had a growing base of players for it.
>did they explicitly apologize for 15
Not that I'm aware. Pretty sure they just cancelled the extra content and gave us some nonsense instead.
Final fantasy spirits whithin bombing is what really killed square.
Test
Sorry but most people play Final Fantasy XIV is on PC. That's where they get their most profits. Same with mobages. Sony is just the "old friend" that helped them out when no one wanted to.
Sony helped them? Like how? All Square did was produce their games for Sony because Nintendo insists on expensive carts and Nintendo's past president Yamauchi trashtalked them that JRPGs are for manchildren.
no one asked for spirits within
Imagine that Spirits Within has never happened.
How would the modern Square look like now?
Still roughly same but more PS2 games would have been produced.
Squaresoft was always shit, they just rode on an era where cinematic games were attractive because of technical limitations. Every one of their game including the 'golden age' ones are broken. Chrono Trigger speedrun doesn't even look like a videogame, it's 100% menu manipulations. The same can't be said with other games of that era: Megaman X is still a videogame as a speedrun, the same with phantasy star, doom, etc.
seriously what are they thinking
It's such a sad thing when you realize that pretty much all creative minds behind older final fantasy titles are complete hacks nowadays.
Even Yasumi Matsuno has stained his hands in Unsung Story disaster.
Well it was Sony or Nintendo at the time. Sega was already killing itself with the Saturn and thinking about a Final Fantasy PC game back then was suicide. And Sony being a generous good guy selling lots of PS1 was out there offering/taking deals to/from everyone and their dogs. Nintendo was an asshole at the time yeah, but I think if not for Sony, Square would have been left out in the dirt.
ETHICS DEPT
In all honesty I went from insanely hyped about ff7 remake to not giving a shit, this ethics crap killed my interest almost completely.
No one asked for the fucking movie, you fucking apologist. They're dumb to make such a dumb decision without the blessing of the market, which is also dumb. So don't be laying that shit on me, shitstain.
>the games were worse then than now
GET OUT.
Their own fault for sinking so much money into it.
Five Words: Final Fantasy The Spirits Within. It almost killed the company and pretty much forced them to merge with Enix
They fell for the CUTTING EDGE GRAFIX meme and put it over all, Spirits Within was a symptom of how early that actually started.
You can tell because the games from them where GRAFIX are put on the back burner can still sometimes be good an frequently significantly better then their "big" projects, but not always though (Left Alive).
They spend 10 years just to make one game, and they weren't reliant on one franchise. They were willing to experiment. Whenever you bought one of their PS1 games, you'd open up the case to see ads for another one of their games. Parasite Eve, Front Mission, Chrono Cross, Brave Fencer Musashi, Saga Frontier, Xenogears, fucking Einhander.
I was a child and didn't know it even existed.
It was the movie that actually prevented the merger from happening. I wasn't until Square started making back money with FFX and KH was Enix willing to partner up.
I'm pretty sure FF has always been pushing the cutting edge of graphics
>CUTTING EDGE GRAFIX meme
To be fair, everybody thought better graphics meant a fucking lot for the industry and it's been like that ever since Nintendo and Sega has been dickwaving their 32bit graphics consoles. I guess it went overboard with the 4k 60fps thing and how games gradually became filled with 20 hours total cutscenes.
The military villain guy's voice acting is pretty bad but aside from that it's a great movie.
>Brave Fencer Musashi
Why did they have to murder this priceless gem with a horrendous sequel? Fuck them.
bunch of the experienced veterans left to mistwalker, bunch of the ambitious young blood left to monolith soft. Higher ups also made a lot of retarded decisions.
>bunch of the experienced veterans left to mistwalker
shame how poorly that went
Hey now, the new Saga might actually become a return to form.
They just aren't pulling of this magical future tech vibe that XIII and XV tried anymore. It's losing steam and people want more classical looking fantasy. They want the amano aestethic.
if they wanted to make a movie franchise like that they simply shouldn't have called it final fantasy. They should have trusted their fans more that they see the movie and tell others.
My problem is that I favor that aesthetic but Square has NEVER been able to make a good game with it, which isn't the style's fault, but it sucks because it'll be a long while before it comes into fashion again and gets another shot at good games.
Nintendo told them to fuck off and never return when they released ff7
That’s why they never made a single game for Nintendo until the wii where wada made peace with yamauchi
This is documented and confirmed by square themselves
Well, yeah, but really most of their problems on the Square-side of S-E can be tracked to how focused they got on their reputation as being what sets the "standard" since it was to my knowledge one of the primary reasons they went with the Crystal Tools project for a "In-House Engine" to keep ahead of the crowd, and we are basically just about moving past feeling the effects of THAT fuck-up, and this is like what? Two Generations after the fact?
The merge with enix also sakaguchi’s gamble with that spirit within movie
Has Enix even made a game? Thought they're just publishers.
>How did we got from the golden age in the 90s
>golden age
>every game is mechanically the exact same
>glorified visual novels with terrible pacing and clumsy narrative
nostalgiafags should get gassed
I'll always blame their obsession with trying to be on the bleeding edge of technology for their downfall. They sacrificed everything for graphics when it came to FFXIII, and then insisted on using their own tools and went way over budget. Hence why we got so many shitty FFXIII universe games using the same, awful engine.
I'm so happy they've started to use 3rd party engines. Dragon Quest 11 shows they can still do outstanding traditional JRPGs and can focus more on the quality of the world/characters/story because the technology isn't as much of a concern at that point.
I wish DQ11 had more music tracks though
no, fool, i don;t think you understand. the square side of SE is the retarded, experimental division who spends too much money. enix is the traditional JRPG purist division who MUST get their traditional JRPGs right or otaku might throw a fit. if anything, the square side brings them all down
XI and XII were the last time square/s-e was good though.
I was gonna refute you and mention Crystal Chronicles, but then looked it up
>Square created a shell company to develop for Nintendo to avoid any entanglements while contracted to Sony
>Again because of that fucking movie they were hemorrhaging money
>So Crystal Chronicles was developed in secret until the merger, when SE "acquired" the company that made the game
It's a pretty neat story. Still waiting on that remaster.
It wasnt until 13 that they started making soulless shit, 12 is great especially the zodiac version and x-2 was alright
Hollywood films is not Square's specialty. But they still promote the movie whenever they release a new Final Fantasy movie.
You're like 3 hours late saying what's already been said
Don't forget legend of mana and threads of fate. Square's productivity during the PS era is analogous to Rare for the N64.
>x-2 was alright
let's not get ahead of ourselves here. The story was fanfic-tier and you have 3 party members for the entirety of the game, one which is a literal who.
I actually think the Fabula Nova myth has some nice ideas in the world building, but the games utterly botch the presentation. like Type-0 with the CHILD SOLDIERS thing basically everything about how L'Cie and what the whole plot was actually about, namely that it was basically a divine bet between gods if the "Gate of Finis" would be opened with sacrifices of Quality or Quantity.
And really the fact the "Myth" was recycled for 5 games doesn't really help. And yes, im counting XV since the holdovers are fucking blatant even with the numbers filed off.
It was a pretty generic sci-fi movie, even if they tried to spice things up with souls and ghost stuff.
You can save the company by supporting the right games.
>and you have 3 party members for the entirety of the game
And they cover more roles than the bunch of party members from X.
>Too much anime/eastern spiritualism stuff turned off the mainstream audience
It wasn't even that, it just didn't do anything meaningful with any of it.
I saw the movie in theaters and even enjoyed it enough to buy the dvd, but that was their own fault.
3 characters are enough when you can swap jobs for all of them in the middle of battle and get rewarded for it with buffs, increased rewards and instant-win spells.
Don't tell me that you only used the "Shortcut" grid? Seriously that grid is basically just trap since the supermodes are influenced by how many nodes your grid has anyway, it is basically only so you can easily grind AP on them, not actually properly use them.
They weren't very good in the first place, you just have nostalgia goggles. Like everyone else that loves shitty retro games, back to plebbit hipsterfag
>Even Yasumi Matsuno has stained his hands in Unsung Story disaster.
I'd say in his defense it was more the development team that approached him and him not knowing how stuff like Kickstarter works.
Yeah some aspects of the game were shit but it was still fun to play through, it wasnt totally awful but it wasnt great either it was just alright.
Some thing that happened with Soviet Union. The people in charge are old, incompetent men who are out of touch with the rest of the population and have no idea what to do anymore yet refuse to step down and let fresh blood with new and innovative ideas take their place.
>Phoneshit
Crystal Chronicles didn't do that well. Square doesn't give a fuck about Nintendo nowadays, in fact, it's Nintendo who's begging Square Enix to publish games for them.
I'm gonna laugh so hard when they originally intended it as a phone game then decided to port it over the consoles but never bothered changing the interface just like what they did with Vita ports. Square is going to fuck themselves in the ass so hard if they did that again.
I doubt that will happen again. RS2 had the issues with a mobile interface on PC because the port was originally released on phones. This time SG and RS3 are being released across all platforms simultaneously.
No, this is the phoneshit. At least get your shitposting right.
That other game is coming to phones, look.
Nah, Waka >>>>>>> Proto-Lightning (Paine). I guess Rikku was alright but she's originally from X.
I guess 3 would be enough if they were all new characters to a new game, but this is a direct sequel and you have Paine, a literal who, instead of Lulu.
If the entire theme of your game is a young girl squad striking out on their own, the older pregnant woman is probably not a good fit.
That doesn't make it phoneshit though. You may as well call every console/handheld game that gets ported to phones "phoneshit".
the other games were for the super famicom and ps vita
The actual answer is a series of terrible investments into making their own software instead of using middleware like everyone else in the industry was moving to.
The development of Crystal Tools was the first step in a chain reaction that managed to ruin the development of every other large scale game in their pipeline. XV and ARR got intensive repair jobs in order to try and salvage their disastrous development; ARR managed to pay off due to putting the right man in charge, XV didn't.
Additional problems are the rise of FPS and cinematic action games making RPGs seem obsolete to many consumers, anime artstyles generally not being popular in the West, and driving away a lot of the key talent during the PS1 days.
It means it has to fit phone specs and phone expectations for a game.
She 24 in X-2, she's not that old. Also, she wasn't pregnant by the end of X so I guess that was just an excuse added by the devs for the sequel to explain why she's not part of the group.
Sounds like you're just talking out your ass in order to complain about something.
The Bouncer is a cool game
Sakaguchi failed and retired. If he didn't make the shit movie square wouldnt have fallen into otaku/moe trash that much
You forgot to count for anime years. She's a hag.
You'll see user.
Real answer? Most of the people who made 90s Square so good all left for Mistwalker, Monolith Soft and Cygames.
Mistwalker fell apart but Monolith's beginning to soar in popularity and Cygames made enough money from mobileshit and are finally developing large console JRPGs.
It's actually embarrassing to compare Square's Final Fantasy 15 with Monolith's Xenoblade X since FF15 was in development for over a decade and was a disaster while XBX was in development for only 3 years and is a technological marvel.
>3 Mikado Dauragon in the fucking roster
Yeah no
Don't they have deus ex as well?
>Cygames made enough money from mobileshit and are finally developing large console JRPGs
With how cancer their mobile nonsense is I don't expect anything good from their console game, I expect it to basically be predatory trash.
I think user was only counting games specifically tied to Square and Enix, rather than later acquisitions like Eidos and other western studios.
Judging by what you picked to praise you'll probably whine, but XB2 was also a huge success on a small budget with what amounted to a skeleton crew, and Monolith also helped with (aka pretty much made) BoTW.
FF general, not just 7. Regardless of how shit they are, main FF installments continue to sell well. Also all of the ports of older games do well. They can survive on the FF brand name.
>They can survive on the FF brand name.
I honestly wonder how much longer that can last. Technically speaking FF should've been the cashcow that funds all their other, experimental stuff. But now they've fallen into this weird feedback loop where they need FF to support FF and everything else is just wandering around in the ether picking up scraps. Seems like that's always been the case though.
Nevar forget
Nomura.
Nobody asked for The Spirit Within, and even then they managed to disappoint everyone while burning away all of their Final Fantasy money on it. It's exactly this sort of ego driven "visionary director" primadona culture that continues to fuck them over time and again, even after the merger. Which can be beneficial when the projects are AA in size and there isn't so much on the line if it backfires. But by putting some dubious personalities at the helm of 350+ multimillion dollar projects, they become too big to cancel when everything's headed to shit. What Squeenix needs is new blood on smaller projects, and their big ones to be more carefully planned and with everybody on them encouraged to voice their opinions and tell the directors flat out when they're being retarded.
It didn't work as a Final Fantasy movie, and as a science fiction film it was painfully average. Neat visuals for the time, yet nothing about it really justified it being 3D animated.
What was your biggest disappoint? Mine is XIII. I actually loved XII so much and when they said XIII was coming I jumped to hypetrain so hard. I really wanted to love that game and hoped that it would be like XII but with better graphics. Sadly it turned to be biggest pile of shit i have ever played. The whole was just one big pipe run. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
I'd say XIII is where a lot of people officially bowed out. I know I was in the same boat as you. I even remember them billing XIII as a more dynamic action rpg.
they blew all their money on spirits within, then enix, their main competitor initiated a hostile takeover.
>What the hell happened?
>How did we got from the golden age in the 90s to unplayable shit today?
They're easily the best publisher this gen
XV is the fastest selling Final Fantasy game
KH3 is one of the best selling games this year
XIV is the most successful MMO out there
Automata sold 4 millions
Bringing new IPS like Oninaki, Lost Sphear etc
Reviving Secret of Mana, brought back TWEWY and a potential sequel is happening, etc
Dragon Quest games having huge success
Their western branch is also having huge success with the rebooted Tomb Raider games
Also no idea why people are saying they don't have new IPS when they are the ones looking out for more new IPS
>Money focus
Do you work for SE, are you invested in SE, or do you play games?
High quality games tend to sell well
Yeah man Fifa and CoD are the best games ever for sure.
They've been running at a loss due to mismanaged development costs and other shit. Also != quality.
>Their western branch is also having huge success with the rebooted Tomb Raider games
Hahahahaha. Now this is a bunch of bullshit. Have you completely forgotten the mass layoffs that took place at Crystal Dynamics after Tomb Raider 2013 didn't meet SE's ludicrous 10 million sales expectation.
mainstream
normies
capitalism
Considering that the movie resulted in $50 million in losses, laying the blame on any individual or group of people is retarded. Most people didn't give a flying fuck about the movie.