What went wrong with FF?

[antisocialmunky]

I didn't want to pollute the FF report thread but I thought I would ask the question. It seems common knowledge that FF and Square have gone down hill in the last 15 years but I haven't seen much in depth discussion on why that is. I also can't really express why I don't really care for the new FFs after FFX. Nor can I find a really good analysis of the subject.

Funnily enough, the FF Wikia Q/A section has this to say, not sure if I agree:

Many reasons.

The original Square company that worked on Final Fantasy I - IX (including creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, character designer Yoshitaka Amano and composer Nobuo Uematsu) no longer work on the games.
Enix is more interested in making money than making games, which means they're making lots of quick and cheap spin-offs and mobile games such as "All the Bravest" and the "Dirge of Cerberus".
A few years ago the company adopted a new "One Year Development Cycle" rule which meant that they only had one year to conceptualise, write, design, create and release the game (most games take several years).
In today's world of video gaming, graphics are valued over storyline, meaning the latter suffers.
Square-Enix wants a younger, new audience which means that they abandon the old Final Fantasy ways that we all grew up with in favour of fast-paced battles, flashy cutscenes and overall simplicity.
They have Motomu Toriyama in charge of writing games. The very same Motomu Toriyama who was responsible for Final Fantasy X-2. Yes, he's in charge of storylines now.
Basically if you want the condensed version, the people who started Final Fantasy have all long since left the company and the people who replaced them don't care about Final Fantasy or its fans - they care about making money from what has become a big name in video gaming. Essentially they've sucked the soul out to make this dry, uninteresting and frankly pretty boring series which panders to your typical teenage anime fan, with melodramatic plots, one-dimensional characters, over-the-top visuals and a more modern setting as opposed to the fantasy worlds that featured in earlier titles. To be honest, if you're a fan of the old FFI - FFIX games, I'd check out Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Although it's online, the guy that Enix hired to create A Realm Reborn is a huge fan of traditional Final Fantasy games and he's trying to emulate the old SNES era titles. It looks really good

What does RB say?

[Sullla]

That's as good of a short summary as any that I've seen. Different people in charge, bloated development budgets, simplistic gameplay, few interesting decisions, embarrassingly bad anime storylines, endless flashy cutscenes - the very definition of style over substance.

For the long version, I'd recommend Pitchfork Pat's series of articles on the series: http://socksmakepeoplesexy.net/index.php?a=patff This is the conclusion, from the writeup on Final Fantasy 13:

With its thirteenth installment, Final Fantasy has at last reached its nadir. This isn't a simple case of me outgrowing something I used to love -- Final Fantasy XIII is just exceptionally lousy. It's an exemplary guidebook on how not to make a video game. It's a bargain bin direct-to-DVD CG anime that Square Enix mashed up with a PS3 shovelware game with an astronomical graphics budget. When you're advancing through The Tube, you only want to get to the next cutscene already. When you're watching the cutscenes, all you want is for everyone to shut up so you can get back to moving forward through The Tube and wishing you were watching the next cutscene.

But what else could you expect? Final Fantasy XIII was the only possible destination for a franchise (and company) that has allowed itself to become so useless and morbidly bloated on its own self-importance. (Fitting for a series that takes so much of its inspiration from George Lucas.) But Square Enix doesn't care, and it doesn't need to care. It knows that its every release is going to sell millions of copies due to brand recognition, the thousands of desperate fans in their mid to late twenties still hoping for another shot of the soma they felt from being thirteen and playing Final Fantasy VII for the first time, and its ever-enduring cred with teenagers who can be counted on to make AMVs from Linkin Park tracks set to footage from its latest release. Square Enix also knows that the mainstream gaming press will always be inclined to treat its latest massive Final Fantasy production with kid gloves and do it some complimentary PR. Final Fantasy XIII received an 8.5 out of 10 score from GameSpot, an 8.9 out of 10 from IGN, an A- from 1UP/EGM, a 4.5 out of 5 from GamePro, a 5 out of 5 from Playstation Official Magazine, a 9 out of 10 from Official XBox Magazine, and an 8 out of 10 from Eurogamer. According to Game Rankings, XIII's average press ratings are 85% and 81% for the PS3 and 360 versions, respectively. There is no other video game franchise on the planet that could have gotten away with this.

So what now? Well, it's still too early to guess what lasting impact Final Fantasy XIII will have on the franchise and Square Enix (Toriyama is already talking about a Final Fantasy XIII-2), but what I can say is that I'm finished with Final Fantasy. It has finally, irrevocably, and beyond doubting turned into something I no longer find interesting or entertaining. Most of the talent that initially made it worth playing is long gone, and has been supplanted by hacks, yes-men, and corporatism. It's become a cliche of itself. It's become boring -- and Square Enix has become the veritable Flavor Flav of the videogame industry. Today's Final Fantasy is not something I would ever spend sixty dollars and fifty hours on again, and it's definitely not something I plan on spending a week writing about after this.

That's only the tiniest tip of the iceberg though. I highly recommend those linked articles.

[Bobchillingworth]

I'm hardly an expert on the FF series- the only game I've played to completion was Crystal Chronicles, which was more a Gauntlet knockoff than anything. I found this segment by Jim "SJW" Sterling to be illuminating though:


http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/v...quare-Enix

[Jowy]

I'm currently about 50 hours into English-patched FFXII IZJS. The game has aged like fine wine. I used to hate it when it came out, and never even completed the full game, but now I love it. The story and the world are complex and mature, which probably explains why I didn't "get it" the first time I played 8 years ago. They don't spoon-feed you the story either, you really have to pay attention and figure things out for yourself. One complaint I still have is that the main character Vaan is unlikeable and irrelevant. I think they definitely intended Vaan to have his flaws, as a lot of the cutscenes basically have Vaan and Penelo acting like children (which they are) in the background while the adults talk about things that matter. They just went too far with it, or left the growth of those characters too late. I have a feeling I know how Vaan will be relevant (which is again something you can easily miss) but I'm already done with most of the game so I'm not sure how much of a remedy it will be.

Gameplay-wise IZJS brings in one massive improvement in the form of a job system. Now every character is different. Creativity and planning in battles is required, and getting loot becomes much more rewarding when you need specific pieces for your jobs. Combat overall is simplistic when fighting normal enemies, even grindy. With the gambit system and IZJS's speed-up button, I got through easy areas quickly without feeling like I'm grinding. The enemies aren't there just to be fodder though as I found out when I started going off the beaten path and into zones I'm not "supposed" to be in. Now suddenly the enemies are deadly and dangerous, and I have to really push my party just to defeat a few. It's really awesome and rewarding to be able to complete sidequests that are meant for much later, to kill big monsters (hunts) that kick your ass at first, and to just explore the world before the story forces you that way. Oh, and the loot, the sweet sweet loot, feels even better when you're not "supposed" to get it yet and you really have to work for it. Much of the game is actually in form of sidequests, and a lot of it is stuff that you can miss if you aren't paying attention. In FFXII you might talk to a NPC who mentions something, then you yourself need to realize that hey it's actually information that's relevant to me and then you follow up on it. Modern gamers would probably need a quest-marker on top of important NPC's and a quest-tracker that tells them exactly what to do (even if they don't know why they're doing it), but I liked how FFXII did it.

FFXII IZJS was a worthy title to the franchise and one of their best games ever made. It's a game geared towards the hardcore audience and older players. Now that I've written this out, I actually kinda get what went wrong with FF. If you think about the possible complaints people had about FFXII, it's all stuff that the next FF game tried to improve upon. There are more flashy cutscenes, more anime influence, the game is more linear and over the top, it's more futuristic and "cool". It seems like a natural step from FFXII if you aren't just intending to make the same game again. I haven't played FFXIII or it's sequels, but from what I've seen and read, it's the absolute worst. FFXIII recently came out on PC with a reasonable price tag, so I'll probably end up playing it and finding out just how bad it is. Until then I can't answer in detail what went wrong with FF, but I can say that FFXII wasn't where it all went wrong.



Looks good for a 2006 game!

[antisocialmunky]

I did like FFXII quite a bit if only because I managed to program the party of a friend's game to play itself using gambits which pissed him off to no end. I'm not sure why though. I guess he liked the crazy grind of that game.

[MJW (ya that one)]

If you are just saying after FFX the answer is simple. Square fired the creator and his senior staff after the move The Spirits Within bombed horribly. (For the record it did bomb horrible it's the #5 biggest movie loss ever.) So all the games after that are FF in name only. Technically it was after FFXI but that was a mmog so it doesn't count.