Alakaizer said:
Then, after FF X Square bought Enix (I think, don't have many facts here) and they shat out FF X-2, which is when the series' quality had officially dropped off a cliff.
Incorrect. The two merged. Believe it or not the film [em]Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within[/em] was nearly a nail in the coffin and Enix royally pulled their butt out of the fire. Unfortunately the staff of the two companies don't mix all that well and they have a nasty tendency to put Enix teams on Square projects, such as the case with FFXII and XIII, which share a lot of their staff with the team behind Vagrant Story, of all games.
As for FFX-2... well..
1) It was a spinoff, what're ya gonna do?
2) Gameplay-wise it wasn't all
that bad and in fact the battle system was very interesting. It's just that they got super-lazy with the world, the music really sucked, the story was absurd, and I don't think many people responded all that well to the Charlie's Angels "girl power" vibe outside Japan and that all their stylistic choices alienated their fanbase. It wouldn't be the first time that Square's stylistic choices royally alienated a portion of gamers. Still, wouldn't say they were "off the cliff" until XII hit.
Grand_Arcana said:
About the PS3 exclusives I say this: Fu*k Sony. It's Sony's fault that I never got to play any of the Japan exclusive games (KHFM, FFX Int., FFXII IZJS, ect.) because Sony won't localize a remake if there isn't enough additional content. So. . . yeah.
Incorrect. It's Square who won't spend the money on it. Honestly the notion of even
doing the international and final mix games in the first place is pretty damned absurd. It's surprising they do it at all; but half of why they do it is to "foreignize" to their audience as opposed to localize for them. If you've ever actually played one (I have--you aren't missing all that much), you'll note that they have the English voice actors but Japanese sub-titles. For them it's a radically different way to experience the game, and the extra content is sort of there to sweeten the deal and make the notion of an "Americanized" Final Fantasy seem less absurd.
The decline is marked by a ton of factors, not just one particular game or one staff member or a move to a different console, and Sony's
definitely not the problem.
When Square moved to Sony they left behind the biggest ball and chain a game company could ever have: pre-Gamecube Nintendo. It turns out Nintendo was extremely antsy over the American localizations of Square's games, frequently forcing them to censor material to the point that huge plot arcs would be cut from their games--IF Nintendo let them localize at all. When Square moved to PS1 instead of N64, it was a
huge relief for them and they had more or less complete freedom with how they developed their characters.
Partway through FF6, though, they lost Ted Woolsey, the localizer chiefly responsible for the whimsical dialogue (and admittedly very liberal translations) characterized by Super Nintendo-era Square RPGs like Chrono Trigger and indeed FF6 itself ("You spoony bard!"). This is one of the changes in staff that marked a dramatic tone shift in Square's localization style, which from then on tended to be more faithful to the original tone of the games' Japanese scripts. For FF7, which was really gritty and dramatic, this proved a positive boon; for other games in their catalog it tended to border on pretentiousness, which is one of the factors that's dragged Square back so much with its older audiences.
FF8's probably the biggest offender, with one of the most non-sensical pseudo-dramatic storylines ever concieved for a video game, born out of the pomp of riding on FF7's coattails. It's sort of like how M._Night_Shyamalan went on to direct nothing but pretentious crap after the success of The Sixth Sense made his head swell and gave him a taste for twist endings and surreal/paranormal atmosphere; Square became the purveyors of one of the most memorable games of all time with some of the most memorable characters gaming had yet seen and simply got carried away with themselves in an attempt to offer more of the same and top themselves. Except it wasn't so much a case of the Shyamalans as a case of the Nomuras; Tetsuya Nomura, to be specific. He'd worked his way up the food chain until he became the lead character designer during 7, and after his suggestions gave 7 the emotional weight it carried with most of its fanbase, they pretty much turned off the suggestion filter when 8 came around and indulged his whims.
Tetsuya Nomura is kind of like the Tim Burton of Squaresoft and can be credited with the unique neo-fantasy style that the series developed, but he can also be credited with the most daft and indulgent ideas, not the least of which was the "school days" feel of FF8, which undermined a lot of the gravity of the story. If you don't believe me about him being loonier than a toon, though, well, imagine if Kingdom Hearts saw Sora wielding a chainsaw. Yep, that's what he pitched to Disney the
first time around, apparently. Apart from being batshit loco, Mr. Nomura has an obsession with Japanese pop culture and lets elements of it seep into his work frequently, most especially the influence of Japanese pop singer Gackd. The point is, though, that Nomura's influence marked a big turning point in the series in terms of its aesthetics, story ideas, and tone, and he'd only get
more control as time went on.
FF9 was an attempt to go "back to the basics" while still progressing with new gameplay ideas. Except now they were known for having realistic characters and imaginative blends of fantasy and science fiction, and FF9 was a huge throwback to the super-deformed chibi-like style of the older games as opposed to something more faithful to the new style they'd developed with 7 and 8, so most people simply ignore it. It's damn good, though, and successfully blends the old style with Square's new, more serious tone of storytelling.
Love it or hate it, FF10 was the peak of the series. Its level of realism pulled in a huge new audience to gaming in general, its battle system was top-notch, and although many cite the characters as being obnoxious (their dialogue is
really painful if you actually go back and play it), it probably had one of the most coherent and consistent storylines of the franchise with a lot of unexpected but perfectly natural twists. The stylistic change from pre-FF7 is now complete, though, and thanks to the additions of voice acting and relatively realistic-looking characters it couldn't possibly be more dissociated from the style characterized by previous games in the series--or whatever it was fans were
imagining when they played the previous games in the series; hence why some fans cut this off as the last nail in the coffin.
It's after
this game that a lot of the original staff began to leave, though, and this was the very last game in the series to be graced by the iconic musical talents of master game composer Nobuo Uematsu.
Well. Except FFXI. Which nobody really cares about except Square.
Not long afterward, as many including myself have pointed out, Square merged with Enix. This officially marks the downturn in its properties.
Half the reason for this is that the original Final Fantasy team--scenario writers, directors, artists, localizers, and all--are mostly gone at this point. Much of its remaining staff are capable, but the other half of the reason is that now Square-Enix has multiple teams at its disposal with which to make its games, and so they trust properties to different teams a lot more liberally. Such is the case with FFXII, which was given to the team behind Vagrant Story rather than anyone left over from the original Final Fantasy staff; they were all working on Kingdom Hearts, which should go to show where their priorities were at the time.
FFXII was a monumental case of the flip-flops, with new characters being shoehorned into the story at the very last minute of pre-production, a ton of features being developed for months of development at a time only to be completely cut, and its original design lead leaving partway through the production only to have director and producership transferred entirely. This production, clocking in at five years, was so epically inefficient that the team gave director Yasumi Matsuno a send-off by creating "Yiazmat," a boss that takes a good 12 hours to kill. In any case, it didn't have ANY of the hallmarks of the main series; Tetsuya Nomura's memorable characters weren't there, the writing wasn't very tight or interesting, the soundtrack just flat-out wasn't that good, and the game design was a mess, with the License Board system being probably the only thing on the planet worse than FF8's draw system. It was so bad, in fact, that the developers flat-out replaced it in the international version with one based on a more traditional job system. It's not an epic, unplayable disaster of a game, it's just sloppy--really, really sloppy.
FFXIII nearly usurped its record in disastrous development time and creative changes. Much about its production is still unknown, but I can tell you what happened here. Square spent a lot of time getting its best team together from
Final Fantasy XII and what was left of the
Final Fantasy X crew--Nomura included this time--to make the most epic game they could on the PS3. They developed a complete story and an incredibly detailed world and set out to start making it. Unfortunately, Square's just not that great at dealing with 3D assets in the current console generation.
Most developers these days white-box in an environment to get the level design down and leave it to a separate staff member fill in the pretty art where necessary, usually resorting to a bunch of modular pieces for repeatable details like hallways, lamps, and garbage cans. Square's technique revolves around building
completely unique models for everything, thus creating very memorable, hand-crafted locales, which even FFXII could claim a few of. With the detail that goes into creating assets for the PS3 generation of hardware, though, this technique just flat-out doesn't cut it. So, while Bioware went on to release two whole Mass Effect games, Naughty Dog made two whole Uncharted games, and Ubisoft set out to make all of Florence, Final Fantasy XIII languished badly. Their staff became bloated to a whopping 300 people (note: this is enormous for a game development team) while they struggled to get together environments they could've easily cranked out on the PS2 hardware. Oh, also, changing your mind about being platform-exclusive in the middle of a development? Totally a bad idea. Ever notice how some games work better on 360 than on PS3? It's because you have to practically completely re-code the game from the ground up to make it run the same on a PS3 as it would on a 360 and vice-versa. Just imagine foisting that mess on a team in the middle of production.
In the end, FFXIII got cut by about half. The first half, specifically, leaving us with the part where Aeris dies in FF7 as the opening of the game, with no emotional context to speak of. The script was re-written hastily, the environments they already had produced (poorly, at that) were re-purposed, and the already-made cutscenes from the early game were disseminated through this second half of a game as flashbacks to explain what was going on. Well, that's my
theory anyway.
So. It's a big combination of factors, really, but it has been a downward trend--as marked by the comparatively smaller
number of games in the series proper that were released between 2000 and 2010 (three games) as opposed to the ones released between 1990 and 2000 (six games--not including spin-offs). It's becoming creatively very in-bred and having serious issues evolving with the rest of the gaming world, just as it was when Mega Man struggled to find his place when the PS2 became mainstream. My prediction is that by the time 2020 hits, this series will be extinct or very close to it.
Well, that went on longer than I intended.
R
