I used to love Squaresoft and Final Fantasy. I'd get excited every time I heard about one of their game coming. But with time passing, I started to care less and less and while I still played their games, they just weren't as fun.
I figured my taste just changed and the pink glasses of nostalgia simply make me remember those older games as better than they really were.
But what if isn't the case? What if S-E is really have a problem keeping up with the time?
Back in the days...
Simpler graphics meant there was only so much you could do to 'wow' the crowd. While FF games were always beautiful games, merely having beautiful 16bits sprites on the screen wouldn't sell a game. The story and gameplay needed to be good as well. Nowadays, it feels S-E is under the Micheal Bay school of design (Who cares about plot, just throw in a lot of explosion and giant robots!).
This was in the infancy of the RPG style of game, things were different and many concept hadn't evolved yet - nobody would complain about a 'grind' in FFV for example... because 'a grind' wasn't something that had been really identified or qualified yet. And it was an expected and accepted part of any rpg. To me, it often seems like S-E's game designer mindset is stuck firmly in the 90s.
Limited sound technology also meant voice acting wasn't possible, which removed the possibility of horrendous voice acting, which S-E has almost become a synonym for when it comes to translated version of the games.
This combined with limited storage technology also meant you had to keep everything to the point and concise. Everything being in text often made the story much easier to follow and S-E now labyrinth like story were actually understandable. I certainly don't remember the 'Wait? What? Who the fuck is that guy? What the hell is going on? Why the hell am I even going there?' moments of FFVII, FFX or FFXIII in older version like III, IV or VI. Nor were the protagonist 'Dream Ghost Football player of a dead city who came to this world to fight their dad who turn out to be satan' ...
I'm not even going to touch the atrocities that are FFXI and FFXIV...
What S-E needs I guess, is a return to form. If your plot is shallow and simple... have fun with it, don't try and make it seem deep and clever with half-spoken insinuation and plot-retarded characters (A good example of this is FFIX, which was a return to the game's root in many way, and imo, probably the best FF since they changed their media from cartridges to disk)... and they need to remember that beautiful (and plentiful) cutscenes don't make for a good game.
In any case, S-E's business numbers certainly indicate that they need to do something.
The gamble here, is that people now expect this kind of stuff from them, and going back to form might actually alienate the fans that have stuck with them through their downward spiral... and it might be too late to drag back the fans they've lost anyway.
Before the flame start pouring in, this isn't a generalization about jrpg. A lot jrpg fans tell me FF is actually a bad jrpg series and that they are gems out there that I simply don't know about. While that may be true, it must still stink for you guys to see the flagship serie of a genre drag the entire genre down with it.
I figured my taste just changed and the pink glasses of nostalgia simply make me remember those older games as better than they really were.
But what if isn't the case? What if S-E is really have a problem keeping up with the time?
Back in the days...
Simpler graphics meant there was only so much you could do to 'wow' the crowd. While FF games were always beautiful games, merely having beautiful 16bits sprites on the screen wouldn't sell a game. The story and gameplay needed to be good as well. Nowadays, it feels S-E is under the Micheal Bay school of design (Who cares about plot, just throw in a lot of explosion and giant robots!).
This was in the infancy of the RPG style of game, things were different and many concept hadn't evolved yet - nobody would complain about a 'grind' in FFV for example... because 'a grind' wasn't something that had been really identified or qualified yet. And it was an expected and accepted part of any rpg. To me, it often seems like S-E's game designer mindset is stuck firmly in the 90s.
Limited sound technology also meant voice acting wasn't possible, which removed the possibility of horrendous voice acting, which S-E has almost become a synonym for when it comes to translated version of the games.
This combined with limited storage technology also meant you had to keep everything to the point and concise. Everything being in text often made the story much easier to follow and S-E now labyrinth like story were actually understandable. I certainly don't remember the 'Wait? What? Who the fuck is that guy? What the hell is going on? Why the hell am I even going there?' moments of FFVII, FFX or FFXIII in older version like III, IV or VI. Nor were the protagonist 'Dream Ghost Football player of a dead city who came to this world to fight their dad who turn out to be satan' ...
I'm not even going to touch the atrocities that are FFXI and FFXIV...
What S-E needs I guess, is a return to form. If your plot is shallow and simple... have fun with it, don't try and make it seem deep and clever with half-spoken insinuation and plot-retarded characters (A good example of this is FFIX, which was a return to the game's root in many way, and imo, probably the best FF since they changed their media from cartridges to disk)... and they need to remember that beautiful (and plentiful) cutscenes don't make for a good game.
In any case, S-E's business numbers certainly indicate that they need to do something.
The gamble here, is that people now expect this kind of stuff from them, and going back to form might actually alienate the fans that have stuck with them through their downward spiral... and it might be too late to drag back the fans they've lost anyway.
Before the flame start pouring in, this isn't a generalization about jrpg. A lot jrpg fans tell me FF is actually a bad jrpg series and that they are gems out there that I simply don't know about. While that may be true, it must still stink for you guys to see the flagship serie of a genre drag the entire genre down with it.
