All-Purpose Final Fantasy Thread

[Shareefruck]

Yes FFT was one of my favourites so I disagree, though everyone's entitled to their opinion. I just wanted to add for some of the criticism here at the time it came out it was much more novel. The job system wasn't new to the FF series, but III and V didn't initially leave Japan. I believe same with the Dragon Quests that had their own. So it was a massive plus on the PS1 when FFT came out with a system that gave you a lot of flexibility and creativity. Other SRPG at the time like Shining Force, Ogre Battle, or Fire Emblem you generally just got a 'promotion' to a new class. Same with Vandal Hearts when it came out, good game but more of the same for what we already had.

I'm pretty sure the same thing goes for FFT story, maybe cliche now but was much more original at the time.

I don't see how its story can be cliche now considering that it's so niche and not popular to tell a story this way that barely anything even bothers to emulate it (and the things that do like Triangle Strategy don't do it nearly as well).

I can't think of many things that even bothers to drench every line with clever conceits and thematic consideration, or has the boldness to tackle a premise about a thankless/non-glorified protagonist, a morally ambiguous antagonist, or that has a mostly negative/bittersweet outcome ambiguous ending in the way this does (there's some, but not many, honestly-- Kentucky Route Zero comes to mind). Doesn't seem all that profitable or in fashion to do any of these things.

Hell, I WISH this became more cliche, because it would mean that we would have had more good things like it than we actually have.

That said, I do have SOME criticisms (the Templar Knights, as end-game characters, should ideally have more interesting/memorable characterization, like the Dark Knights in Tactics Ogre did-- I hope they fix that in the remaster).

 

[Shareefruck]

I thought this was an interesting idea. Haven’t gotten fully through it, but essentially all recent Final Fantasy’s have been disappointing in terms of sales. When you see the success of Expedition 33 with a drastically smaller budget, it makes you wonder if Square needs to keep making such expensive entries.

From Final Fantasy 7-10, Square was on the cutting edge of graphics and pushing the hardware limits. That was a big selling point at the time for some. Nowadays every game looks great and the differences between their work and others is far smaller. Taking a step back from the fidelity arms race and focusing more on a memorable story like Expedition 33 might be the best path forward.

To me XV is the worst entry in the series because it’s so soulless and obviously chasing trends rather than setting them. It’s still unbelievable they shipped a mainline single player entry with such a barebones story. Totally focused on a few big spectacles rather than the gameplay or characters. While there is an above discussion about the weakness of the storytelling (I disagree), at the time entries like 4, 6, 7 and 9 had amazing world building and writing compared to the vast majority of the competition.

This is a common suggestion people talk about. It might be the best path forward if they had the talent to do it, sure, but my prevailing thought is, what the hell makes us think that they even have the talent/artistry/sensibilities to pull something like that off? A lot of their guys who have had that type of boldness and creative integrity (Sakaguchi and Matsuno) have left.

As much as I prefer the approach in general, I can't help but suspect that we would only end up with less pretty AA FFs that have the same weak stories, because that's just the best that they can do now, personally. You tell Nomura to buckle down and take his sweet time to focus on story/world building, I'd fear for the result. His badness doesn't seem to result from a lack of effort/time/creative freedom, in my opinion.

Maybe give a AA FF to that female writer (forgot her name) that everyone says made part of FFXIV's storytelling so good.

 

[PeteWorrell]

Conservative corporate culture is what impedes creativity. Even as a small company, Squaresoft turned down Sakaguchi's first pitch to make Final Fantasy. They only approved of the project after Enix had released Dragon Quest to great success.

Another thing that takes away talent are the promotions. Gifted creators keep getting promoted up the corporate ladder and they are less and less involved into actually making games. It is good that they can use their clout to push for certain projects but they are no longer directly involved in the creation.

 

[RandV]

I'm not going to watch the video but yeah I've been saying that since the FFXIII fiasco. Square got a jump in the 3D graphics game with FFVII and made it their thing. But while cutting edge at the time it was still pretty low tech and not so expensive/time consuming that they could still keep up 3 FF title releases for the PS1 and PS2, and Square helped push the genre to the front of the pack for those gens. By the time we got to the PS3 gen, the market had caught up and that shit was getting both expensive and time consuming, plus the popularity of the genre went into steep decline.

FFXIII was the point where you can start to ask 'does the game really benefit from this expensive and time consuming leading edge tech', and to me that's an easy no. It's questionable if at this point they had the right talent to make the same 'quality' of game, but taking almost the entire console life cycle to get one FF title out certainly didn't help things.