Square Enix Has Lost the Plot for the Final Fantasy Franchise
Note: This is an editorial/opinion piece, and neither speaks for the rest of the gamersledge.com staff, nor community members from the site. If you want to skip the tldr (too long didn’t read) backstory to learn about me and my experience with Square, click here.
Well, it’s done. Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns has finally been released in the wild, and even has a timely demo for folks that would like to download and play it. Let me give you some free advice — don’t bother.
See, the thing is that Square Enix has completely lost the plot. They no longer know how to make Final Fantasy games that people care about (XIV not withstanding, see farther below).
In order to get my point across, I feel the need to look at my own personal history with the company so that you, the reader, can understand who I am as a Square Enix longtime customer, and why I have lost all faith in the franchise.
My very first game was Final Fantasy II on the SNES in the United States (Final Fantasy IV). To say I had never played another game like it is an understatement. It was the first truly character-driven story I had ever experienced, and it blew me away. I had saved my own money to own a Super Nintendo, and this was the first game I had ever purchased. I was riveted to the storytelling and realized that video games could be an entire new medium I had never considered.
This review sums it up nicely.
From there, Final Fantasy III (Final Fantasy VI) landed in the US and I was blown away by how they not only managed to keep what I liked, but expanded into new areas. Again, we were treated to one of the most character-driven stories to ever be put on screen not in a movie. All of this with a major plot twist that I have yet to see replicated to this day. As we are a spoiler free site, I will not go into it, but if you have never played this game, there are very few parallels I can draw other than the Walking Dead to the major plot twist that happens two thirds through the game.
To this day, I’m not sure which I like better – Final Fantasy IV or VI — I like both for different reasons. Not to mention they both have amazing soundtracks that sound even better when symphonies perform them:
Final Fantasy VI’s main themes.
And then, as I entered college, a small collaboration between the artist behind Dragonball Z and Square produced what is arguably the greatest RPG of all time, and one that would change my life, as I would only invest more hours into three other games throughout my lifetime.
With this game, we had something that has always captivated me: Time travel. Introduced into an exceptionally vibrant RPG and the inclusion of multiple endings (13 to be precise, which I beat and saw all of them) and not only did my grades suffer, but so did my attendance. Many things happened in my life at school that are for another post, save to say that for a while I was not playing videogames. And then, I poured myself into them. I discovered the Ultima series, the Gold Box D&D computer game series (I was a bit late to that party) and the 7th Guest distracted me for a time.
Finally, I was in a good place for gaming with friends, and I invested in the original Playstation. I was excited beyond belief for Final Fantasy VII. I had imported Tobal No. 1 to get the demo from Japan, and later had the second demo from Playstation Underground (you could get videos and demos — on disks! 1996 was the shiznite!).
I will summarize my experience with FF7 very quickly – I logged 370 hours in total on the game, (most of that was from my duplicate knights of the round materias firing off over and over and over lol) and it was the first time I ever noticed a chink in the storytelling armor of Squaresoft (I had over 20 pheonix downs in my inventory — seriously guys, no disconnect there?). But overall, I LOVED it. And there were so many games that followed that weren’t Final Fantasy.
My infamous Bushido Blade drinking game appeared in 1997, Tobal 2, Einhander, Final Fantasy Tactics, and then Xenogears, Bushido Blade 2, Parasite Eve, Brave Fencer Musashi in 98 – to say they had me hook, line and sinker — I was now traveling for work, taking my playstation with me. Squaresoft games were my lifeblood.
In 1999, I had no clue that my favorite final fantasy of all time was coming – Final Fantasy VIII.
It featured a much more memorable (and easier to make sense of) story than VII, had a new magic system that I loved (and most other people hated), and even took us into space! I very quickly figured out how to exploit the new mechanics (two healers, 1 almost dead main character; limit break your heart out and raise when necessary), but that did not stop me from grinding almost two hundred hours out of the game. Between the soundtrack, the gunblades (so cool!) and the story, I believe it is the most overlooked and underappreciated game in the series.
Something else notable happened in 99 for the first time – they rereleased many of their games that had only appeared on the SNES onto the Playstation – and people ate them up. This was the first time that Square had truly realized they could make money by simply porting. (That and they were gearing up for the Playstation 2.)
2000 began and Final Fantasy IX launched. Would you believe that I absolutely detested it? It felt like such a backwards departure from their last two games; that it felt old and stale. Plus, I hated Zidane and felt the story was contrite. To this day, I’m not sure if I ever finished it… I’m not even including a picture for it, that’s how much I didn’t like it!
I walked out of my local gamestore with FIVE PS2’s in late 2000, and I sold them all to friends (not even at an upcharge) and when the first Squaresoft game was released in March of 2001, I had worked myself into a fervor over:
The Bouncer by Squaresoft. I played the hell out of it. It was the first game I walked away from (besides FFIX) feeling less than satisfied. The graphics were amazing, the fighting was fun, but the story was mediocre.
But my disappointment wouldn’t last long, as Final Fantasy X would come along and remind me why I loved Squaresoft in the first place. Strong characters, a great story and Blitzball – I absolutely loved it. I was in awe of the graphics. The story wasn’t as good as previous entries, granted. But it did have relatable characters, set around the important task of saving the world once more. Although I did not spend *nearly* as much time with it as previous entries due to life and work, I thought it a worthy entry into the series. (I can’t wait for the HD rerelease upcoming for PS3 and Vita — crossing fingers for PS4 at some point)
For me, it was a satisfying beginning to the PS2 era for Squaresoft. Little did I know, my demise would come just after finishing the story.
As soon as I had cleared FFX, someone told me that in Japan, they had released a new kind of Final Fantasy — one that allowed people to play together. Now, I had dabbled in MMOs before, like Ultima Online and Everquest; but this was a SQUARESOFT game online.
It was called Final Fantasy XI. I imported it, and spent the next six months typing in Japanese and staying up until all hours of the night playing with other westerners who had imported, with the Iron Maiden Troopers linkshell. I lost myself for five years of my life into this game, I have one of the firstNinja Artifact Armor Quest FAQs ever written. You can touch me!
The music was fantastic, the story was actually interesting and the camaraderie was second to none.
When Final Fantasy XII finally came out, I was absolutely thrilled. It was *almost* Final Fantasy XI offline; a single player variety. It also sported a character (who is now my favorite final fantasy character) with a very similar name to my online handle. Balthier, you sly devil, you! I devoured 12 and went right back to the online version, salivating at what could be on the horizon with this new Playstation 3 on the horizon.
When Final Fantasy XIII came out, I played. And I played. And I sat there in disbelief. The game was horrible. The characters were milktoast; their motivations were generic. The dialogue was contrived. The story was laughable. I had no freedom (and by the time I did, I was sick of the game honestly). I could care less about Lightning; she’s the most boring protagonist they’ve ever had. I like ZIDANE more than her — at least I feel something for him. The approach to the game was all wrong; I never felt like they gave me a reason to care about anyone other than Sazh; but even that was pretty hamfisted the majority of the time. It is the only Squaresoft game I have ever traded in.
This is where I will take a quick aside to discuss Final Fantasy XIV; I don’t have much to say about it other than a) It’s a lot of fun and b) it’s Final Fantasy XI but with some enhancements. Really. This is why it works; they didn’t really do anything new — yes, there are new things and ways to do things, but seriously — it’s the same freaking game. They just changed the names of the races!!
Square has been selling less and less of the Final Fantasy franchise over time.
Final Fantasy VII sold 9.8 million copies.
Final Fantasy VIII sold 8.2 million copies.
Final Fantasy IX sold an estimated 8 million copies.
Final Fantasy X sold 6.6 million copies.
Final Fantasy XII sold 5.2 million copies.
Final Fantasy XIII sold 6 million copies
Final Fantasy XIII-2 sold just 2.8 million copies.
This is a huge departure in sales, and as of this writing, if you look at launch sales for FFXIII: Lightning returns, it is just 18% of what Final Fantasy XIII’s launch sales were.
Yet here we have the creator saying that Lightning is one of the most popular characters ever. On top of that, when asked about creating a remake of Final Fantasy VII, the MOST popular entry in the entire franchise, he said “It would take a lot for that to happen.”
Really? Are your current ideas that great? Let me tell you – just having played the demo of Lightning Returns, I can say the following critiques:
1. The music is horrible, and somehow sounds dated.
2. Battle, while I see it being potentially deep with the job class, is in no way, shape or form interesting to me. I have 3 AP bars (1 for each class) and can switch between them when I run out. It’s still only one person fighting and completely uninteresting (to me).
3. At the start of the demo, you make me watch the cutscene without sound, that I then spend watching for six minutes with sound. And I still don’t care. The characters are still soulless, the dialogue is boring and cliche, and when Hope is speaking to me as I’m traversing the world, I trigger cut scenes that stop him from speaking, never to hear the end of what he was going to say.
4. That brings me to production values. It’s like they aren’t even trying. I’m running through corridors that have no soul. You have me chase Snow through all these areas so quickly, there’s no time to either figure out why they are there or whether I should appreciate them.
5.Then, I finally find where he is, and I have to teleport away because someone *spotted* me? When I just killed three guards in a roomful of people, I just beat 40 someodd monsters, and I just took out a three-story tall hentai creature — but I’m worried about some freaking human guards? Really?
It’s a mess. It’s like there is noone overseeing the different departments and coordinating them to make a cohesive game.
So, I’ve spent 2000 words criticizing. How can they fix it moving forward?
1. Start fresh. If you aren’t going to give us our Final Fantasy VII remake (which would print money), then start with a story that people are going to care about. It doesn’t always have to be about saving the world.
2. Look at the past to draw better influences. Look at the storyline from Final Fantasy VI. You haven’t played a story card like that in quite some time. Maybe it’s time to turn your storytelling on its ear. How about changing things up and having a Final Fantasy where we play the villain? That would most definitely be different. Recent games from this generation (The Last of Us, the Uncharted Series and others) have shown how you can make compelling origins for bad people.
3. Stop focusing so much on the combat systems. It’s still an RPG. If I want an action RPG, I’ll play Kingdom Hearts. Figure out how to innovate the traditional JRPG system. It doesn’t even have to be realtime (gasp!).
4. Listen to your fans, don’t tell us what we want. Your sales reflect that you aren’t delivering what you want.
5. Your sales expectations are unrealistic. Figure out how to utilize smaller teams with more limited budgets to give a core experience that gamers want. (Final Fantasy Tactics 2 anyone?)
Square Enix, I love Final Fantasy. I love your older games. Come back to the path. We vote with our dollars, and unless you start listening to what I want as one of your core gamers, you won’t be getting anymore of mine.
Do you agree or disagree? What has your experience with Square games been in your life? Let us know in the comments below…
Interesting read, but I strongly disagree on most points. If it matters, I too’ve been playing FF games all my life. FF2/4 basically taught me to read as a kid. 😛
I personally think FF13’s characters are some of the most fleshed-out, well-rounded, and believable characters in the franchise. Hear me out! Their motivations are all a LOT more complex, they’re just not revealed as quickly through half-assed expository dialog in their first encounter.
Locke: “You remind me of someone…”
Wakka: “You look like him!”
Lightning joining the military, pushing Serah away, feeling angry and worthless in realizing Snow protected Serah when Lightning didn’t, changing her temperament when she realizes the influence she has on Hope, and eventual reconciling with Snow was a much deeper arc than almost any other character in the franchise. Beyond that, the characters actually developed, where with a few exceptions, the huge majority of them tend to stay the same.
I think the reason they were made to be, dare I say, “off-putting” at the outset is that they were to be given room to grow, because they were (mostly) necessary through the whole story, so they’d have room to grow. In most FF games, characters tend to have have very little to do after they’re introduced. In FF6, everyone but Celes, Edgar, and Setzer is entirely skippable before the final confrontation. Recruiting Setzer gives you a glimpse into his backstory, prior to that he may have just been another random face. Edge, Strago, Relm, Barrett, Cid, Cait Sith, Zell, Selphie, Quistis, Amarant, Freya–party members join, they get one or two scenes, then they shut up and let the main characters shine.
Where I felt 13 shined was the characters actually interacted with each other in meaningful ways. In 10, Yuna, Lulu, and Wakka are meant to be childhood friends, but they each only have two or three conversations with each other throughout the game. Since they were saving the big twist about what happens when the Final Aeon is called until late in the game, they get no opportunity to show any kind of internal conflict about what was going to happen. Instead, the most we got was a “We tried to stop her!”, and a Wakka who’s more nervous about playing in a Blitzball tournament than his friend dying. Auron barely interacts with anyone other than Tidus and Yuna, ditto with Rikku. To me, Lightning apologizing (in her own way) to Snow while shedding a tear was a much more earned character moment than Squall flying off to space to save Rinoa, or Cloud losing his marbles.
I’m only a few hours into 13-3, but about your thoughts on the demo:
That wasn’t a silent cutscene you were watching, that was essentially a trailer you were meant to skip, which is why it was before you even got to the title menu. There was one at the start of 13-2 as well that also basically showed the intro. Weird choice for them to include, but whatever.
I don’t remember what the music was like in the demo, but I’m enjoying the main game’s score. It’s a lot more like 13’s (Fabula Nova Crystallis is one of my favourite songs in the franchise), which I liked a hell of a lot more than 13-2’s J-Pop tracks.
Anyways, on to the game itself:
IMO, the one-person-fighting isn’t that big a deal. I personally don’t find it much different than FF6, 7, 8, 10, or 10–they had so much character customization that ultimately, everyone ended up being the same person. It doesn’t matter who’s using Quick Hit or Ultima, or KOTR when they’re all doing the same damage)
They should absolutely focus on battle systems, battle systems are a huge part of RPGs. FF13’s battle system DID innovate the typical JRPG battle system, and it received a ton of critical praise because of it. I think people are overthinking the old games’ battle systems. They’re mindless, and even worse, they’re grindy. FF13 discouraged grinding, 13-3 actually punishes it.
I think it’s a bit silly to criticize the dialogue when it’s no worse off than any other game in the series. Give Terra a voice, and her soul-searching quest to understand love will suddenly turn from moving to laughable.
If anything, Square-Enix needs to STOP listening to their fans, because their fans DON’T KNOW what they want. Look up any article praising a particular Final Fantasy game, and there’s a dozen people insisting that game “ruined the franchise”, “# was better,” etc. With 13-2, Square-Enix addressed every major complaint about the original (keep in mind at the time, people were primarily just complaining about the linearity, the bandwagon hate about everything else hadn’t begun), and the game suffered because of it.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about the production values, I think the game looks friggin beautiful.
Finally, sales data from the series’ older games isn’t relevant today. Back in the day, RPGs–particularly Final Fantasy games, were almost the ONLY games you could play that had anything resembling a story at all. That’s not the case anymore, and it’s showing, because now people are less interested in the genre as a whole. I may be wrong, but the only modern RPG that has duplicated the success of RPGs in their prime was Pokemon X/Y, and that has a lot of things working in its favour that no other franchise has, Final Fantasy or otherwise. Tales, Ni No Kuni, Star Ocean–even with falling sales, Final Fantasy is still having a much greater success than most of its competitors in the genre.
Because of this, I think it’s a big premature for people to be insisting a FF7 remake would be some massive commercial success. 7’s sold 10 million copies, yes, but it also spanned multiple platforms, and debuted in a time when RPGs weren’t just a niche market.
Just my two cents…I’ll stop rambling now. 😛
Comment so big it broke the page format! 😛
Ultimately I think the thing that really threw me with 13’s characters was that there was no initial hook for me. Even the class system takes a while to get unlocked, so they don’t even feel special in combat. Add to that some questionable voice acting, and lets admit it silly written script isn’t nearly as bad as sill VA script, and the game starts on kinda a blah. Personally the greatest offense was the hallway. I’m not gonna debate it because I have and it is a preference thing, that that the thing that almost killed FFX for me. I *GET* that both were stories of focusing on “getting somewhere” but it really annoys me when I have so little freedom in an RPG.
RPGs are definitely in a slump, and with so many games having RPG like elements and more developed stories I know developers are trying to do things that will draw in sales. For me, Squenix should look at one of the most successful RPGs of recent history: ES V: Skyrim. Make a JRPG, with that kind of freedom, storytelling and a turn based system and i would be in heaven.
It was broken when I got here, I swear! 😛
The class system in 13 unlocks about an hour into it, but yeah, it’s weird that they took a while to actually unlock the multiple roles. The douchiest part of the “tutorial” phase in 13 was that you’re not gaining any xp, so they don’t tell you you’re better off skipping as many battles as possible. I expect the limited selection was because they didn’t trust the gamers to know which roles to use so they simplified it, like they did with Sphere Grid in FFX compared to the International version. In 13, even though everyone can eventually use all roles, Hope will never be as good a Commando as Fang, Snow’ll never be a great Medic, etc.
Bang-on with the voice acting and dialog. Quina telling a dwarf to “Lali-ho yourself” would never be so amazing if s/he were given a voice. I just try and think of the games like one might with anime, in that sense that a lot of people prefer subs over dubs. Even translated accurately, a lot of the dialog is gonna come off as pretty darn hammy.
13-3 actually took the voices a step forward–I’m not 100% sure, but I *think* it’s the first game in the series to actually sync the character’s mouths to the dialog, rather than making the voice actors attempt the opposite. I know it’s not for everyone, but as someone who’s invested in the characters, there were some scenes in 13-3 that Ali Hillis and Troy Baker totally knocked it out of the park as Lightning and Snow, that they might not have been able to do as effectively if they were constrained by the original animations. In 10, Yuna’s English voice actress actually did a really good job of syncing the dialog to the character’s movements, but the result was that Yuna kind of sounded like she had a speech impediment that everyone was too polite to acknowledge.
I think, unfortunately, the “hallway” is just something that’s happening to all modern gaming, not just RPGs. Shooters, survival, action, all of it. Elder Scrolls/Fallout of course being an exception, but most things beyond the “world map” (which is admittedly ginormous) are still pretty constrained–there’s just a lot to explore in a way only a first-person game would really let you). I actually *hated* the storytelling in Elder Scrolls. Bethesda crafts a damn good lore, but good gravy they struggle to populate it with anything interesting. I’d love for Obsidian to take a crack at it the way that they did with New Vegas…I just think of the huge backstories all the New Vegas companions got, then think of all the Skyrim ones sharing the same voices, and F’ing Lydia, who wouldn’t stop complaining about carrying my burdens. 😛
Squeenix sure as heck listened to the complaints about the hallway, though, maybe even to an extreme. Some of these areas are just massive. I’m not exaggerating when I say the Wildlands are comparable to FF6’s entire map, and there’s actually a ton of stuff to do in it. I think the quest structure in it is somewhere between Skyrim and Legend of Zelda–you get given missions to go to the ass-end of the world and do whatever, but you don’t get any kind of map markers, and you might have even picked up the item you needed before you got the mission to find it. It’s very exploration-driven, possibly even to a fault, since it can be kind of overwhelming to look at your quest lists and see the dozens of things you could be doing and trying to sort out the most efficient way to tackle them, keeping the clock in mind. It’s insane, and stressful, and somehow more fun than it has any right to be.
Have you tried Bravely Default? A lot of people are praising it as the “game that Final Fantasy should be”. I think it’s as great as it can be, but it highlights and acknowledges the inherent flaws of JRPGs. It even makes very worthwhile efforts to correct them, but I think it has already ruined my next turn-based experience since I’m guessing those features won’t be included. :/
I believe it. There has never been a comment that long before…we didn’t realize Disqus and the Theme don’t play nicely with the expanded comments.
ANYWAY – I have looked at Bravely Default and it is intriguing, but I don’t know when/if I’ll pull the trigger. Largely a time factor. That and backlog from hell. My backlog has backlogs. I haven’t put any time in with the XIII-III demo and I didn’t play XIII-II so I can’t really comment on a lot of that stuff in that regard. It sounds like they tried to adjust for some of the complaints.
There are those that love XIII and I am glad they exist. I know some SMT players that LOVED trying to crack the battle system, and those folks are doing the same with LR. (Something about spending EP on only Chronostasis seems to be the key debate) I wish I cared about LR. I wish I felt like XV was going to reclaim FF for me. Honestly I have hopes for XV, but part of my, and Balth’s I think, problem is we are looking to reclaim something of the past, and FF as it is progressing keeps getting further and further from that. It’s probably not fair, but I will judge FF games to a different standard and for good or ill XIII poisoned the water for me. Ultimately it is a personal choice, and I am glad you are digging it, but I can’t seem to care. Oh and add to that the whole Majora’s Mask mechanic and I am REALLY out the door 😛
Hey, the image got resized! 😛 Was it the large comment specifically, or would any thread that length have done it?
The Majora’s Mask mechanic in LR is pretty hilarious/stupid…since time keeps getting rewound, I think my first “day” lasted something like ten hours of playtime, so while there’s pretty much NO pressure to rush and do anything, I found myself weirdly stressed out playing it–in a good way, somehow 😛 Gawd, I WISH I could only have used my EP on Chronostasis, but I’m just so effing bad at the game I needed it to get through random battles, because holy crap, some of those bastards hit hard!
I’m all for people having their own favourite FF games, and I totally understand why a lot of people might not like 13. I think the Metacritic score is fairly accurate–lower than the other games, but still a respectable 80-ish. I don’t necessarily think the game is underrated, but I certainly believe it’s over-criticized. The flaws that existed at its release still exist, but so do the aspects it was praised for–the battle system got a ton of critical acclaim (the characters and story too weren’t without compliment, either).
The 13 games certainly aren’t perfect, but I find the sweeping statements people make about them to be not only hypocritical (I’ve seen people in the same rants trash on the Crystarium’s linearity while praising the Sphere Grid’s freedom, while not only are they the same basic system, but the Sphere Grid is actually much more constricting), but they just make gamers look bad. This site’s tag of building “fun, passionate communities” is pretty much in line with the philosophy I try to follow online, and IMO, what gamers should strive towards–I find it much more inspiring to see people sharing what they care about, rather than shitting all over what they don’t. People even within the FF fandom in particular just get SO negative about FF games that they just start ranting about every aspect of an entry they don’t like, however baseless and petty their claims end up being–I try and avoid IGN game articles because they so often just turn into a never-ending vortex of cynical jackassery.
Haven’t tried SMT, I was looking at it on the eShop a while ago and was torn between it and Etrian Odyssey 4 (I suspect I chose incorrectly… :/) Anything else exciting on the backlog? If you can squeeze in time for even the Bravely Default demo, you might find it worth a look. It’s a great demo (solid few hours, bonuses to import to full game), but it’s pretty darn misleading about how the game is structured–it’s a lot more like a ‘classic’ FF than the free-roam-iness of the demo implies.
It looks like it is when the Disqus [see more] feature is kicked in. the theme doesn’t adjust for the extra length May just be a Disqus setting though. Have to dig a bit deeper.
Honestly I have never played a proper SMT. Dabbled in the Persona games is about it. Right now I am catching up on Uncharted so that is pretty fun. I have soo many games I am behind on most of the time I don’t even know what to play.
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