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May 12, 2024 16:34
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- Countblanc
- Apr 20, 2005
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Help a hero out!
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I'll try to keep this tl;dr
- FF6 is the best FF.
- Key creative people started leaving Square during / after FF6.
- FF7 was good, in spite of a few glaring flaws. It was the all-out multimedia masterpiece that Square had wanted to make since the early 90s, with pre-rendered cutscenes, dozens of hours of music, and all that stuff. It was a huge smash hit and took JRPGs from niche to mainstream. However, Square became a victim of their own success. The start of the 3-D era pushed production budgets 10+ times higher, and fans wouldn't be happy if there was any regression, if they lost the "WOW" factor. This is where the focus on pretty graphics and cutscenes over plot and characters began.
- FF8 is where the series went off the rails. Utterly stupid premise ("these whiny teenagers are the world's most elite mercenary military force") and even stupider plot points ("our summoned monsters made us forget that the main antagonist is really our adoptive mother
 "). It had a few neat original ideas though, like shitloads of hidden sidequests, level scaling, and the junction system.
- The Spirits Within was a massive flop that nearly bankrupted the company and forced them to merge with Enix to survive.
- Vagrant Story, while critically lauded, was also a financial flop. (It had a lot in common with Dark Souls now that I think about it. Guess the market just wasn't ready yet.)
- Due to the previous 2 points, plus spiraling production budgets, Square-Enix became extremely conservative. Gotta stick to "safe" character and story tropes, because one more failure will sink the company for good.
- They've been stuck in this rut ever since FF10. Take for example FF12, which spent years in development hell and had a focus-group-approved teenage protagonist shoehorned in at management's order. Nomura and Kojima have a stranglehold on creative control and are perfectly happy to keep things the way they are.
Double tl;dr: they fired all the writers and became reliant on tropes and graphical bamboozlement.
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Nov 16, 2016 06:49
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Nov 16, 2016 05:24
