Final Fantasy: Decline and Fall or Fall and Rise?

Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada acknowledged this week that the fumbled launch of Final Fantasy XIV "greatly damaged" the brand.

To their credit, Squeenix has never charged users beyond the initial purchase price for the discs and they're still making changes, adding systems and trying to realize some of the setting's potential.

But it never should have come to this.

Of course, as an MMO FFXIV was already on many gamers' Ignore list. For them, the damage to the brand came from the extremely linear Final Fantasy XIII. Square Enix is trying to address that criticism with the forthcoming Final Fantasy XIII-2.

I'm a long time FF fan, but the sad truth is I didn't make it past the tutorial phase of FF XIII. Of course, said tutorial phase lasted like two hours or something, so that had a lot to do with it. I've just never had the urge to go back. I may finally force myself to work through it when the sequel gets closer, but I shouldn't have to force myself to play something from a series that was always a Day One purchase.

The good news is that Square Enix isn't bunkering up - they've taken their lumps with due humility for XIV and continue to work on the game far beyond the point where most publishers would have written it off and moved on. And they don't seem afraid to look outside the Japanese gaming scene to see what's working in the rest of the world, which is a good thing since in many respects Western console role playing games have far outstripped their Eastern rivals.

Given the long production cycles, Square Enix is probably already far along on Final Fantasy XV's world, plot and character design. If I could give any advice, however, it would be this: go back to first principles. When first starting work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, EIDOS Montreal required the design team to go back and play the original title. And it shows all throughout the final product. It's not a slavish recreation, but a natural evolution. Do the same with the Final Fantasy brand. Go back to what works, strip away the decades of FMV, anime tropes and pop songs.

Rediscover the fundamentals of the game play and game players will come back to you.

Comments

[tov]

We have tried, many times to play several of the FF MMOs. They just are not polished the way WoW is unfortunately. I am really part of the problem - I want something different from wow, but if it's different, I don't like it because it's not what I'm used to. The FF MMO that we last played was basically a port from console to PC, and PAINFULLY obvious. Using the interfaces shouldn't be so horrible.

I have never been a big FF buff, but of the stories that I have heard, the story in the movie and the tiny stories that I've played through, they seem really awesome. For some reason they haven't translated to a genre that I like playing.