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Forum - View topicThe X Button - Squared Circle
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Sheleigha
 Posts: 1674 |
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Oh boo, I'm sad that the news for the Class of Heroes II wasn't on here, as there is only a few days left for it!
(Details here: http://www.gaijinworks.com/) |
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Charred Knight
 Posts: 3085 |
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The problem is that the CEO of Square Enix is incompetent, he cant find new people, the company makes decisions like not bringing over the games that do well critically like Bravely Default (Final Fantasy Type-0 I could sort of understand but why not bring over Bravely Default)
I still think Square Enix has talent left I mean Final Fantasy XIII was certainly flawed (in particular the pacing is atrocious) but they still put a lot of good ideas in their games, and I do like the fact that they understand the damage FF XIV did to their name and tried to fix it I think a big problem is the type of enviroment video games are currently in were selling 1.5 million copies is considered a failure because you needed 2 million to break even. Copying some other guy's game doesnt hurt video game sales, and in fact some fans applaud that type of thinking (recently the creator of Gears of War suggested that the next Saints Row game be more serious so it would be closer to GTA) |
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AiddonValentine
 Posts: 2359 |
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SE has just bled itself of talent. Admittedly though, the three episodes of Xenosaga make me wonder if 'Gears was just a fluke or there was another writer that Takahashi took the credit for so I find Takahashi's being "talented" to be a bit dubious. Still though, when Yasumi Matsuno (by FAR the most talented director and writer to hit that company since Sakaguchi himself) decided to flee it was all over. The current crop of Square talent also just DOESN'T have any eye for finding the right people. When they're trying to prop up hacks like Motomu Toriyama as visionaries, you know they're in trouble.
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Charred Knight
Posts: 3085 |
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Xenoblade was fantastic, and the problem with Xenosaga is that it played like less of a game, and more like a movie so you had a large number of NPC just hanging around doing nothing.
Gameplay wise Xenosaga was perfectly fine, and I lost interest in the franchise because it did things like constantly change character designs. |
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unused
Posts: 36 |
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Yeah right. Square Enix messed up big time. 2 years ago I finally managed to get my hand on a PSP, hoping Type-0 would be released quickly. Now, that game is unheard. Kingdom Hearts stopped being interesting since Chain of Memories. BBS was decent though. But they wouldn't release Re:Chain in US.
They should focus on creating a few high quality RPGs, rather than creating a lot of poor executed titles. |
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Cecilthedarkknight_234
 Posts: 3820 Location: Louisville, KY |
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no mention of star ocean or dragon quest??? I mean those are square-enix franchises after all despite being developed more on the enix side.
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Blem
Posts: 13 |
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the company that's been working on versus xiii for eight years needs to create less games? no i think the key is to create simpler games that don't have 100 million dollar budgets |
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Lynx Amali
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Uh..... They did. I'm a little worried about Colonial Marines but then again, considering I've waited FOREVER for it to actually be released, I'll probably bite and check it out. |
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3980 |
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I finally saw the announcement that I've been waiting for for over a year, the US release of Ys: Memories of Celceta!
I've been an Ys fan since the days of the TurboGrafx-16 and bought a Vita when it was announced that there was going to be a, Ys games for it. |
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Paul Soth
 Posts: 142 Location: Columbus, Oh |
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I miss the old SquareSoft. It's nice to hope that someone will "get the band back together," but it's clear that it's not going to happen. It almost reminds me of some of the shifts that happened with the American comics industry over 20 years ago, with major talent becoming separated from their publishers and the respective companies floundering as a result. Granted that the SquareEnix's loss of talent doesn't have the clash of egos that the Image Migration had, but like Marvel Comics throughout most of the 90's, SE is a once-respected name now mired in mediocrity and clutching to past glories.
Or I could be reaching here. At least the Edios branch is trying. Never thought I'd be saying that... |
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Pleinair92
Posts: 50 |
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I never took the "Square-Enix is bereft of talent" argument seriously. I would point out that Final Fantasy II is still considered one of Square's worst, half of the pre-FFVII games never left Japan, FFVI was fairly divisive among fans at release, FFVIII was very divisive, Chrono Cross is still contested by Chrono Trigger fans, all of The Spirits Within, and other, minor things.
But, given the sheer quantity of missteps, even compared to before, I wonder if the author might have a point. |
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gatotsu911
Posts: 457 Location: US of East Coast |
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Todd I'm a little disappointed that you made no mention of Takashi Tokita in your list of talent still at Square. He had a major role in the development of Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger and Parasite Eve, as well as cult oddities like Live A Live and The Bouncer, and more recently has been collaborating with Matrix Software on retro-themed Final Fantasy spinoffs such as the DS remake of IV, 4 Warriors of Light, and Dimensions. Along with Kawazu, Ito and Kitase, he is one of the last remaining captains of the old guard at Square, and one of the best hopes for the company's future in my opinion.
Other developers with Square lineage include Super Mario RPG veterans Akira Ueda, Taro Kudo, Chihiro Fujioka and Yoshihiko Maekawa, all of whom worked at Kenichi Nishi's Love-de-Lic studio until it disbanded, after which they went their separate ways (Ueda to Grasshopper Manufacture and then to his own audio inc., Kudo to independent studio and frequent Nintendo collaborator Vanpool, Fujioka and Maekawa to the Nintendo-owned AlphaDream), and Mana series creative force Koichi Ishii, who just fairly recently left to form independent developer Grezzo, which is also a habitual Nintendo collaborator. Longtime producer and original Square member Hiromichi Tanaka, whose resume includes Secret of Mana, Xenogears, Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy XI recently left the company after the Final Fantasy XIV debacle. And it might go without saying, but Yasunori Mitsuda is also a Square departee, having left the company in the late 90s, and was in fact among their first A-list talent to do so. I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking of, too. Man, when you think about it, if you ever need an illustration of Sakaguchi's extraordinary ability to recognize and cultivate talent, the veritable wellspring of successful developers that have fallen off the tree he nurtured really speak for themselves. His departure really is what cursed Square. Last edited by gatotsu911 on Wed Feb 06, 2013 11:20 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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sainta
 Posts: 989 |
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I get the feeling Square just doesn't have the people to work in their most promising works. I mean, Final Fantasy X is one of the best selling console RPGs of all time and its rerelease in HD should promise good sales. Kingdom Hearts III and Versus XIII have also been requested a lot by fans but Square is made two sequels for FF13 that delayed a lot their work in Versus XIII. They have the right to do what they can but FFX, KHIII and Versus are their best options to get better sales.
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gatotsu911
Posts: 457 Location: US of East Coast |
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Final Fantasy II was mostly the responsibility of Akitoshi Kawazu, who's still with Square, and was a product of a transitional period in the industry when many developers were experimenting with unconventional sequels and risky game concepts, since compared to today the guidelines for what constitutes a "good" game were not nearly as firmly set in stone. Not to mention, Final Fantasy I and III have aged just as badly as pretty much every other 8-bit RPG. I'm not making the connection between the fact that much of Square's pre-PlayStation output was never localized and a lack of talent. That makes them pretty much the same as nearly any other Japanese developer of that era. I'm genuinely curious about whatever "controversy" surrounded Final Fantasy VI at the time of its release, because literally all I've ever heard about it from people who were into the gaming scene at the time is that everyone who played it regarded it as a technical and narrative milestone. Regardless, it's now an undisputed classic, almost universally agreed to be one of the greatest ever examples of its genre, if not video games themselves. Final Fantasy VIII and Chrono Cross are still regarded as landmark games and major feats of innovation and technical prowess, regardless of the retroactive backlash they've experienced within their respective fandoms (and I say that as someone who considers FF8 to be one of the weakest numbered entries in the franchise). Spirits Within was admittedly a critical and commercial failure and a crappy movie, but even that managed to be significant as a landmark achievement in CG animation that is still studied by computer animators to this day. The trend here is that under Sakaguchi, Square were true visionaries - they always aimed big, even when they misfired, and that made their output consistently exciting and endearing. Since he's left, they've increasingly congealed into a synthetic corporate culture of merchandise-driven, design-by-committee games generally more concerned with pandering for profit and exploiting their past successes than with advancing - dare I say it - an artistic vision. And perhaps even more importantly, they've demonstrated a startling inability to manage their own development teams (just look at the catastrophic development cycles of Final Fantasy XII, XIII, XIV and Versus XIII) and hallmark brands (c.f. the wild over-saturation of Final Fantasy spinoffs in the mid-to-late 2000s, or the steady trickle of unremarkable Kingdom Hearts spinoffs in lieu of the sequel fans have been demanding for the better part of a decade). |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4632 Location: New York |
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Capcom's Aliens vs. Predator should have been the Aliens vs. Predator movie. Hot cyborg chick and Ah-nuld (seriously, it's the same guy Arnold played in the first film) team with Predators to fight aliens. That is awesome. Way more so than Paul Anderson's mess.
As for Square, do us all a favor. Stop it with FF 13. No one liked it the first time. |
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