What happened to the Final Fantasy franchise?

Remember when we used to have 3 games per gen? And the games were fullfledged games? A complete experience, one title different to another.

Then came XIII and everything went downhill.

But it hit the bottom with XV.

A mess, incomplete, rushed release with content lacking, we, like, paid $60 for a glorified beta.

It's been almost two years and the game is still not complete, and this goes without mentioning the royal pack rip-off.

They went the GaaS and hit rock bottom.

I think we can partly blame mismanagement by SquareEnix and the series creator leaving to form his own studio, but the biggest culprit is games just take more resources to make now than they used to. Final Fantasy X was made by a team of about 100 people, and while I never saw an official number for XV, rumors put it between 300-400.

@judaspete: that's true, while we don't really need 3 FF per gen, we could have something with the quality of XII at least.

While they aren’t at the top of my favourite Final Fantasy games list I still enjoyed FFXIII and FFXV. I got a lot out of FFXV myself, it took me about 100 hours on my initial playthrough. I felt that the game was ‘complete’ enough and in previous gens we probably just wouldn’t have gotten any of this dlc at all and that would have been that. As for not releasing as many games as before I think that as gaming has progressively become more advanced it just takes that much more time and manpower to make these games. They do have other games that they are working and continue to work on like FFXIV which they continue to support and create content for plus they are working on the ambitious FFVII remake.

I never really played 12, but never had any interest in it, and I feel like around that point is where they dropped the ball.

Also, I think maybe the burden of maintaining an online Final Fantasy since like 2003 (11, then 14, AND then REMAKING 14...) has probably has an impact on development of the other main series games.

I also really think SE is having a really difficult time determining what direction to go in with the series in modern times. They want the games to appeal to the Japanese as well as the West, and other emerging markets. But they aren't sure what kind of story or chatacters the game should have, or what gameplay it needs to have. So they wind up with something that tries to take cues from other Western games but feels half-baked, and has a really awkward story and characters.

I still really don't think the merger with Enix is to blame, I would say that Enix's projects have mostly turned out better than Square's since the late PS2 era.

@Ovirew: they should try to praise the Japanese market, that's how they were successful in the last. Jrpg should stay jrpgs, they don't need to westernize final fantasy.

The bizarre is that even kingdom hearts is not westernized and it's better than FFXV.

Final fantasy doesn't need.to be open world.

1. FF on 7th gen console has 4 games. (XIII trilogy, FFXIV)

2. Dev cost rising

3. FF obsession with innovating jrpg

4. SE diversified their portfolio to cater more to western audience (tomb raider/hitman/gravel)

FFXIII trilogy is not that bad. Lot of the older games are much, much worse.

We had 4 games last gen. XIII, XIII-2, and Lightning Returns, plus the XIV MMO. I think the difference is that they make sequels where they didn't do that in the past. We only had X, X-2, and XII the gen before last, plus the XI MMO.

Lets face it; the only decent FF games have been FFVII, FFVIII and FFXV. Fact.

Silly Rabbit. Tricks are for kids. You didn't mention FFVI or FFXII so that's kind of an auto fail lol

What happened to the Final Fantasy franchise?

Now they try to appeal Western gamers by killing off turn-based combat and (vastly empty) open world. I'm not expecting FFXVI to be turn-based either.

It's been almost two years and the game is still not complete, and this goes without mentioning the royal pack rip-off.

True. Yet we get some FF15 fans bashing me saying "get used to it. don't like it, don't buy it.". Some of them need to wake up and smell the coffee.

Anyhow, back on topic. Final Fantasy franchise is dead meat ever since FF13. For me, Square-Enix made some bad decisions with Final Fantasy XIII. At the very least the storyline was bloody long that gave completeness. They could have rectified and made the right decisions with FFXV, but no, they decided to do much worse by releasing a ton of DLCs periodically and grind out as much cash. Plus, Season 2 DLC is coming out next year.

Final Fantasy golden era (FF1 - FF12) is long gone. The only way for Square-Enix to rise from the ashes is perfecting FF7.

@omegamaster:

I think the FF7 Remake already doomed from the start, at least for me. Abandoning the turn-based battle system for hack-and-slash action, episodic content and tons of planned DLCs, it won't impress anyone except for very hardcore FF7 fanboys who want to see Cloud and Sephiroth again and again. Not too long ago Tetsuya Nomura boasted that FF7 Remake will be many times better than its original game that come out 20 years ago. I hope that he won't be disappointed when episode 1 really come out in this year.

I always liked the idea of FF, but couldn't get into it, turned based games get boring for me maybe if they where more hack'n'slash, I liked the movies though even though the first one had nothing to do with FF at all.

Everything went to shit after FFX came out. This is when Squaresoft merge with Enix to become SquareEnix and they released FFX-2.

By the way FF13 is a full fledge game and the ending could end the game there ... they decided to continue but even those have a different gameplay so eh whatever.

I have an idea why they didn't put the whole story in 15. A lot of games do have extended story or alternative story in books or shows/movies and so they split the story in all those media since people consume them anyway.

I agree i couldn't care less about FF series anymore after FFX, the last one i care about for whatever reason. They just fell off for me.

The series was dead to me when they started fucking about with the combat too much from 12 onwards.

I don't like the awkward hybrid of combat it is now.

Did they split their team up too many directions? All at once I see them working on 15, 7 remake, and tons of original mobile ff games. Not to mention the hd ports on ps4 and steam. Back in the day I think the focus was more concentrated on making one badass game at a time in a timely manner. I miss the snes/ps1 era square.

The interesting thing is that FF7 and FF8 were both made by taking concepts from things that would make the games more "Americanized". They intentionally made characters to look more Western, and set the games in places with more American environments and styles. They took cues from American action movies and worked in more elements of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic settings. Squall was even modeled after River Phoenix. It's not to say that there weren't Asian influences there - the 'organizational committee' from 8 being one good example of this, but I mean... Come on... Everyone in Balamb eats hot dogs for lunch, lol.

By contrast 10 had much more Asian influence.

I know that's a bit off-topic - these influence aren't so much related to open world or Western-style games, but there certainly has been Western influence on FF games - successful ones.

And let's not forget - most of the older games have more English or French (Vana'Diel) settings. And, Japanese as the series might be, it is in fact a renown Iranian-American programmer who developed most of the battle systems for the early FF games we all know and love.

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Grade: A+

It started going downhill after IX. Sad.

They got bigger, more expensive, more "ambitious" ie. eager to be the jack-of-all-trades of AAA gaming.

Focused too much on style that they forgot about the substance.