Hopefully this gets your attention somehow since you seem to care.
If you want SE to get back in the best place it could be ,here are the things that must be done:
1. Improve the writing and story telling of all of your games. FFXIII and many of your recent titles have characters that display such vagueness through their dialogue. They constantly overreact and under react. When they talk, they hardly ever talk about tangible things that are happening right in front of them and in the end the story ends up as another "friendship" story. By default it's more entertaining to have the characters constantly at each other's throats (the entire game). You need to create characters that have a dynamic range of emotions for every character, especially humor and fear. Have the characters have their own opinions that conflict with everyone else's. Each of them should be looking for their own path. And for the love of god, don't ever have annoying characters: Vanille and Chocolina are two perfect examples.
2. Side Quests: Make unique side quests that are all useful in their own way. Don't make all the sidequests based on killing monsters for rewards as that can get repetitive. The structure of the sidequests should present themselves uniquely too (no "mission number 1" or "mission number 63" for any quests). This goes for chapters of the game as well; doing that takes out the immersion of the game.
3. Items: All items should be useful. Don't ever give lacking rewards for any treasure. Recently there have been many useless items throughout your games found in treasures, or rather lacking rewards like 200 gill in a game where that amount doesn't buy you hardly anything at all.
4. World map: You must make world maps for your FF games again. Controllable airships to fly around vast places would be a start, lots of exploration and unique places to find.
5. Battle System: For the most part, it should always be turn based; but more importantly, there should be a variety of things to do in the battle system: You should be able to steal, turn enemies into items/cards, capture enemies, switch between party members if you choose, and much more. The battle system shouldn't always revolve around defeating an enemy.
6.Difficulty and balance: It shouldn't take long to get stronger in your games. Excessive grinding should be avoided at all costs. Certain sidequest bosses should be challenging, but not necessary to fight. If you're not sure on the difficulty, skew it towards easy. Your definition of hard might include very long battles, which is not a good idea. NEVER punish the player in the game, which you have been doing lately. Always find ways to reward the player through their accomplishments.
**Believe it or not, this isn't asking too much, Yosuke Matsuda. This is pretty much how the best FF games always were.
Anyone reading this, please help spread this to SE. I'm not sure how to contact them and give feedback.
Graphics have maybe one more generation to go before they will no longer impress. Developers won't be able to rely on graphics at that point. Nintendo may have made a smart decision staying behind graphically.
Was anybody really expecting anything better? We're going to continue to see more shooter and war games throughout the 8th generation. I'm sure Sony and Nintendo will show some great exclusives, but nothing nearly enough to overthrow the FPS/war mindset for high production valued games.
swyg's comments