DanielJr82 said:

The Japanese are overworked. This same story applies in the anime biz.

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I'm interested in hearing more about this. Is this the reason why so many anime seasons are flooded with generic moe crap?

Pikachu man. I can't believe the FFXIV team, I mean, all I really wanted was FF12 online. How was that hard? I didn't ask for a miracle, but cmon people, you can't expect to churn out shit, and then take it easy and watch it rectify itself.

I'm sorry, and I know some of you guys are gonna get edgy, but ever since square and enix merged, I just don't know anymore. My friend years back was telling me about it, 'Squares gonna get a big head- they don't care about the RPG gamer anymore" I told him to go Juck himself. Square was my boy man. What happend-what happened?

Oh and, If they don't want to work those hours, I'm 120% sure 100,000,000 other people will. And company vacations? Get outta here. Come back when you make a decent mainline game.

Riposte said:

But after they add PvP, raids, materia, chocobos, magitek, and modify the world? There is a chance.

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I was never interested in FFXIV until I read the words materia and magitek. Hell, maybe they can pull this off.

Emulation of the west: "Treat employees like shit" phase complete. "Make mad bank", "Effective communication and vision", and "critical praise": phases stalled.

cosmicblizzard said:

This is why I say Square has the talent but not the management. There really needs to be a change in the place. Wada going would be a start, but the damage has already been done and we'd need a miracle worker like the Gooch again to fix it.

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"Had" is rapidly becoming more appropiate with each passing year of Wada's entropic tenure.

So, uh...

http://kotaku.com/5821127/does-working-at-square-enix-suck

didn't see this mentioned. I find this incredibly hilarious-- make message board posters do your investigative reporting (read: putting 2 and 2 together), and then lazily repost it to get hits for your site. I guess it's not really a bad thing, I think this is newsworthy, but this sort of "journalism" seems very... odd. In all of these cases, I feel like it would be much more respectful to either:

A) Just link to your source, and say "hey, go check out what this guy said"
B) Start out the article by doing A), and then say "thanks for this guy for bringing this to my attention, now I've got my own thoughts on the situation, here they are..."

2-3 hours of sleep a night? I would be fucking depressed and crazy as hell.

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/07/25/square_enix_interviews/

this is the interview famitsu had with the producers.......
Tanaka's response are specially interesting.

Final Fantasy XV and Dragon Quest X have yet to be shown to the public. But Famitsu decided to jump ahead a few numbers for some interviews it held with Square Enix's production staff for company feature that appeared in Weekly Famitsu a couple of weeks back.

The magazine asked a few producers to share their brief vision for Dragon Quest 20 and Final Fantasy 20. This was just one of a series of slightly odd questions posed to the staff.

Here's a sampling of responses, based off a transcript that was posted today at Famitsu.com

Hiromichi Tanaka

Producer of Final Fantasy XI.


What will DQ20 and FF20 be like?
Tanaka responded that they might end up being casual mobile games.

What DQ and FF job mosts suits you?
Responded "bard" because he's always busy doing various things.

What DQ or FF character is most like you?
Responded FFII's Ming-Wu, in the sense that he's like the development staff's guardian.

What DQ or FF spell do you want to see in real life?
Responded with Ethna, as he wants to clear out the poisons from his body.

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they don't have cafeteria over there? ouch.

Naoki Yoshida

Producer of Final Fantasy XIV.

What would you do if you were Square Enix's CEO?
Said he's make a company cafeteria and basketball court.

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more on andriasang article.

I'd suggest that working conditions ties into the much more worrisome issue at SE (and other major Japanese developers), which is cultivating new talent, but I suspect conditions were this way even when they were bringing new blood successfully through the system.

Akuun said:

I'm interested in hearing more about this. Is this the reason why so many anime seasons are flooded with generic moe crap?

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Someone posted a video a while back about Naruto Anime staff... jesus fucking christ. you would think they would invest talent and treat their artists good, but no. those very few staff have to work their ass off, and are destroying their hands because they are so overworked.


Anime is dead as a result. It's incredible how fast that whole industry went to shit.



And it's the same in electronics. Internally, a company like Sony are at war with itself. the different departments fuck each other over.

And both for gaming, anime and electronics they started outsourcing to Kore and China - And right now you see the results of doing that.

In electronics, companies like Sony used companies like Samsung and LG (both Korean) to do the labor work, while Sony took care of the "hard stuff" like designing a beautiful device or doing good marketing, but individual parts were made by these outsourced companies. But then they catched on. Look at Samsung... they are doing relatively comparable phones, tvs, dvds and all sorts of components, but at a cheaper price... they just looked and copied Sony.

Its also why they are in trouble with Apples lawsuits right now. Samsung gained proficiency in making components and "stole" design ques from Sony and Panasonic and such.




Japanese business created a revolution in the 70s, where they had massive booms. Using SOP (Standard operating procedures) the Japanese changed the way we used our working ethics.
Basically, it's a sort of guideline to enable an outside person with little skill to be able to do a specific task, by reviewing these SOPs, and thus become much more efficient. It's widely copied all over the world.


But the Japanese were extreme. they are extreme. It's not uncommon to hear stories about them trying to maximize their deficiency to such a degree that they would sleep in shift at work, and work 24/7.

It looks like this crazed worker bee model can't go on much longer. the workers are grow dull and dumb, can't be creative, the strain on their physical and mental health leaves them like zombies, and when the enthusiasm is gone, the high quality is usually gone too.




If you look at Square-Enix, I personally don't think they have released a really good product outside of Final Fantasy 12 since the early 2000s.

1) They tell poor stories, repeat themselves.
2) They fail to innovative and improve on their weak areas, and just continue living in the past.
3) They make needlessly convoluted products, full of fluff and holes in the design. Obscure battle systems, fucked leveling pacing, overly extended gameplay. Just the whole approach to design is throwing more shit at the toilet problem, instead of trying and fix it. they keep adding layers and layers. A game like FFXIII might have been technically advanced but on the inside it was hollow and shallow as fuck (outside of the battle system).

airmangataosenai said:

Japanese entertainment industries are notorious for having environments like this. Animators in particular, you hear horror stories about them living at work.

Manga artists...

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Yeah, I don't get how people put up with that.
Oda had a whole day off a week Day 1. He drew his schedule in one of the early One Piece volumes.

For me this schedule is the reason so many manga go down the bad route. You start out full of ideas but then the schedule just crushes creativity over the years.

Or look at Arakawa of Fullmetal fame. One 40 page chapter per month instead of 20 page chapters per week. Or Kishiro from Alita, who even was so "lazy" to publish 25-page chapters in a monthly magazine. And it completely shows.

I feel the slave-labour routine of many mangakas is one of the reasons why the industry produces so much so bad content. You can't even properly think about the next chapter under those conditions. I don't believe likewise work conditions do the gaming industry any favours as well.

Clear said:

Game development has always been like this. Worldwide.

Crunch is ingrained in the culture, some places enforce it more harshly than others but its always there to some extent. Ideally it only occurs at certain points of the cycle (build days, final-push etc.) but its always there - nature of the beast.

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Crunch is crunch. People are willing to work overtime to get the project done to a good level of quality. But if that crunch lasts for prolonged periods of time, or is even the standard, then management is doing something terribly wrong.