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Square-Enix Executive Embarrassed by Company's E3 Showing

M_Night said:
Would love another XII style game, but only if Matsuno is at the helm. The lack of Type-0 at E3 annoyed me greatly.



Haha, here's what I could find anyway. There was a bit more about his character somewhere.



http://finalfantasy-xiii.net/2008/1...erview-what-you-should-know-about-noctis.html

Judging from his dialog in the latest he came across as loud and hot headed.
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It didn't look like he actedin a calm, confident manner, he acted more like a moody, self-centered douchebag, not to mention he needs a haircut.
 
claviertekky said:
Maybe Inafune and Itagaki were right.

The Japanese game industry is behind.
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very behind... they can barely survive this gen. Next gen they might get left in the dust.


Maybe the Wii U can save the Japanese industry
 
In all honesty the more I think about it it's "next gen" that did them in. Their DS output was pretty good (exempting the glut of ports/remakes), FFCCRoF/EoT, DQIX, TWEWY, FFTA2 (I personally hated 358/2 and recoded). And though I haven't played it I hear KHBBS wasn't bad either. I think they saw next-gen consoles and were done in by HD and hi res textures, case in point the infamous "HD towns" comment. They got caught up in the pixel counting game and weren't ready for it, hence they needed huge amount of quick selling DS ports to likely fund games stuck in development hell like Type-0, Versus, XIII, XIV, among others. I sincerely hope they learn from these mistakes and get back to really focusing on quality console games in a timely manner.
 
Not even being able to show a new trailer for Versus was just embarrassing. I don't even think the game exists anymore.
 
Negator said:
Ugh. If XII was the future, that is a future I don't want to be a part of.
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^now thats what im more used to


Zeal said:
Not even being able to show a new trailer for Versus was just embarrassing. I don't even think the game exists anymore.
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you know whats worse is the fact that technically they didnt even release that trailer, it was leaked then since it was already out they might as well release a better quality version of it.
 
Aeana said:
What happened was that the next game in the series came out, so people chilled out on the last one they hated. Happens with Zelda too.
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I would say it works both ways in that poorly liked sequels make their previous installments seem better, while well-liked sequels (here I'm thinking SMG2 and Uncharted 2) make their previous installments come down to earth.
 
Stumpokapow said:
I would say it works both ways in that poorly liked sequels make their previous installments seem better, while well-liked sequels (here I'm thinking SMG2 and Uncharted 2) make their previous installments come down to earth.
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The difference being that SMG2 and Uncharted 2 are basically the same game as their predecessor with small improvements, whereas FFs and Zeldas tend to be radically different from game to game and appeal to a different group of people every game.
 
FFXII had so much fucking potential but square blew it with stressing matsuno so much he had to quite.
If he had stayed we probably would've gotten something that resembled a mix of vagrant story and demons souls.
The concept of a huge seamless overworld with realtime encounters was also fucking brilliant. And so was the gambit system.
FFXIII took 14 steps backwards and came up with a system that would've even worked on an atari 2600.
 
Special J said:
^now thats what im more used to





you know whats worse is the fact that technically they didnt even release that trailer, it was leaked then since it was already out they might as well release a better quality version of it.
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They did release it officially in 1080p
 
Stumpokapow said:
I would say it works both ways in that poorly liked sequels make their previous installments seem better, while well-liked sequels (here I'm thinking SMG2 and Uncharted 2) make their previous installments come down to earth.
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I would say that the latter is the natural way of things. Ideally, sequels should be better.

I'm personally looking forward to when people decide FF13 isn't so bad after all. Watching people turn around on FF12 and Wind Waker and lately Twilight Princess (the cycle will be complete when Skyward Sword is out) has been amusing.
 
Ahoi-Brause said:
FFXII had so much fucking potential but square blew it with stressing matsuno so much he had to quite.
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As he himself admitted, Matsuno is a control-freak who couldn't handle leading game development and not having absolute power. To blame SE alone for his rumored mental breakdown is kinda unfair.
 
Aeana said:
]I'm personally looking forward to when people decide FF13 isn't so bad after all. Watching people turn around on FF12 and Wind Waker and lately Twilight Princess (the cycle will be complete when Skyward Sword is out) has been amusing.
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It isn't bad, but I don't think it got a backlash for the same reasons XII/Wind Waker did. Those two games are a lot more experimental than the norm for their series.
 
darkhunger said:
As he himself admitted, Matsuno is a control-freak who couldn't handle leading game development and not having absolute power. To blame SE alone for his rumored mental breakdown is kinda unfair.
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Then he should have had absolute power over the game. It's SE's fault for not completely handing over the reigns to one of the best directors of all-time.
 
darkhunger said:
As he himself admitted, Matsuno is a control-freak who couldn't handle leading game development and not having absolute power. To blame SE alone for his rumored mental breakdown is kinda unfair.
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Yeah and you don't fucking interfere with a genius.
Especially if people like wada interfere, just look at that crazy story how they drove GRIN insane.
They probably did similiar shit to matsuno and faxed him new marketing research about how he needs to put in more pretty boys and other shit on a hourly basis.
It's hard to imagine the horros of working directly under japanese square management.
 
Negator said:
Ugh. If XII was the future, that is a future I don't want to be a part of.
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ff12 is not a bad game (Im playing the izjs version since that fixes a lot of things) but in some aspects I kind of like FFX a bit more.

I got to the train graveyard in ff7 and that's about all I could stand.

I think most older JRPGs i'd have to put cheats on to enjoy because I otherwise just don't enjoy them.
 
Srsly said:
Then he should have had absolute power over the game. It's SE's fault for not completely handing over the reigns to one of the best directors of all-time.
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It was already a leap of faith for SE to hand him the next installment of their biggest franchise after the relative commercial failure of his last game (Vagrant Story). They weren't going to give him absolute power to FFXII, especially since FF had always had a relatively democratic development process compared to other Japanese franchises.

Besides, if the only example that he can bring up for why his tenure as an FF director didn't work out was that he was forced to incorporate airships into the game because a staff member made him, somethings obviously wrong with the guy in terms of being able to manage people.

Ahoi-Brause said:
Yeah and you don't fucking interfere with a genius.
Especially if people like wada interfere, just look at that crazy story how they drove GRIN insane.
They probably did similiar shit to matsuno and faxed him new marketing research about how he needs to put in more pretty boys and other shit on a hourly basis.
It's hard to imagine the horros of working directly under japanese square management.
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Sorry, if you're going to make a post about a "genius", don't put GRIN in there as an analogy. A bunch of incompetents like them pointing fingers in regards to their own demise just isn't a good example to compare things with.
 
darkhunger said:
As he himself admitted, Matsuno is a control-freak who couldn't handle leading game development and not having absolute power. To blame SE alone for his rumored mental breakdown is kinda unfair.
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Exaggeration much? "I wasn't used to a democratic design process" = admitted control freak?

Also I'm pretty sure he can handle leading game development, seeing as he was the director to 4 games prior to XII. They simply had smaller budgets/market expectations than XII and thus didn't have to bother with executive meddling or SE's lack of ability to manage a flow of ideas from multiple sources; a problem that was, again, extremely evident with XIII but amplified.

There is fault on all sides, but SE's lack of good management is obviously on of the bigger ones.
 
Square Enix needs to step their game up. I am honestly sick and tired of their weird stories, and as much as I love the classic games, they need to make some new top notch games! WHERE IS KINGDOM HEARTS 3 DAMNIT!?
 
Aeana said:
I would say that the former is the natural way of things. Ideally, sequels should be better.

I'm personally looking forward to when people decide FF13 isn't so bad after all. Watching people turn around on FF12 and Wind Waker and lately Twilight Princess (the cycle will be complete when Skyward Sword is out) has been amusing.
Click to expand...

I'm not that sure on this one. It's true that once the next game come that fans start to backpedal a lot about the past games but I do think that FFXIII will be hard to justify as a good game by its detractors. Personally, I found the game to have so much flaws that I couldn't even play it twice. To give myself a complete opinion I often play games twice and with FFXIII I just couldn't force myself to do it. When I played FFXII for the first time I didn't like it much because I was playing on a tight schedule and had personal issues going on but when I played it in the following summer I loved it since I had the time to play it properly and experience a bit. With XIII I had to two full free weeks to play it and I couldn't get into it. I juste forced myself to beat the game. I tried to get into it during my summer vacation and couldn't get into it much more. 13 is not the worse game I played but its certainly not one my favorites.

Unless the next game (15) is even worse then maybe I'll be able to say that at least XIII wasn't as horrible as this one but I will never admit it being one of the best game I played. Having no control on team mates is a huge flaw for me. So is a broken economy and a half baked job system. I won't even touch the other annoyances such as no towns, only be able to do side missions 3/4 through the game and a locked character progression system.

The recent Zelda games also polarized gamers a lot. Not only TWP and WW but also Spirit Tracks and Majora Mask. All these tried to add a new gameplay mechanics that divided the fanbase (Boat exploration, Train Exploration, Emphasis on side quests and Time travel and Wolf transformation/purging of areas collecting light seed). As such, gamers go back over past games and think well it wasn't so bad after all especially if the sequel add a gimmick they didn't like. For instance, after experiencing the Spirit Train I have to say the boat is not so bad anymore.
 
darkhunger said:
It was already a leap of faith for SE to hand him the next installment of their biggest franchise after the relative commercial failure of his last game (Vagrant Story).
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What do Vagrant Story's sales have to do with the management of its development process?

Pro-tip: Nothing at all. Hell VS had limits that caused it to be scaled back and still ended up an amazing game.

Vagrant story didn't have:

1) The words final and fantasy anywhere in the title.

or

2) Anything approaching actual marketting outside a single commercial in Japan.

Oh but yeah it's definitely Matsuno's fault for making Vagrant Story too good or something.
darkhunger said:
They weren't going to give him absolute power to FFXII, especially since FF had always had a relatively democratic development process compared to other Japanese franchises.
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I wonder if Sakaguchi was responsible for managing that process when he was still at Square, would make so much sense.

Too bad he made that horrible movie.
 
darkhunger said:
It was already a leap of faith for SE to hand him the next installment of their biggest franchise after the relative commercial failure of his last game (Vagrant Story). They weren't going to give him absolute power to FFXII, especially since FF had always had a relatively democratic development process compared to other Japanese franchises.

Besides, if the only example that he can bring up for why his tenure as an FF director didn't work out was that he was forced to incorporate airships into the game because a staff member made him, somethings obviously wrong with the guy in terms of being able to manage people.
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Matsuno may have had problems, but the development issues that XIII had (which aren't all that different from XII's issues) suggest that there's a problem with the process in general used to make games at Square.

Here are some quotes from a Game Developer magazine postmortem on FFXIII's development.

Square said:
"Final Fantasy XIII was first introduced through a concept trailer shown alongside the announcement of the Fabula Nova Crystallis project at E3 2006 (Fabula Nova Crystallis represents a suite of games and other entertainment media related to Final Fantasy XIII). The trailer was merely a visual concept, and we had not yet created anything playable at that point.

I felt that this trailer set the bar for the quality we were aiming to achieve, in terms of battle speed and cutscene imagery, and believed that this sentiment was shared by the rest of the team.

However, it became clear that, at the time, there were actually very few members who saw the trailer as a representation of what we wanted to achieve with Final Fantasy XIII. This lack of a shared vision became the root of many conflicts that arose later in development."
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Square said:
"Even at a late stage of development, we did not agree on key elements of the game, which stemmed from the lack of a cohesive vision, the lack of finalized specs, and the remaining problems with communication between departments.

What enabled us to conquer this line of seemingly endless conflicts was the development process for the Final Fantasy XIII demo, which was included in the Japan-only Blu-ray version of the animated film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete. The demo was not in our original plan, so we had to make adjustments to the overall schedule to accommodate it. Whatever effects creating the demo had on the schedule, once it was complete we realized it was just the panacea we needed.

With a tangible version of the game that could actually be played, internal debates transitioned from theoretical discussions based solely on abstract concepts to concrete dialogue. The demo not only unified the vision and understanding of the game’s direction across the entire development team, but it was also the first time that everyone could see exactly how the assets they worked on would function within the game. During the internal postmortem, many team members noted that the demo was what finally allowed them to truly realize and embrace the vision for Final Fantasy XIII.

Although a vertical slice is commonplace in Western development, this was never actually practiced with our teams unless there was a company requirement. In retrospect, the demo acted as our vertical slice, and its effectiveness was felt full force by each and every member of the team. This was an essential key learning point that affected how we approached game development moving forward."
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This demo was released in 2009, almost 3 years after the initial concept footage was shown.
 
XTERC said:
First step to solving a problem, is admitting you have one.
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They've been admitting their problem(s) all gen. When will they finally take the next step in actually correcting them?
 
claviertekky said:
Maybe Inafune and Itagaki were right.

The Japanese game industry is behind.
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Other companies have had their wakeup call, this may finally be SEs.

Fimbulvetr said:
What do Vagrant Story's sales have to do with the management of its development process?

Pro-tip: Nothing at all. Hell VS had limits that caused it to be scaled back and still ended up an amazing game.
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6-digit sales, nigh-universal praise, and the more I learn about its development, the more impressed I am by the crafty game design decisions made by Matsuno and the team leads did on cutting features, content, and integrating that back into cohesive narrative and gameplay. So yeah, WTF @ them handing it over to him and boggling at what was forming.
 
sega4ever said:
remember that the ff12 you played wasn't the game matsuno was intending to design.
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The ONLY thing that would have changed if Matsuno was given full control would have been the story actually making sense and not falling apart halfway through. Nothing about its gameplay would have changed, and that's probably what the poster was referring to.
 
XII was great, XIII wasn't so bad. S-E really needs to have some sort of plan for the company, right now it looks like a mess:

1. Games are announced way to early, tons of content are created that never make it into the game e.g. reveal trailer for FFXIII.

2. Production is constantly switched, people are moved between departments - Agito moved to PSP, then it became Type-0; Versus was pushed after FFXIII-2, FFXIII started as PS3 exclusive, then moved to PS3/X360.

3. Lots of stupid side-projects that make little sense: endless FF remakes for PSN, Wii, etc.; Gun Loco LOLZ. On the other hand things people beg for are ignored: FF PS2 collection in HD.

4. Betting heavily on X360 in Japan early on, huge problems with making their own PS3 games.
 
ZephyrFate said:
The ONLY thing that would have changed if Matsuno was given full control would have been the story actually making sense and not falling apart halfway through. Nothing about its gameplay would have changed, and that's probably what the poster was referring to.
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The gameplay is great though, so it's a moot point.
 
SatelliteOfLove said:
Other companies have had their wakeup call, this may finally be SEs.



6-digit sales, nigh-universal praise, and the more I learn about its development, the more impressed I am by the crafty game design decisions made by Matsuno and the team leads did on cutting features, content, and integrating that back into cohesive narrative and gameplay. So yeah, WTF @ them handing it over to him and boggling at what was forming.
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unfortunately if wada isn't fired, there is going to be no wake up call.
 
ZephyrFate said:
Except that is completely debatable. So his point still kinda stands.
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But his point had nothing to do with story or gameplay.

I'm not sure he even had much of a point at all other than general Matsuno bashing.
 
Fimbulvetr said:
But his point had nothing to do with story or gameplay.

I'm not sure he even had much of a point at all other than general Matsuno bashing.
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I'm even kind of okay with that outside of Vagrant Story, whose only major issue was inconsistent linguistics.
 
lunchwithyuzo said:
Yep, but not by all that much.

RE4 PS2: 2.2m
RE4 Wii: 1.8m
RE4 GC: 1.6m

http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/million.html

Considering it was the 4th release of the game, and on a system that could already play some 1.6m copies out there, RE4 Wii was a phenominal success. One that Capcom only expected 450k sales out of, and that they never followed up on.

It's weird, in a way Revelations almost seems like the apology for how Capcom mismanaged the franchise on Wii. It's sort of like the Wii game we should've gotten years ago.
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Seeing some of the numbers, it's surprising to see many of the current franchise iterations being among the Capcom's best sales ever...
 
Ya know... I used to think Square had fallen off during the PS2 days. Their games started to slow to a trickle and the style of the games was increasingly questionable animu IMO (ie FFX and KH)... and they were making sacrifices for "next gen" then too: ie No more airships. But in retrospect, they caught up with some decent games toward the end, and now that gen doesn't look too bad.

They really showed me what "falling off" looks like, this gen...
 
Fimbulvetr said:
Oh. Who's doing it?
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The White Dragon, who just did an FFIX LP and won a shitton of people over with the game who previously hated it before by including backstory about Hawaii that made its way into the game due to the fact that the game was I think either made or translated in Hawaii.
 
Maybe SE should return to making games that made Squaresoft notable to begin with. Games with narratives that started with simple premises but then intertwined into something more complex with an adventure that endeared the player with the cast of characters or world.

Back then there was a lot of classical music influences, and influences from real world myth and legends from around the world.

Today we get Japanese pop rock themes from the characters, the music, and the narrative. Costs to produce games have risen so much due to the fact that they feel pressured to cram ever more realistic cutscenes to artificially induce emotion into the script to make up for the shortfalls in gameplay because they can't adapt quickly to technology.

The first thing Final Fantasy should do is go back to ground zero and begin again with a traditional fantasy setting and then do a lot of thinking in coming up with an endearing plot. The Legend of Zelda is stuck in that period yet still can come up with compelling stories that are quaint even if it misses all that cutscene induced drama.

Then when they have a setting and plot, they can look around to see how guys like CD Projekt are kicking their ass.

Lastly, their management is incompetent. Kingdom Hearts was an incredibly successful series but the last game on a console released in 2005. This is 2011. The excuse for not having one out? Nomura is too busy with other projects.

What a great concept to have in a company. Only 1 guy can handle your major IP's since nobody else is supposedly talented enough so not only is everything riding on his ability, you also had better hope nothing bad happens to him or you're screwed.
 
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