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Square-Enix's financials: the elephant in the room

Toth

Member
Shinta, how dare you object to the all knowing presence of Uncle Rupee

Take a cue from the vast majority of Ni nu Kuni and mend his heart by traveling the world and finding that missing emotion!

(I enjoyed Ni nu Kuni but the sidequests are far from groundbreaking)
 

Lady Bird

Matsuno's Goebbels
I honestly think Matsuno's stories are dreadfully boring. For as neat and in depth as Ivalice is also, I just prefer the world building and mythology in Vana'diel, Eorzea, and Cocoon/Pulse more. It's up to personal preference, so if you like his stories, that's great. Personally, I thought they were pretty boring, and had boring casts as well. The best thing about FFXII is the art style and the gameplay (Yoshida, Ito).
How are Ramza, Ashley, Sidney, Delita or Gabranth boring characters, especially compared to the likes of Snow or the generic evil pope?
 
when they have become the laughing stock of the industry.

whoa now... I wouldn't necessarily call them 'the laughing stock of the industry' (that would probably be Konami) quite yet.

Despite a rocky generation, Square-Enix (and, in turn, Final Fantasy) is still a very powerful name in the industry.
 

Shinta

Banned
So liking a game or not is subjective, but if you don't like MMORPGs "you're stuck in the 90s". LOL ok

You have bad taste.

Ni no Kuni looks like a masterpiece next to FF13. It has an overworld and side quests. It's not a tube RPG. You clearly haven't played anything by Love-de-Lic or its spin-offs, AlphaDream, etc.. They are still making great games.

Mastuno was never technically "at" Level-5. He agreed to collaborate on Guild 1. One and done.
That's odd. I distinctly remember them announcing that he left.

Actually, I've been playing and enjoying the games of all the other companies that have spun-off of S-E in that time. You're the one who is desperately clinging to S-E's terrible games and holding them up as "great" when they have become the laughing stock of the industry.

I don't really base my opinion on what everyone else thinks. If I enjoy the games, that's enough for me. And your definition of "laughing stock" is again, unbelievably close-minded. You ignore everything that doesn't fit your pre-decided opinion.

NieR
The World Ends With You
Bravely Default
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
The Last Remnant
Final Fantasy: Type-0
Dissidia 012: Duodecim
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep
Dragon Quest IX

Just off the top of my head, those are the ones this gen that are almost universally liked. I don't see what the "laughing stock" thing is you're talking about.

And stuff coming up, we've still got:

Kingdom Hearts 1.5
Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD
Lightning Returns
Thief
Bravely Default

Then there's the E3 announcement of a PS4 FF game in less than 3 weeks.

What are Mistwalker, Level-5 and Monolith putting out this year? Anything?

And I really tried to like Ni Ni Kuni. I just don't like it. An overworld is not impressive. It's not difficult to make. They were making it on NES for FFI-III. Dragon Fantasy, the indie game on Vita has an overworld. No one omits retro style overworlds because it's hard to make. They just didn't want to make that for XIII. And if you're talking side quests, The Last Remnant, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns have tons.

Arguing with Shinta is a "waste of time".

Should I lie and pretend that he's convinced me? I just think he has a bad argument. Sorry.
 
XIII is more than enough evidence that Toriyama doesn't any more pull or control of anything. That game was garbage with a capital G.
 

Toth

Member
Sorry to burst your bubble but if you find Matsuno's stories boring, yet somehow enjoy garbage like Cocoon/Pulse then you have objectively bad taste. Someone needs to say it.



At least it has them

So what would you call the chocobo digging, 64 hunts, weapon 'raising', and Pulse exploration of 13? Those are sidequests and pretty beefy ones too.
 
Agreed, added to my ignore list

Why?

You created a thread in hopes of discussion and you are ignoring someone who is engaging you in discussion.
You and Shinta might have different opinions, but it's not like he's throwing blind insults at you and saying you have "objectively bad taste".
 
High turnover isn't supposed to be the norm at Japanese companies, and if S-E management was better they wouldn't be losing so many people left and right. And regardless of how many people have left, the point is they have a sustained history of losing their top talent over and over again.
I wouldn't know about Japanese turnover, as I'm no expert. What I can say is that everyone can't get their own way all the time, so perhaps Shinichi Kameoka and Koji Tsuda left because there weren't any game design spots opening up ahead of them? That's neither Square Enix's or their fault, it's just reality.

That was at near the end and had to do with companies S-E has collaborated with in the past but no longer does. They added some variety to the company's portfolio, like the talents that left to form their own companies. Get it now?

Variety, you say? You mean like Deus Ex: HR, Thief, Just Cause 2, Sleeping Dogs, etc.? Square Enix's portfolio is more varied than it's ever been.

But what kind of variety did two Dragon Quest games bring to their portfolio anyway? And do you really think the inevitable Dragon Quest XI will be a huge drop in quality without Level 5's involvement?

Did you read the post? Look at how many of those spin-offs are now owned or financed by Nintendo.

Three studios, two of whom are relatively small and the other that spent years making games for Namco before Nintendo bought them out? Wow! I get that you love Nintendo but give it a break, they're no-one's saviour.
 
Why?

You created a thread in hopes of discussion and you ignoring someone who is engaging you in discussion.
You and Shinta might have different opinions, but it's not like he's throwing blind insults at you and saying you have "objectively bad taste".

He's clearly not interested in discussion, he just wanted to tell everyone his opinion and tell them why they were wrong if they disagreed with him.
 

Shinta

Banned
Why?

You created a thread in hopes of discussion and you are ignoring someone who is engaging you in discussion.
You and Shinta might have different opinions, but it's not like he's throwing blind insults at you and saying you have "objectively bad taste".

I guess if you like FFXIII, you're a sub-human on here. It's pretty depressing.
 

Lady Bird

Matsuno's Goebbels
XIII is more than enough evidence that Toriyama doesn't any more pull or control of anything. That game was garbage with a capital G.
Toriyama is completely clueless as a director. His ff13 team had no direction or vision until the first demo was finally prepared, and his vision for ff13-2 pretty much revolved around making a list of features fans demanded and throw them into the game without understanding them.

It doesn't helps that he's equally clueless to what makes game design or storytelling good.

The man has some interesting ideas and isn't bad at directing events. That's what he did for FFX, and that's the most he should ever do, imo.

EDIT:
So what would you call the chocobo digging, 64 hunts, weapon 'raising', and Pulse exploration of 13? Those are sidequests and pretty beefy ones too.
Final Fantasy games usually have twice the amount of that stuff (more relevant character progression systems, mini-games, etc), and they usually don't force you to play for cross a road for 20+ hours to get access to them.

Outside of the hunts, FFIX had, at the middle of the first disk, a chocobo mini-game, chocobo digging, weapon ability collecting, frog mini-game, blue magic collecting, synthesis collecting, in addition to the normal world map exploration.

Within the first 10 minutes of FFVIII, you had several optional places of the garden to explore, an entire "optional" town, triple triad, guardian force's ability progression, weapon upgrading, and plenty - plenty of ways of strengthen your characters through junction.
 
Variety, you say? You mean like Deus Ex: HR, Thief, Just Cause 2, Sleeping Dogs, etc.? Square Enix's portfolio is more varied than it's ever been.

But what kind of variety did two Dragon Quest games bring to their portfolio anyway? And do you really think the inevitable Dragon Quest XI will be a huge drop in quality without Level 5's involvement?

Fair point, but I wouldn't say those games are at all representative of the Squaresoft fans knew and loved. Personally, I'm not really interested in any of their Western studio's work. They're just another publisher for those games, could be EA for all intents and purposes.


Three studios, two of whom are relatively small and the other that spent years making games for Namco before Nintendo bought them out? Wow! I get that you love Nintendo but give it a break, they're no-one's saviour.

Small can also be fragile. I don't know if companies like Skip, Vanpool, 1up Studios, and Alphadream would be around without Nintendo. Punchline, the one spin-off of Love-de-Lic that Nintendo didn't support, is apparently finished after Chulip, for example.

Monolith probably could have maintained a relationship with Namco, and Mistwalker had some support from Microsoft (that seems to have dried up), but over all I would say Nintendo has done a good job of supporting those companies and at the same time working with them on established IPs.

He's clearly not interested in discussion, he just wanted to tell everyone his opinion and tell them why they were wrong if they disagreed with him.

I'm interested in intelligent discussion, which Shinta is apparently incapable of, nor am I on GAF to make friends with people who have bad taste.
 

MagiusNecros

Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
Should I try and convince you that Gilgamesh sucks and then write you off if you don't change your mind? I just don't get why you posted what you did.

I even agreed with your post earlier.

That is a battle you can't win. GILGAMESH.

Yes you agreed with my post. As it is common sense. Word's uttered by Abraham Lincoln.
 

ronito

Member
First off I didn't really see anything about financials in there. Just more about talent issues. But it's an easy trap to fall into to think "If only SquarEnix had x person working on y game it'd be great again!" But the problems at Square are far from just being that they lost top talent. Yes, that will hurt many companies and it's really hurting them right now. But, Square's inability to properly gauge the market and invest accordingly could kill the company outright.

I'll go back to what I said in the other thread. Square has a branding problem. The talent problem is fairly easy to fix. Either find the right person and throw money at them or give your younger talent a way to grow into those roles. But even bringing back Sakaguchi isn't going to help if development is bloated unwieldy and impossibly expensive.

That's one thing I see again and again on GAF is people thinking "Well if they just make x game." Or "If they could just get x person". That's a nice fan fantasy. But the problems there are deep and systemic. Sure it would help to bring back those they've lost. But in the state the company is in right now it wouldn't do much good. Why does nobody talk about the elephant in the room? Because you worry more about patient dying from loss of limb than the fact that their limbs are weak.
 
I guess if you like FFXIII, you're a sub-human on here. It's pretty depressing.

I enjoyed FFXIII for what it was, too. I also found FFXII's story fairly boring and lacking charm. Put me in the bad-taste, subhuman category. ;)

I still have fundamental problems with Toriyama's role these days- and I do think it reflects some questionable management decisions from S-E since Wada took over. I think Toriyama has a creative mind and, if controlled the right way and given better writers (ala FFX), he can do some great work.
I have no doubts that longer concentrated development (meaning the production team worked more as a unit than as separate 'parts', as was mentioned post-FFXIII release) and a more experienced writing team (headed by, say, Nojima) would have made XIII a completely different project... and for the better.

It had a good foundation and some really interesting ideas.

I'd like to see Toriyama get one more shot at a mainline FF, but under the conditions mentioned above. I mean, the guy has been a contributor for the FF series since FFVII, so it's not like he's just some fruity dipshit they pulled out of a FF fanfic chatroom (or is he? :D)

I expect to see some significant changes- creatively and the way development is handled- with FFXV and/or FFXVI (assuming FFXV isn't VersusXIII). If things continue the way they have been with the whole XIII Saga process, I think that shows upper management at S-E learned nothing... and that's troubling to me. FFXIV shows me this is a company that can still learn from their mistakes and adapt. I guess we'll know for sure with the final product.
 

Shinta

Banned
I enjoyed FFXIII for what it was, too. I also found FFXII's story fairly boring and lacking charm. Put me in the bad-taste, subhuman category. ;)

I still have fundamental problems with Toriyama's role these days- and I do think it reflects some questionable management decisions from S-E since Wada took over. I think Toriyama has a creative mind and, if controlled the right way and given better writers (ala FFX), he can do some great work.
I have no doubts that longer concentrated development (meaning the production team worked more as a unit than as separate 'parts', as was mentioned post-FFXIII release) and a more experienced writing team (headed by, say, Nojima) would have made XIII a completely different project... and for the better.

It had a good foundation and some really interesting ideas.

I'd like to see Toriyama get one more shot at a mainline FF, but under the conditions mentioned above. I mean, the guy has been a contributor for the FF series since FFVII, so it's not like he's just some fruity dipshit they pulled out of a FF fanfic chatroom (or is he? :D)

I expect to see some significant changes- creatively and the way development is handled- with FFXV and/or FFXVI (assuming FFXV isn't VersusXIII). If things continue the way they have been with the whole XIII Saga process, I think that shows upper management at S-E learned nothing... and that's troubling to me. FFXIV shows me this is a company that can still learn from their mistakes and adapt. I guess we'll know for sure with the final product.
I wouldn't really mind if he never made another FF mainline title, considering he's been at the helm of 5 of them. I just would be interested to see whatever his next game is honestly. New IP would probably be better at this point since FF is always about reinvention, so I don't mind seeing new people work on it.

But yeah, I agree. We still haven't gotten to see their next big reinvention. XIII-2 and LR show a lot of changes, even in the confines of working with existing assets and a lower budget and shorter development time. By the time they start a new game from scratch, it'll be radically different.
 

MagiusNecros

Gilgamesh Fan Annoyance
VP Silmeria was an abortion compared to VP.
You know they had no idea about what to do for the story the moment they introduced time travel.

My problem with VP2 was the way recruiting Einherjar was handled. Text Document history was not a good design IMO.
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
Monolith was basically a trade for a bunch of Nintendo's outstanding stock so that the Bandai/Namco merger could happen.

Also they do in fact still take contract work for their portable team with Namco as evidenced by all the bad Namco portable games MS has credits on.
 

Village

Member
KH is shit.
Where was PS2's equivalent of FF Tactics? Einhander? Vagrant Story?
Brave Fencer Musashi's sequel was terrible.
I don't get how anyone could think PS2 era S-E was as good as PS1.

alternate-stopped-reading-there.jpg

Next your going to start complaing about why those darn kids like the new fangled sonic.
 

Morfeo

The Chuck Norris of Peace
They'd probably get a big boost in sales if they'd reduce the prices of their games on the iOS App Store and Google Play. Their games are easily among the top tier in terms of pricing, and almost all of them are ports of old games. The money they think they'd "lose" by reducing the prices would be made up by the quantity of sales they'd likely get.

I can see why they are expensive though. Square feels that compared to most iOS games, their products are quality, and should be priced that way. What happends if they release, lets say, a new Final Fantasy Tactics for iOS when people are used to paying less for their titles? They wont buy it, so I think they are keeping high prices to try to uphold value in the kind of premium products that they make. Which imo is right, and also what Iwata talked about at that infamous GDC-conference two years ago.
 
edit:

sorry guys.
Removing because they might be considered 'scans' from the 25th Anniversary Ultimania.

If you've quoted me please follow suit. :) :[
 

Shinta

Banned
off-topic, but holy shit! All of these years as a FF fan I've never seen this image of an early version of Final Fantasy VII before (from the FF 25th Anniversary Ultimania):
I've never seen that either, and it's extremely interesting. However, I think they're considered scans, so you might want to edit your post.
 

Famassu

Member
Square Enix is a mess, at least on their Japanese side, they are quite happy to ignore how awful they have been moving into this, and what will become last, generation of consoles. I'm not surprised that they are aiming to move more into mobile/internet gaming because their home console work has been about as slow as can be.
It's you who is ignoring facts. Square Enix has been well aware of the problems they are facing and have been working on fixing them, from small, easy to fix issues like announcing games too early (Fabula Nova Crystalis games were pretty much the last ones to be announced so much in advance, they learned from that and nowadays don't necessarily announce stuff until a few months before release) to overhauling their whole way of developing games. The simple fact that silly ignorant haters like you seem to not understand is that you don't turn a company as big as Square Enix around in an instant. With all the problems that FFXIII & XIV faced, they've learned from their mistakes and are ACTIVELY working on solving those problems. It just takes time since they have to figure out HOW to improve and once they've figured the how they can start implementing those changes The new game development tools being a big step forward from how they did things in the past, yet when you develop your own tools, it will take time when you're beginning from scratch. I mean, Nintendo is going through similar problems now with Wii U, noticing that hey, it actually isn't quite as easy to keep developing games of certain quality, depth & scope while also upping the audiovisual ante to the kind of levels people expect from hardware of Wii U's caliber. Square Enix simply had the harder job simply because they are mainly a JRPG developer and JRPGs are huge projects in comparison to some New Super Mario Bros U or that theme park game.

Besides, Square Enix's output has been far better during the last few years than it was during the PS2 one and gameplay-wise their games have absolutely NOTHING to be ashamed of in front of the "classics" or Monolith & Mistwalker's productions (I'd personally say they are much better, for the most part). Stuff like TWEWY & Birth By Sleep are vastly superior action RPGs when compared to Vagrant Story, Secret of Mana, Last Story and the like, as far as gameplay goes.
 

kpjolee

Member
I dont think SE' problem is the lack of talents. Management and overreliance on FF franchise has been bigger problem.
 

Morfeo

The Chuck Norris of Peace
Wow, this would have been MUCH better than the final product. Who cares about that FF7 Remake? Give us the FF7 Demake instead!
 

Hero

Member
I think by the end of this console generation SE is going to have to merge with another entity or changing themselves entirely with mobile being their focus and console/handheld stuff being an afterthought. The Final Fantasy brand is damaged, Dragon Quest takes way too long to come out and Kingdom Hearts may not be a huge seller anymore after an entire generation of nothing but handheld spin-offs.
 
This argument is happening again?

Gezz. I can't wait until Lightning Returns and Final Fantasy XIV come out and Square Enix can move on. This bickering is getting old.

XIII fans need to accept that the XIII series is universally panned and very few people like it. They need to accept that Square Enix needs to move on to greener pastures and better worlds/stories.

XIII haters need to accept that there are SOME Final Fantasy XIII fans. Yes they exist. No it's not because they have bad taste. They obviously, genuinely love the game. Let them be. Yes I know they make outrageous statements sometimes but that comes with the territory of being a fan.

I love Kingdom Hearts II and think its the second best KH game. But I have accepted that its not the opinion the majority holds. I understand people's frustrations with the game. Doesn't make me love it even less. I don't need to actively try to change people's opinion on the game. The only thing that matters is that I like the game and that I know other people who like the game. <--- Why don't we try this approach for a while. I think both sides will cool off a bit if we just did this.
 

fates

Member
Looks to me like a very very late SNES game. Normally I'm all for SNES stuff but I actually like FF7 as it turned out.

As far as Square Enix of now goes... I think they are a lost cause for the time being. Not trying to be mean, but the XIII sub-franchise has been a very low point of the series in the eyes of a lot of people. Hype for XIII-3 doesn't seem very strong, either. As I recall, sales for XIII-2 basically nosedived after release, too. I can't see XIII-3 doing so hot, either.

They've got to do a lot right in order to win back their fanbase if it's even possible at this point. The rumor of FFX Collection having DLC isn't a good way to start that either. Wonder what surprise they have in store for E3...

XIII haters need to accept that there are SOME Final Fantasy XIII fans. Yes they exist. No it's not because they have bad taste. They obviously, genuinely love the game. Let them be. Yes I know they make outrageous statements sometimes but that comes with the territory of being a fan.

Thought I would chime in on this... It's not that anyone is (well, they might, but that's silly internet drama antics) attacking those fans for liking XIII. The issue seems to be that Square Enix is dumping what appears to be a good deal of money into the sequels of which the first did not perform very well.
 
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