Should they start creating more adult centric Final Fantasy games

[tony12]

This question has got me wondering a bit. With the increasing popularity of video games aimed for adult audiences such as The Last of Us, Walking Dead, plus many other titles out there. Do you think it is time that Final Fantasy start making storylines for adult audiences as well. As I have gotten older I have realized just how childish pretty much all the storylines in final fantasy games are. Even the best ones are very obviously made for early teens and pre teen game players.


So do you think it is time that Final Fantasy make a plot for adults. More adults are playing games now than ever before and previous video game titles over the past five years have definitely shown that there is a market for them.

[Hollycat]

I find it hard to believe that Cid in Final Fantasy 7 was approved for preteens. no I think that they are trying to take themselves too seriously and its ruining the fun a story can be for adults and still be fun

[tony12]

I find it hard to believe that Cid in Final Fantasy 7 was approved for preteens. no I think that they are trying to take themselves too seriously and its ruining the fun a story can be for adults and still be fun

Cid in ff7 was in no way made for adult gamers. Just compare him to Joel in TLOU and you can easily tell the difference.

[Aulayna]

You mean like Final Fantasy XII?

(also is it coincidental that your two examples of "adult games" are both "zombie" ones? The Last of Us and The Walking Dead are games that are tackling a completely different set of topics)

Final Fantasy's storylines are timeless. To an early teenager they may simply be tales of saving the world. But now as an adult if I go back to something like Final Fantasy VIII there's points of character development there that I simply dismissed when I was a teenager as it was unrelatable.

From pretty much VI onward the franchise has tackled some fairly hefty topics in the background of it's narrative; from love and loss, to capitalism and religion. Think the politics and war of FFXII, Steiner accepting that a female might just be better than him and falling in love with her in FFIX, Vivi's search for identity in FFIX, the underlying criticism of organised belief systems in FFX. These are all very big philosophical topics.

Just because they're not thrusting life and death choices in your face and putting your life on the line in an attempt to make you question your existence every 5 minutes ala The Last of Us or The Walking Dead, it doesn't make them less "adult."

So what exactly is an "adult" game? Is fantasy childish now?

[Jessweeee♪]

Doesn't get more adult than Wall Market

[Mirage]

Actually kind of agree with that. When you look past the comical part of it, Don Corneo is actually a guy who forces girls into sexual slavery. Not a very childish topic, and at the same time, not a topic that young people really think about the first time they play the game. I would guess it kind of flies over their heads until they get older.

[Shorty]

I think there are plenty of adults who can appreciate games without having to steer them in the direction of a specific audience. Plenty of adults like movies like Wall-E and still like old games like Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. It's all about how well you are able to suspend reality and expand your imagination to make these things work to enjoy whatever it is you're playing.

How do you think the Final Fantasy stories are childish? Like, with the love stories or something?

[Mirage]

Wall-E is fantastic and I nearly cried :(
I'm 28

[The Man]

If you didn't cry at that montage in Up you're probably a spambot. Or that Futurama episode with Fry's dog.

I'm 30.

[Mo-Nercy]

I think Final Fantasy delves into some pretty 'adult' themes at times though it may come across childish because of the fantasy aspects of the game. In FFIX, Zidane has that superdeformed chibi look and sports a tail, but he's still gets pretty mindsmurfed in Pandemonium, discovering that he's not human and has a limited lifespan.

If you're after a Final Fantasy with a little less 'fantasy' and a darker, grittier, more realistic setting and overall presentation, I say, wait for FFXV.

[Quindiana Jones]

Maturity =/= brown.

[Gamblet]

More Final Fantasys with stories similar to Tactics? YES PLEASE.

[Vyk]

I agree with the OP. Squall, Tidus, and Vaan, ruined Final Fantasy for me. Square admits that they want to follow George Lucas, and take something that can appeal to everyone, and make it with only kids in mind anymore. They basically admit they don't know how to do real drama, and let 15 year olds write their melodramatic plot twists or whatever. I see more characters being whiny, rather than actually feeling something. Nobody ever questioned the intensity of how much anguish Celes was feeling that she actually attempted suicide if you failed to save someone dear to her. And yet on the same token, nobody can take the fake and over-acted whiny angst that Tidus continually cries over during the course of his game. There's unrealistic, and unrelatable melod-drama. And then there's real, palpable, relatable drama. You may not have to be an adult to appreciate it. But I tend to believe you do have to be a little immature to actually appreciate melodrama. So I'm more inclined to believe Final Fantasy games these days are indeed for kids. And Square themselves have admitted as much

I would take something like, say, Xenoblade Chronicles. A JRPG with legitimate drama, with good, solid writing, to take as an example of where Final Fantasy probably could have been going. I bet kids can enjoy Xenoblade Chronicles. And it's not littered with characters who spew nothing but angsty unrealistic emotion that they should be writing down in journals rather than acting out on screen

It doesn't have to be a zombie game, or talk about the fall of humanity, or even have suicide and death and sex-slavery to be something adults can really appreciate. But I would definitely appreciate it if they would stop with the melodramatics of their characters, and send their writers to some sort of writing course, and teach them the difference between the two. Either that or Final Fantasy is just legitimately not for me anymore. Because my days of investing in angsty teens (or younger!) trying to "save the world" is just too unrealistic for me to suspend my disbelief for anymore. Which is sad for them, and sad for me. But that's my two cents

[Aulayna]

Square admits that they want to follow George Lucas, and take something that can appeal to everyone, and make it with only kids in mind anymore. They basically admit they don't know how to do real drama [...] So I'm more inclined to believe Final Fantasy games these days are indeed for kids. And Square themselves have admitted as much

Source?

[Bolivar]

I'm not as extreme as Vyk, I like Tidus and Vaan and Lightening, I can stomach a little melodrama to go along with the other plot points in those games Vyk apparently glossed over, but I agree with the Tony that FF maybe could use a slightly more adult entry. I actually thought that's what Versus' original concept was going to be. I don't think it would be appropriate of the main series, but I would like to see at least a square game to accentuate the emphasis on grittier fantasy that we've seen in the genre lit world for quite some time now.

[Roogle]

Japanese game developers must overcome their inclination to certain tropes, such as the dependence on younger characters as protagonists.

One example comes to mind when early drafts of Final Fantasy XII had Basch has the main character, yet they eventually ended up creating Vaan to make the game more palatable to Eastern audiences.

[Jinx]

Japanese game developers must overcome their inclination to certain tropes, such as the dependence on younger characters as protagonists.

One example comes to mind when early drafts of Final Fantasy XII had Basch has the main character, yet they eventually ended up creating Vaan to make the game more palatable to Eastern audiences.

This is what I came here to say. It's harder for adults to connect to characters who are all sixteen and seventeen-years-old going out to save the world. It really started with FFVIII and has been that way since. I'm not saying they can't have younger characters, just that it would really help if there was a range of age, like in FFIV, FFVI, and to some extent, FFVII.

[Loony BoB]

I dunno, age and what I can only describe as bluntness (bloody faces, dirty clothes and swear words) are the only things missing. Religion, prostitution, racism, slavery, corruption, sex, loss of loved ones through war/murder/etc, corporatism, terrorism, broken families... the bases have been covered. It's a fantasy game, remember. You can't make it too real or you lose the fantasy. Also, perhaps one of the more adult things about FF is that they can touch on such topics without having to resort to a whole lot of swearing.

[Quindiana Jones]

If you can make something that is simultaneously entertaining for a child and deep and meaningful to an adult, then you effectively win at subtlety and storytelling. And you have just made a game that will remain popular for decades. Called FFVI.

[Shauna]

Japanese game developers must overcome their inclination to certain tropes, such as the dependence on younger characters as protagonists.

One example comes to mind when early drafts of Final Fantasy XII had Basch has the main character, yet they eventually ended up creating Vaan to make the game more palatable to Eastern audiences.

An even better example would be Nier. It is about a father whose daughter is stolen away, and his story to save her. Nier Gestalt (I believe it is called) is the same game except instead of Nier being her father, they changed this to make him her brother. They actually released two seperate games because Japan didn't like the old ugly man. It is crazy.

That being said, Nier is really really ugly. I suppose I can see the reasoning... xD

[Quindiana Jones]

He's the one with underpants on his face, right?

[Shauna]

He is indeed.

[Laddy]

I agree. While Final Fantasy is not nearly as bad as other JRPG franchises, I think some more mature themes and less archetypical plots and characters would do the franchise a service, especially as it appears to be getting stale with my many increasingly older gamers. Keep in mind, the "Golden Age" of Final Fantasy is now older than a rather large demographic of video game players themselves and those who appreciated the games IV-X are now in their 20's or even 30's.

To be honest, I would like to retire the teenaged protagonists and world-saving plots a bit for something a little less wholesome. I'm not saying we go all M-rated and make a Gears of War RPG (I'd argue that would be going backwards), but some moral ambiguity and more nuanced handling of violence, sex, ethics, and the like could do the franchise good.

[Freya]

Maturity =/= brown.
This. While the games listed in the OP are more "adult" I do find this strange trend to think that dystopian settings and lots of dull colors means it's adult. Just because they aren't trudging through zombies doesn't mean it's not adult.

But yes the young protagonist thing needs to be toned down.

[Jinx]

I have no problem with having young protagonists exactly. I just think they work better in an ensemble cast rather than a one-person story.

[Vyk]

Square admits that they want to follow George Lucas, and take something that can appeal to everyone, and make it with only kids in mind anymore. They basically admit they don't know how to do real drama [...] So I'm more inclined to believe Final Fantasy games these days are indeed for kids. And Square themselves have admitted as much

Source?

I'll have to hunt it down. The topic blew up a couple years ago. There was a thread on here somewhere about it. It was an interview done with one of the directors or CEOs of Square-Enix, after getting a lot of flack for a lack of maturity in their games. They basically paraphrased George Lucas, in the feeling that they don't want to grow with their audience, they want to continually capture and re-capture younger audiences. Though it was probably with Kotaku who may have taken pieces out of context to fit their agenda. But I'll see what I can dig up in the meantime

Edit: Found a link to a portion of the interview in question

http://www.giantbomb.com/final-fantasy/3025-194/forums/yoshinori-kitase-speaks-on-final-fantasys-future-241270/


In terms of the age group we target with each new game, it remains the teens to 20-somethings This is the part that created so much George Lucas heat, with regards to fans wanting their favorite franchise to grow up with them, and continually being let down, and given main protagonists in the 16-year-old range

[Aulayna]

Cool, thanks. That was around the time I wasn't really following FF as thoroughly due to only having a fleeting interest in XIII so no wonder I missed that.

It's certainly intriguing and it'll be interesting to see how XV fits into all of this considering the cast image so far, there seems to be a bit more of an age spread with the main characters.

[Vyk]

Indeed. I'll be the first to admit I probably give the series a little too much grief, and continue to hope for miracles in the form of rose colored nostalgia glasses. But I just don't think it's impossible, and I keep holding out hope, and keep setting myself up for disappointment. But if any game in the series in recent years stands a chance at winning me back over, I think VX is a good bet. I'm genuinely interested, and I haven't been interested since like FFX, I think

An interesting note, when I was searching for that interview, the only things that originally came up was about how XIV is now targeted towards more adult-oriented audiences. And insinuations that Square may be shying away from the previous stance. Like I said, the interview is now a few years old, so it's possible they've changed their minds, and future games will embrace adult fans. In which case I'm giving them crap for nothing. Though I do vote with money when at all possible when it looks like they want to step in the right directions. So I haven't completely sworn them off either. Just a jaded fan

[Mercen-X]

What does VX stand for? Very eXciting? Verge of eXploding? Virtually eXtraterrestrial?

[Vyk]

...15? :P It's not like RPG Maker VX, where they just put those letters there to look pretty. This one is actually roman numerals. I presume you were joking. But just in case, I'm answering anyway

[Jinx]

D'you mean XV?

[Vyk]

...Oh. Now I get it. Ha. Oops

[Jinx]

;)

[black orb]

>>> If by adult you dont mean dull and boring, yeah..:luca:

[Jiro]

I don't think Final Fantasy games are made for children. Plenty of aspects of Final Fantasy games are very much in the 'adult content' region; even as far back as the original Final Fantasy there were 'dancers' (I mean strippers/prostitutes). Mature, or at least less fanciful fantasy storylines have been done before: Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy VI, probably fucking all of them if I think hard enough. You look at the themes covered and tell me assassination, rape, torture, patricide, suicide, and genocide are just for kids.

[Loony BoB]

Just to confirm the bit that Vyk touched on regarding XIV: Yes, there are a lot of adult themes going on in that game. The most obvious of them are the whores that you can find dotted around the place. They used to all be in the Miner's Guild on a stage, dancing. If you spoke to them they would offer to join you later if you paid the right fee. Obviously, you couldn't actually "pay the right fee" :( But yeah. Drunken men about, staring at 'em, etc. They left the Miner's Guild in A Realm Reborn but are now found dotted about the zones instead. XI & XIV don't get shy about things such as racism, sex, etc.

[Jinx]

Well, while there are a lot of adult themes, it could be that Final Fantasy doesn't present them in an adult way. Don't get me wrong, I love the series. But there are books on racism, genocide, rape, abuse, etc for children and teenagers. The content is just presented in such a way that it's easy to access and doesn't upset them, but still teaches them things they (might) need to know right now, and will definitely know later.

So while I think that there's a lot of adult content in Final Fantasy, I don't know if I'd say the game is really made for adults. I'd say the audience they most appeal to is late teenagers.

[VeloZer0]

I don't really consider FF12 as having an 'adult' story. Just because it involved politics doesn't make it adult, it was probably the most shallow and predictable of all the games.

I don't think there has really been a problem, over the length of the entire series, about the tones or subject materials broached. I feel it is the melodrama that makes it hard to take the game, and hence subject material, seriously.