Do you think Square is deliberating suppressing

[ANGRYWOLF]

other games they own the right to ?

Games they don't have any intention of making sequels to out of fear those games will interfere/cut into popularity/sales of their FF games. Or that staff that might be used to develope those games are devoted/required to make FF games and they don't have the time or resources for these other games.

I don't know if that is so. Just wondering.

That would include games like the Chrono games, Ogre battle that they own through Enix, Valkyrie profile games, and others.

Any comments ?

I am a FF fan btw so I want FF games to be developed.But I also want new sequels to the chrono games, Ogre battle and other rpgs as well.

[Kyros]

Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre were awesome!!! I need to start working on my Tactics Ogre Advanced file again where I'll probably start all over since I dont remember any of it.

[black orb]

>>> FF and DQ are the ones that give them the most money I guess..

They dont care about Chrono or Ogre battle anymore.
We have 3 different Valkyrie Profile games now, tri-Ace will probably keep making more but their priority has always been the Star Ocean games..

[Rad Bromance]

I think it's more like they're done with those franchises rather than purposely suppressing them.

[ANGRYWOLF]

>>> FF and DQ are the ones that give them the most money I guess..

They dont care about Chrono or Ogre battle anymore.
We have 3 different Valkyrie Profile games now, tri-Ace will probably keep making more but their priority has always been the Star Ocean games..

Well that won't make their fans feel very hospitable towards Square.

I had forgotten about Dragon Quest...

I have never played a DQ game.I don't have any adverse feelings towards DQ though.Just never felt very interested in it.

True that Tri-ace is the actual producer of the Valkyrie games.Square just distributes them.Same deal for Star Ocean.

There are a lot of dedicated Chrono and Ogre Battle fans.

Some Chrono fans actually tried to make their own games using hacked material and got nasty cease and desist letters from Square and had to abandon their efforts.I wonder why Square bothered if they aren't interested in making more Chrono games.

Of course there are fans interested in making their own Ogre Battle games too. I hope they are wise enough not to use any hacked material.

Square should just offer to sell the rights to those games, as well as any others they have lost interest in, to the highest bidder.

[Wolf Kanno]

Chrono has been stopped because most of the original development team for the series have all left Square, in fact the one guy still actually working for the company (not freelance) has said he has no interest in making another game after the original. SE says they will make more if the game sells more but they have also said they won't make it cause they refuse to make a new Chrono team and would prefer to bring back most of the original team which will be very difficult to some extent.

I'm pretty sure the Ogre Tactics series has a similar issue since the brains behind the series no longer works at SE following his departure midway through the development of FFXII.

I don't really think SE suppresses their other titles as much as I would argue they don't properly endorse their other non-FF/DQ/KH titles. The Mana series and the few Front Mission titles released in the PS2 era got little to no exposure in order to build hype for the games. The "World of Mana" compilation was nearly released all at once and most people don't even realize Front Mission 1 got ported to the DS let alone that Front Mission 5 and FM Online were both released in Japan only.

SE makes weird business decisions. I'm still peeved that we will never see Sigma Harmonics outside of the country.

[ANGRYWOLF]

to Ogre battle, chrono and any other game properties they don't intend to utilize and concentrate on DQ and FF and don't lie/pretend they still have an interest in anything else.

[Wolf Kanno]

If they sold the rights, the people who would buy it would probably either make a crappy game or something totally different from the source material, while still good, would not feel like a true entry.

Personally, I prefer death of a franchise over pandering it for the sake of the fans. Especially when both sides of the deal know the end result will not be something either party wanted.

[Bolivar]

As far as the Ogre series is concerned, I think it's safe to say that Final Fantasy Tactics/Ivalice games are the spiritual successor to the Ogre series. Hell, I think a lot of the same sprites from Tactics Ogre were brought on into games like TA2 and Revenant Wings, I think the dudes with wings specifically.

Chrono has been stopped because most of the original development team for the series have all left Square, in fact the one guy still actually working for the company (not freelance) has said he has no interest in making another game after the original. SE says they will make more if the game sells more but they have also said they won't make it cause they refuse to make a new Chrono team and would prefer to bring back most of the original team which will be very difficult to some extent.

Actually a lot of people from the Square side who worked on Chrono Trigger still work at the company, namely high profile people like Yuji Horii, Nomura, Kitase, and Naora and most importantly Hiromichi Tanaka. He not only produced but designed Chrono Cross as well. A lot of the other people have left Square, but they still get brought on to projects through outsourcing. If Square can get Uematsu to come back for Final Fantasy XIV there's no reason they couldn't do the same for the Chrono series.



As for my thoughts generally on the topic, I'm not really sure what's up with Squre Enix these days. Half of their titles are in their main, sure-shot franchises, while the rest are from their quirky new Western studio, games that I'm 99.9% sure no one even in the West really cares about. Apparently they see how the Western market has skyrocketed and want to take advantage of that - the problem is their ideas to do so are pretty, well, stupid. I think they're focused so heavily on this because they see the Japanese market contracting.

But I'd say one of the primary reasons for the Japanese market contracting is because developers like Square Enix haven't been making innovative games in the last 6 or so years!!!

[ANGRYWOLF]

If they sold the rights, the people who would buy it would probably either make a crappy game or something totally different from the source material, while still good, would not feel like a true entry.

Personally, I prefer death of a franchise over pandering it for the sake of the fans. Especially when both sides of the deal know the end result will not be something either party wanted.

You can't make such an assumption.There's no factual basis for it.

We don't know if Chrono , Ogre Battle or other Squaredoesn't want to make those games anymore games ; if they were sold to other studios, wouldn't be good products.

I don't expect Square to sell them btw...

Here's an article I found about those naughty cease and desist letters:

Square Enix pulls the trigger on Chrono Trigger fan projects

[Kyros]

It's not like Chrono Cross was as good as the other games of it's time though. Chrono Trigger's the only one that stood out of the 2 really. CC came out within a week or two of Legend of Dragoon and nobody ever really talks about it over LoD b/c it simply wasn't as good. As long as its good though I'll play it.

[Wolf Kanno]

Actually a lot of people from the Square side who worked on Chrono Trigger still work at the company, namely high profile people like Yuji Horii, Nomura, Kitase, and Naora and most importantly Hiromichi Tanaka. He not only produced but designed Chrono Cross as well. A lot of the other people have left Square, but they still get brought on to projects through outsourcing. If Square can get Uematsu to come back for Final Fantasy XIV there's no reason they couldn't do the same for the Chrono series.

Horii, from what I read was almost the core to the original Trigger and reason it came to be along with Toriyama, Sakaguchi, and Aoki and regretfully, he is the one who stated he had no interest in making another Chrono game (technically, he is also freelance now though his company works exclusively with SE) and that was back in 2005 when he made that statement. Kitase and Nomura were drafted into the game midway from working on VII, and while Kitase is credited for being a director most sources I've read says his role was working on subplots he wrote and not so much the core of the game. Naora was a graphic designer working with Nomura on more of a technical side rather than a creative side so once again, their contribution is negligible.

Tanaka did work on Cross but most sources say that Kato was actually the main driving force of Cross as he was the main writer, designer, and director for the game and even he works freelance now. Most of the Cross team that worked with them also happen to be the Xenogears development team that left shortly after Cross was released and formed Monolith Soft which is now owned by Nintendo.

Kato and Mitsuda are the only members of the original Trigger/Cross team that is really interested in doing another title (despite both of them being freelance), it sounds to me like they want something along the lines of some of these big names to come back and work on it. Mitsuda mentioned a sequel would require a lot of "politics" so it sounds to me like they almost want the original Trigger team, even getting the Cross team would involve dealing with Nintendo. Of course there could also be more to the story than we know cause it sounds plausible to simply hire Kato to write a third title with a new team and hire Mitsuda to provide music but SE won't do it.

The VP of SE said shortly after the release of the DS port for Trigger that SE would only make a sequel if people actually started buying the games...

You can't make such an assumption.There's no factual basis for it.

We don't know if Chrono , Ogre Battle or other Square doesn't want to make those games anymore games ; if they were sold to other studios, wouldn't be good products.

I don't expect Square to sell them btw...

Here's an article I found about those naughty cease and desist letters:

Square Enix pulls the trigger on Chrono Trigger fan projects

We like these games cause they stem from the creative outlets of certain individuals, despite being a simple name in a credit often times they are the heart and soul of a game. Cross featured only a small portion of the Trigger team and that's why it felt completely different cause only a few of the main contributors actually worked on the title. If a third party company was able to hire them on you might get something like Cross again but still making the same magic is hard, DQ does it by creating strict guidelines and maintaining their key creator you start getting new people in their and they will want to contribute and change the idea to suit them as well so yes, it will feel different.

Whether its good or bad depends on the production company but I'm not sure how many would actually want to tackle a series with an overwhelming historical background and legions of devoted fans. If Blizzard handed WoW over to Valve tomorrow, I think they would be sweating bullets on building that next expansion.

Tactics Ogre might be a bit safer bet since its more of a cult series and as Bolivar said, the series does live on in the FFT franchise. Yet, while playing through the "Ivalice Alliance", I do feel the Ivalice team has lost a bit of their magic without Matsuno to guide them and considering he created the Tactics Ogre series I don't see it fairing any better without his input. Besides, the teams that worked with Matsuno are too busy making the Ivalice Alliance and working on FFXI expansions and content. I would say SE bought Quest simply to kill the franchise so it wouldn't compete with the FFTactics series. They could make a sequel but why not use the sources to build the more SE centric FFTactics series? To be honest, I doubt Matsuno being there would really change whether a new Tactics Ogre game would be made. I might give you that TO was bought purely to kill the franchise and use the dev team to make more FFT titles.

[,,,]

I'm not really going to speculate about the supression thing, but I am sure that Square is well aware that a game named Final Fantasy Tactics will sell more units than the exact same game called Tactics Ogre, so the chance of us seeing a new installment in the Ogre series is pretty much nil.

I'm mainly commenting just to say that I'm pretty pissed off that we'll never see the rest of the story to the Ogre series.

[ANGRYWOLF]

The Fallout series is a recent and rather drastic example of that.

I still would prefer the series be sold than let it die.Or in the alternative allow fans to create their own games.
I realize the latter is unlikely to happen.

I don't think we'll see another Ivalice tactics game.

Of course there's nothing to prevent a Pulse tactics game..or some sort of tactical spinoff to the current game arc Square is creating.
But if they ever do something like that it will probably be on the PSP.

Someone mentioned Legend of Dragoon.There was a rumor several months ago that a sequel is being developed.But I haven't heard anything recently about it

The idea of buying gaming properties/companies to eliminate them as competition seems to me to a huge waste of money.If Square bought Enix,Eidos, or other companies to remove them from being competitors when they could have taken that money and used it in game development then they've lost any shred of common sense imo...

[Wolf Kanno]

Well in the case of Quest, Square basically bought them out to not only possibly eliminate the Tactics Ogre series but to get the TO team to work on the FFT games since they are basically the same games from a technical standpoint so not only do you eliminate competiton but you can utilize the teams creative talents to build your games. So I wouldn't say SE bought Eidos or Quest to wipe out competition as much as to use their talents to cover their weaknesses and build better products. In the case of TO though, its a possibility they wiped out the competition and use them now to make the FF brand of TO.

The problem with TO/FFT is that Matsuno is now gone and he was the main creative force behind both series. I seriously doubt he quit simply because of illness (though a total mental breakdown is plausible), Mitsuda was hospitalized during the creation of CT but he didn't quit over it. I still suspect there was some background squabbling going on between Matsuno and the higher ups.