Quote Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno View Post
If I ramble and seem incoherent, I apologize to the three people on this forum who actually read my posts.
It's ok Wolf, the census committee always reads your walls of text.

Now that this irrelevant issue of gaming psuedo-taxonomy is over, I would address that I feel the problem with the JRPG formula or "Japanese development style" comes from a few issues of developers not understanding how franchises are suppose to work, not understanding their audience, placing too much emphasis and prioritizing only parts of the game over others, listening to their fans (yes this is a problem and its not as counter-productive to this argument as you would think) and like Vyk pointed out, just some bad writing as of late.

For SE, part of the issue with many of their games is that a) their marketed poorly and b) quality is a mix bag. I agreed with what Bolivar mentioned in another thread about SE, which was that ten years ago, the developer was led by several artists, but nowadays it feels more corporate. While corporate means we get more games I feel the polish and quality are lacking.
This actually reminds me of an article I was reading on gamasutra about the state of game development and how to fix it. I'll link for anyone interested: Gamasutra - Features - Japanese Game Development: The Path Forward

It's a bit long but well worth the read for anyone interested in why Japanese developers have been struggling the last few years. Half of this stuff Square even admitted they got wrong with FFXIII, but I do agree that perhaps the biggest problem is the lack of people with creative drive to share and complete a game matching the vision in their head, and a structure to development that stifles creativity from team members rather than encouraging it. Frankly, I think if Square could sort out their development issues and find the Sakaguchi's and Kojima's within their company they'd not only be on the road to improvement but probably on the way to dominating the industry again.

Quote Originally Posted by Mirage
Well here's the thing. Giving a FF license to a western developer won't actually make the "real" FFs come out of japan any slower. You won't get one less japanese FF because we got one western FF, so in reality there is no loss for the people who refuse to touch a western FF, while those who do want one will get their dreams fulfilled.
I'm not so sure about this. Odds are as publisher Square would be paying the developer for the game development which would mean taking money away from another project. It might not take money away from a Japanese developed FF of course, but something else may get canned. Whether that turned out to be a good or bad thing though, who could say?