Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
If it were my decision, I wouldn't go through with this. 16 bit FF games, at their time, were very good for their generation. Hell, they were massively influential, too. But imagine if, after FFVII through XIV, they were released now. Would they be influential? No. Not at all. It's all old-school and perhaps people with nostalgia might like the idea of playing such things, but let's face it, these games just won't cut it in today's gaming environment. If they would, then surely other companies would be churning them out in a big way.
That's what I was going for. Although 16-bit could be re-imagined in a very creative way while still using the power of modern consoles (like the way LBP used classic 2D platformers as a kind of inspiration for the game it came up with). There are a few other games that are much closer to old-school 16-bit games, such as BlazBlue (I think that's the sprite fighting game) and Record of Agarest War Zero, with varying levels in the success of implementation.

Point being that the visual style of 16-bit consoles can be reimagined for the modern generation, but they need to utilise the power that the consoles have, and secondly, a release of VI as is in this day and age would be a critical and commercial fail.

Quote Originally Posted by Loony Bob
Basically, my thought is along the lines of "Graphics and gameplay are two seperate things dealt with by seperate teams.
And I'd add story to that too. Obviously there is some overlap, but blaming story and gameplay declines due to increasing graphical standards is silly. Yes, the developers of XIII said they couldn't give us a broad game world because it takes a long time to make graphics, but everybody knows that is rubbish. The team just developed the game badly, hence why they had enough content cut off to make another game.

Although I would disagree with Bob that the stories and characters of FF have declined. I found the older FFs to be inferior to the PSone era in terms of story and character development. From then on, I would say quality has been fairly similar. Fair enough, there is still some ridiculous propositions in the stories and they are still somewhat overly melodramatic and twisty (even the very subtle XII), but they've been very good (for games).

I think what Square-Enix really need to do is start making games with a clear vision. XIII wasn't a fundamentally flawed game. There were a lot of good aspects to it and it was immensely polished, like all FFs. However, it was clear that it never reached the potential that it could have because the design team weren't focused from an early point. That's why I have hope for XIII-2. There seems to be a much clearer focus on what they want. And even maybe Versus, although it seems to be in development nowhere, because it seems that there has been a design vision that has been carried through the project.