Final Fantasy XV: What we're all thinking

[Aulayna]

Well

But really, if it was something as simple as not having the technology to do what they wanted with the game, that would have been easy to state. It would have taken perhaps two minutes. So if that really was the reason I don't understand why they were dead silent until this past week. Hajime Tabata has given us more information on this game in a week than the entirety of Square has been able to give us for what is almost a decade. "Oh, that's just how the Japanese are." So what's changed? They finally sit down with their other branches to learn how the Western world work?

Square have always been notoriously bad at PR. Who actually knew FFIX was coming out until it suddenly appeared on store shelves? Europe didn't get FFX for nearly 6 months after the US an almost an entire year after Japan. It was never mentioned why and we pretty much just got some of the features of X International (which even then came out before X was even released in Europe, and despite the fact it came out before, EU didn't even get all the features that were in X International). Square have always been quiet on the development of their games. A Realm Reborn is the most transparent they've even been, and Yoshi-P had to have an uphill battle with the executives before they eventually signed off on him doing A Letter From the Producer Live. A lot of the higher-ups thought that it wouldn't be very well received.

If you've been following our frontsite, you would've seen the article that Freya made showing that SQEX have setup a Final Fantasy "council" to get the franchise back on track, Yoshi-P and Tabata were bought onto that council. It's funny that how after that happened, Type-0 and Agito were confirmed for the west and we started getting more information. There's been a very clear shift in dynamic with SQEX in the past couple of years.

It's not just exclusive to SQEX either. Other major Japanese companies like Capcom are woeful at the PR side of things in the internet day and age. Nintendo struggled with it for ages too, and eventually found their niche by ditching big glitzy press conferences at E3 and just messaging directly to their fans via things like Nintendo Direct. The Asian market is hugely different to the western market.

The flipside of this is a western company like Blizzard, that generally announces well in advance what it's planning to do. Particularly with the likes of World of Warcraft. The issue Blizzard has, is that they might start publicly discussing a feature for an expansion - that as development progresses they realise doesn't actually feel as fun in practice as it looked on paper. Then they gut it. Then they have players screaming at them going "oh but you promised us this" because it seems game consumers still can't grasp the concept that sometimes, during development of a game, things don't always work out. It's pretty much a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. No communication, people get annoyed. Explaining every change, people get offended and act like you're somehow nickle and diming them.

I don't have faith in Square because they haven't given me any reason to put faith in them. "What about Bravely Default?" It was outsourced."What about Tomb Raider?" It was outsourced. "What about A Realm Reborn?" A Realm Reborn is what Final Fantasy XIV should have been when it first came out, and had they listened to their beta testers, that may have been the case. Almost all the mistakes I've known Square to make has been things they could have easily avoided. This isn't rocket science.

In the case of Bravely Default, SQEX JP was involved in the development of it. It still cost them money to make it and as the publisher they could still have royally screwed it over in an attempt to "westernize" it. But they didn't.

Tomb Raider was made by Crystal Dynamics which is a development studio that SQEX completely owns, they could've got involved in that and royally screwed it over too.

FFXIV yes, you're right, but this was at a time when they had a different CFO who pushed the game out. Several other big name publishers (read: EA) would've just left it dead in the water (see: Warhammer Online). Rebuilding FFXIV from the ground up, while supporting the old version and allowing people to play the old version for free is something a lot of companies wouldn't even dream of doing. Let alone pretty much firing everyone involved and building a new development team, at what was probably a considerable financial overhead for them. In hindsight we can say the mistake shouldn't have happened, but everyone makes mistakes - not one single gaming company (not even, dare I say it, Valve - have a 100% perfect track record of 0 mistakes), very few companies actually have the balls to stand up, admit to them and then dump probably billions of yen into fixing said mistakes.

Earlier this year at GDC they even held a press conference going through why 1.0 failed and what they learned. I believe Freya also made an article about this.

Does this excuse the mistakes they've made? No. But at least they're willing to stand up and admit to them. You can either be stubborn about it, or give them a chance to see what they can do. They are certainly making more of an effort in the past 12 months to win back the trust.

And in the same vein as Lockharted stated, I got excited for those old images of Stella that showed her with a staff casting a spell of some kind. I wanted to play as a kickass female mage. And games like X-2, XII, and XIII has spoiled me somewhat because it allowed you to play as a woman more directly. And that's something that hasn't been seen since Final Fantasy VI. Final Fantasy III, if you're a hipster. But even if you couldn't play as them directly you always had them in your party that gave you some control in battles. In V you could make Lenna or Faris your party leader and run around as them. And in an industry that's largely male-dominated, that's sort of a big deal.

Stella was never a staff wielder in any material we've seen of her. She was always wielding a rapier as far back as the initial Versus XIII trailers. In the early trailers they (Stella and Noctis) were shown at being odds with one another in the grand conflict, but friends at the same time. The latter part I agree wtih you on though, and one of my main drawbacks with XV is that there aren't any playable female characters.

And when Square keep showing us features that have been around for years as if they were just recently created, that doesn't exactly fill me up with warm, tingling feelings.

Like what?

Don't even get me started on the names. We went from generic sounding code names to stuff that sounds like they put random words into a translator until something cool sounding came out. Because that's exactly how I seen Ignis used as a name before.

Oh you mean the fact that they're Latin words with everything we've seen or heard thus far of the game having a very strong Latin literature based theme running through it? Fancy that.

To go off on a tangent here, I honestly cannot understand some of the people giving out about "real time combat" and "cars" as if they're something that's only just been shown off. The combat has always been real time in pretty much every trailer it's been shown in. The combat scene we saw at E3 2013 even looks like it was lifted almost directly from the first ever trailer of Versus XIII and turned into an actual in-game scene than an FMV. The car has been in from pretty much the second ever trailer of the game. Honestly aside from the aesthetical changes and character re-designs, everything from the 2006 days still seems to be there.

Watch this and just see how much stuff you can recognise (and for the recent car critics out there, look at just how many roads are in the trailers)

It seems that some of us are quite cautious and disappointed, and most who are optimisic are cautiously so. By what we've seen this week. Square Enix have a lot riding on this game being a big success. If it isn't THE GREATEST FINAL FANTASY OF ALL TIME EVER, then they're going to lose a lot of fans for good. But then again, they could win us all back with Kingdom Hearts III.

This is actually not very far from the truth either! There's an interesting article on Kotaku. A lot of Japanese developers are shifting more and more toward the mobile market because Japanese consumers are always on the move. If FFXV flops it could very well be the last console FF we see for quite some time. A whole lot is riding on it for both fans and Square Enix, and considering how frank Tabata and Sakaguchi have been in recent interviews, they sure as hell know that they've got an inordinate amount of pressure piling up to deliver.

The reality is they won't be able to please everyone. They've stated from the outset that they want this to be a modern FF. That's already riled up those who wanted a traditional high-fantasy FF. Real time combat has riled up those who wanted a turn-based game. All in all I will judge XV on what it's setting out to do, not my own pre-conceived notions of what I want the game to be. For me, judgment day will pretty much be when I get my hands on the demo with Type-0. If I end up not liking it, it's not going to be the end of the world for me because I know from trying to play the JPN version of Type-0, that Type-0 is a great game that will give me my "fix."

As an aside, my main reservation with FFXV is the combat system. I like Kingdom Hearts and the combat system there, but FFXV definitely looks like it's going to take some getting used too, with all the teleporting around and stuff. I only hope that the controls for it are fluid and responsive.