I'm not sure if there's much of a point to this topic, but it came to mind just now so I'll share it anyway. I was thinking about how much better Square-Enix's or even just Squaresoft's (pre merger) RPG's could've been by now if the company had a serious pressure to innovate. I'm not saying Square Enix makes bad games - far from it - the company didn't rise to the top through shabby workmanship, but rather that being at the top, they have little incentive to truly stretch the boundaries of RPG's. Competition always leads to innovation, and always for the better. It might be fruitless to speculate, but it seems pretty interesting, how much better or different the current releases might have been had there been a viable competitor in the RPG market. I wonder if Namco with the up and coming Xenosaga series - touted as perhaps the only competition to the Final Fantasy franchise - will cause Square-Enix to raise the bar in order to maintain their dominance?