Quote Originally Posted by Scruffington View Post

Why couldn't they have just delayed the game another year? Why couldn't they have just scrapped all of these spinoffs, the anime, the movie, and focus on making the game as good as it could possibly be at launch?
Because it worked so well before with the VII Compilation and lesser extent FFXIII. Believe me when I say you're preaching to the choir here as I feel the game should come first and the spin-offs after.

Final Fantasy XV is not an MMO. I would rather Square Enix focus their time on their singleplayer content and actual story instead of time exclusive "festivals". Seems like SE has lost sight of what the franchise was built upon in the first place.
Yes, but as it stands, the MMO entries are still doing strong and where FF gets most of their money in game development besides mobile. Since both departments are comprised of FF fans, it stands to reason they might like something like this.

Expecting a Final Fantasy game to have fantasy elements, good characterization, a complete story, and depth in combat might be high standards. But they're also standards that the series exceeded and thrived at after 30 years of success. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect those things from an FF title, and FFXV failed to deliver on all of them.
Eh, I'd put the "30 years of success" in quotation marks to be honest. For me personally, the franchise hasn't been the same since FFX came out, like it tried to be great but just felt so lackluster in comparison to Square's work on the PS1. I will give people FFXII and The World Ends With You, but frankly, FF has just been getting strikes or balls with most of their games since the 21st century began. Final Fantasy has kind of been a laughing stock for awhile now, and I don't feel it's realistic to believe Square-Enix can deliver a gaming experience on par with their glory years with the franchise.

With XV itself, the game had technically been in development for ten years by that point, by which I mean eight of those years was Nomura and Square-Enix sitting on the IP while they whored out KH and FFXIII between tying to release another FF MMO nobody asked for and then fixing it when they rushed it out the door. The last two years has been a different team trying to get a game that comprised of a first draft script, two tech demos, and some concept artwork into a full fledged games for a new console. I feel it was obvious to see that XV was never going to live up to the expectations people had for it while it was still Versus XIII. I think it was Fox who said it best, the game was developed by committee so it would be so inoffensive to sell, but not do anything to really capture people's imaginations. Had it had more time, perhaps, but the combination of fans bitching about waiting for it so long due to SE poorly marketing the game ten years ago, combined with a modern gaming era that is becoming more and more use to day one patches and frequent updates to "fix and develop" games past the traditional development window kind of caused this mess. Unfortunately, I feel the era of releasing "finished" stand alone titles ended in the PS2 era. SE knows they can milk this franchise, they wouldn't be wasting time making a remake of a twenty year old game if they didn't believe that.

I would have this attitude, but unfortunately Tabata's team keeps sucking away Square Enix's resources to add useless updates to FFXV (like the multiplayer update).
Considering the money they are making off of mobile titles and the MMOs, I wouldn't really worry about resources. Of anything, I would be pretty confidant to believe that SE really has most of it's resources in KHIII at the moment since it's the next big game. Tabata is likely working with a smaller dev team and even if he wasn't, SE is hardly a small firm and has entire divisions devoted to developing other content for SE. It's part of the reason why some fans think Division 12 (the Ivalice team) might be working on something, because no one has heard from them since their Crystal Defender titles a few years back. Point is, I feel Tabata wasting resources is unlikely.

@Psychotic - I like that idea to. It would be neat if XV did festivals for other IPs that belong to SE. A Mana festival to coincide with the remake of Secret of Mana might be cool, but I like the Millennium Fair idea, especially if it means they'll do the Aveh Festival in Xenogears eventually.