Phoenix_XIII said:
Point is, why do people complain about them? It's the one thing that irritates me about Yahtzee and IGN and Gamespot and all of those gaming sites based in America or otherwise.
They haven't made a decent game for themselves in almost ten years. Don't even talk about Kane & Lynch, that's Eidos. Let's look at what all Square themselves have been doing for the past decade. Note that I'm not going to talk about the Enix-based properties (Dragon Quest and Star Ocean, to name a couple), just the Square ones.
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[li]
Final Fantasy X - 2001 - Excellent battle system wrapped in a superficial (if harmless) advancement system (Sphere Grid). Players' tolerance for some of the most grating, stupid, irritating characters Square has ever produced may vary, plot has a poor flow, third act starts with a lame plot twist that renders everything the player has done completely pointless. At least it had some exciting action, though, and for what it's worth this game innovated a lot in the way of what we expected from the PS2 visually.[/li]
[li]
Kingdom Hearts - 2002 - An excellent game all-around, but many of the better points of its storytelling can likely be attributed more to Disney Interactive's involvement than Square's. Additionally, playing a kid with too much hair gel and a set of clown shoes doesn't appeal to everybody.[/li]
[li]
Final Fantasy XI - 2003 - The MMORPG nobody wanted; a Final Fantasy-themed re-skin of Everquest, but less thought-through in terms of overall design. It has its audience... but that's barely a fraction of the ten million who bought Final Fantasy X and other main entries in the series.[/li]
[li]
Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories - 2004 - GBA spinoff to a major game in the series. Everybody ignored this because the gameplay sucked and it re-treaded the first game heavily. The problem? Square put effort into this. No kidding, this wasn't a spinoff, this was the next proper game, which you
have to play in order to understand the next one.[/li]
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Kingdom Hearts 2 - 2005 - A pointless clusterfuck of a story with a pointless clusterfuck of a game system. Too many overlapping features added into combat made it un-engaging and un-challenging. Everybody was confused due to Chain of Memories taking all the good ideas this game could have been founded on and containing vital details for understanding this one's events. Square had more control over this one, which meant the Disney stuff--while there was still lots of it--got a lot less attention, leading to this feeling like one of their most padded games. Villains are hollow and inconsistent in their motivations, heroes deal with artificially manufactured teenage angst and self-loathing, making this frustrating to sit through.[/li]
[li]
Final Fantasy XII - 2006 - We waited one year between FF9 and FF10 for a Final Fantasy that was a mixed bag, but you could at least say it had a strong identity, had some exciting action, and was fun to play. We waited five
more years for the blandest Final Fantasy with the blandest characters, the blandest storyline, the blandest gameplay, and one of the worst advancement systems ever put in an RPG (License Board).[/li]
[li]
Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII - 2006 - This game is even more of a disaster than Kane and Lynch 2. Promising concept, amazingly poorly executed. Weak shooting controls, weak action, weak AI, weak plot, terrible pacing due to choppy and inconsistent use of cutscenes,
incredibly poor level design. Dull, monotonous, pretentious. This one is notorious for Square's forcing a major Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu, to delay the release of its review--which was decidedly poor--to not impact sales.[/li]
[li]
The World Ends With You - 2008 - Tetsuya Nomura's brainchild. Woefully under-supported by Square marketing. He probably wasn't happy about this.[/li]
[li]
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - 2008 - "Hey kids! Remember the main villain in FF7? Well it turns out this guy we just made up was actually the one behind him going crazy this whole time!" Does that even sound remotely compelling? The worst thing is that this retcon is all this game contributes. Weak action RPG combat contrasted against flashy cutscenes. Think Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time if you only had one character. Dull, monotonous, pretentious.[/li]
[li]
The Last Remnant - 2008 - In the interim between FF12 and FF13, the FF13 team started fooling around with the Unreal Engine since FF13's game engine was taking too damn long to make. The result? Another detached, half-assed RPG with poor exposition, poor cinematic direction, and a lame combat system based on giving vague suggestions to characters rather than actually controlling them. This thing was a bomb and rightfully so.[/li]
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Kingdom Hearts: 368/2 Days - 2009 - It's a Kingdom Hearts game on the Nintendo DS. How good do you think it is? It's awkward and repetitive to play (lots of "smash all the boxes" challenges...) and the plot is paper-thin. They had one idea, and they blow it entirely on the last act. The combat system is
almost okay... except that it's on the DS, so the controls are awful.[/li]
[li]
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep - 2010 - The most puerile bullshit that Square's tried to foist as a story yet, coupled with a combat system that, while initially promising and challenging, quickly Magnet Spirals out of control. Did I mention that this is the most puerile bullshit that Square's tried to foist as a story yet? This may be the most badly written game they've ever produced, and that includes the next game on this list.[/li]
[li]
Final Fantasy XIII - 2010 - If you attach the "Final Fantasy" name to the same poor qualities seen in The Last Remnant, apparently that means 80+ review scores. We waited another four years for the next entry in the series. The verdict? Arguably one of the worst video games of all time, ever. Un-engaging combat system that essentially doesn't need the player to interact with it, coupled with a lousy exploration scheme that makes it feel like no effort was put into making the game's world believable. The funny thing? Not many people know that this thing's content was thrown together in about six months. They didn't have any gameplay developed or any story written until they released the demo alongside Advent Children Complete in November 2009. And that was
all they had.[/li]
[li]
Final Fantasy XIV - 2010 - Following one of the worst single-player RPGs of all time, arguably one of the worst MMORPGs of all time! Don't take my word for it, though, just ask CEO Yoichi Wada, who issued a public apology for this game and immediately extended the free trial indefinitely. I believe that Square has yet to make a single dollar off this turkey.[/li]
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BOTTOM LINE: Square has no sense of focus as a developer. They can't develop titles efficiently, they can't create a good enough sense of focus to support their apparently-narrative-centric approach and create even basically
competent stories, let alone engaging or relatable ones, and it's been a very long time since they've developed a game that was actually fun to play.
Mileage may vary, depending on peoples' tolerance or acceptance of the negative qualities of the above games. Even so, it's difficult to ignore that they take way too long to release low-to-average quality material and have a poor sense of accountability. They'll give a press release one year ("towns are too hard to make in HD! It's impossible! An FF7 Remake would take a million years to make!" -- Meanwhile Assassin's Creed 2 and inFamous had already come out) and change their tune the next (FFXIII-2 includes towns, settlements, and characters to talk to, so does Versus). In the past two years they've released major titles virtually un-tested or ignoring their user testing altogether (FFXIV, FFXIII). With all their reports of over-long development times, infighting within their dev teams, and constant waffling of direction with said major titles (FFXII, FFXIII), it's as if they're staffed entirely by student game designers; we feel like the parents, and they're lying to us about their report card.
