Former Square Enix CEO: “Final Fantasy is Finished”
Jun. 17, 2015Former Square Enix CEO: “Final Fantasy is Finished”
“We’ll make a Final Fantasy VII remake once we’ve made a Final Fantasy game that exceeds the quality of FFVII… If the team were to remake Final Fantasy VII now, then the Final Fantasy franchise would be finished.”
So, so long Final Fantasy. It was good knowing you. Well… maybe not recently. But those early years were pretty good. You know, the ones you so often hearken back to with constant re-releases andre-re-releasesandFUCKING RE-RE-RE-RE-RELEASES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.
Oops. Lost my cool there. Sorry.
Like most of my articles, this one began with a tweet. Specifically these two, from me and friend of my Twitter accountPedro:
@_jayholdenpic.twitter.com/51lPSwwrPJ
To which I replied:
.@ImPeterBennIn some ways 14 was justified. FF11 is the most profitable in the series. But there’s a reason why: all the previous titles.
If that seems like a lazy way to write this article, it is. But that’s ok because I’m going to elaborate on that last tweet. But first let’s do some story time.
…
The year is 2006, and Disney has just acquired Pixar in a deal that surprises many in the industry. Steve Jobs, then CEO of Pixar, and Bob Iger, recently-named CEO of Walt Disney International, were the architects of the $7.4b acquisition.
Before the acquisition went through, Iger took the time to meet with John Lasseter, one of the brilliant minds at Pixar and director of Toy Story and other iconic films from the studio. It was important John understand the reasons behind the acquisition. Because, as John would find out, Iger intended to make John the chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation.
In a Fortune articlearchived here, John recalls his dinner with Iger:
[Bob Iger] told me his epiphany happened when Hong Kong Disneyland opened last fall, and he was there with his young kids watching the opening-day parade. He was watching all the classic Disney characters go by, and it hit him that there was not one character that Disney had created in the past ten years. Not one. All the new characters were invented by Pixar. That’s when he made the decision.
It was Iger’s observation and decisive action that turned around a flailing Disney Animation studio which had recently created, among others, such prestigious titles as Cinderella II and Aladdin King of Thieves, the 3rd entry in the series. Iger, like Wada, understood something vital: you can’t keep rehashing and reproducing the same thing and expect long-term success.
…
Pop quiz.Q: What’s the most profitable Final Fantasy ever?A: XIYes, the Final Fantasy that broke even nearly two years after its release is now the most profitable game in the series. With hundreds of thousands of subscribers paying to access the game every month for the past 12 years, it’s not hard to see how it racked up enough money to eclipse sales of even heavy hitters like Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 10.
Final Fantasy XI’s selling point was simple. As a player, you get to take part in your very own journey as someone in a world not unlike the Final Fantasies of the past. You could be like Butz. Or gambling man. Or anger-problems-transforming-girl. Or emo blonde guy. Or emo brunette guy. Or Vivi. Or katana-wielding-sunglasses-ronin. Any of those. Or your own original person. Maybe emo redhead guy. Cool, right? Sure, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Final Fantasy XI had a place because it capitalized on previous titles. Then came rat-face-boy of Final Fantasy XII, which wasn’t very good, and emo blonde girl in XIII, which also wasn’t very good. Then came XIV. In Final Fantasy XIV, you get to take part in your very own journey blah blah blah. You could be all of those characters like in Final Fantasy XI, PLUS rat-face-boy and emo blonde girl! Whoa!
The problem with Final Fantasy XIV is it doesn’t add anything to the formula. Nobody likes rat-face-boy or emo blonde girl. Nobody wants to play as Vaan or Lightning.
Final Fantasy XIV, and the upcoming Final Fantasy VII remake, are like the characters in the parade Iger watched go by in Hong Kong. It’s been 14 years since the Final Fantasy series created a character or story that fans found compelling. Like Disney, the company is floundering in remakes and sequels no one asked for, desperately draining its historic relics of their prestige. Any hope left for the franchise lies in a game that will have spent 10+ years in development by the time it’s released. And then? Maybe we’ll have another remake.
All we can hope is that the stories of Disney and Square Enix serve as guidepost and lighthouse, respectively, for new and upcoming developers.
Follow me on Twitter at@_jayholden.
Check out the rest of FextraLife’s E3 coverageright here
jayholden
Love my family. And good games. I own the @BloodborneGame twitter account.
Good article. I enjoyed reading it.
I have to support forum here. While the character we see is still the main from when the project was versus XIII, it has completely changed. Versus was originally going to have a crisis core esque gameplay style with a sole character being the focus. This isn’t duke nukem forever as forum said. It’s been reformed and now that a demo is out, I hope that within the next year or so it should be released
Technically yes. Probabl misleading. I could say I’ve been writing a book for the last 10 years when I completely scrapped most of the initial concept and almost everything related like 2 years ago.
Technically true doesn’t mean practically true.
I did the same as you. Basch was better suited to be the main character.
It’s been in development since 2006. Fact.
I loved ff xii o.o I just never put the “main character” on my team lol
Square Enix developed Bravely Default and Bravely Second, which are well recieved. Several Kingdom Hearts games have been released and well recieved since then.
I’m pretty sure at this point saying FF15 has been in development for more than like the last 3 or 4 years is misleading. They probably stole some of the mechanics and art, maybe the engine and canned the rest, with the rename (as opposed to outright cancelation) being a PR move. You can’t have seen the Duke Nukem catastrophe and not learned that it’s a dumb idea to try to release a game so long in development without nuking most of it to start from scratch.
Did I mention they took the fans response to Bravely Default so seriously that they founded a new studio specifically to make JRPGs?
Point is, it would only take 1 really good, successful FF to turn things around. They’ve screwed up, they’re hurting, they’ve never recovered from the loss of several talented people, but they seem to see their problems and they aren’t dead just yet.
Edit. @Serious I think you misunderstand the problems people had with 12. It wasn’t necessarily that it broke the mold, it’s that the story was full of poorly delivered political themes (which square apparently sucks at) and it was extremely anticlimactic and all of the characters were underdeveloped with the character they focus on being even less interesting than tidus.
Similarly, many, many people love FF X-2s battle system and hate everything else about it, because most of it is either mediocre or just bad.
I actually liked both X-2 and XII. They did their own thing, and to be honest X-2 was more original in terms of gameplay and style than all the FFs everyone considers the “best” in the golden era of VII-X.
XII is hugely underrated by fans. They hate it because the gameplay was different. They hate it because the main character was not one of the two actually interesting characters (Ashe/balthier). They also hate it because it broke the mould. I think it did so in a good way.
XIII was where it turned bad for me though. It looked so good from early trailers, it looked like it encorporated movement and separate attacks to bring a whole new dimension the fighting with positioning, use of time within attack groupings and really cool animations. What we got was “mash x to automatically play for you”. It also didn’t help that all the enemies were robots. It was a victim of some very poor design choices and obvious cloud ripoff for a main character.
I think FFVII remake could actually be a second coming for the franchise. The thing that fans want is a return to the roots of final fantasy. Turn based systems. Exploration. Actual side quests. Stories that are actually engaging. If a remake of VII is what it takes to get the new generation of square enix devs to understand the soul of final fantasy, I’ll happily accept it.
P.S. If you had played FFXIV, you would know that actually it has nothing to do with either XII or XIII as it is based on the very early games both in terms of story (warriors of light, crystals) and the class system of character development.
