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| Is Square-Enix seeing the end of its most popular franchise? |
All in all, I think Square-Enix is riding out the fan-base of the Final Fantasy series, scooping out money on pretty much just the name itself. I believe their last quality product was Final Fantasy X, and that was about 10 years ago, and that's a long time for such a juggernaut of a company; 1991 - 2001 we've had Final Fantasy VI - X, 2002 - 2011, we've had X-2 - XIV. The last 10 years focused on spin-offs and compilation efforts, spreading the title of Final Fantasy to everywhere imaginable, and I personally haven't found much outside of the numbered series worth playing besides Final Fantasy Tactics. This isn't to say, of the single player games, that Final Fantasy X-2 - XIII were awful but they were alright, which isn't what Square-Enix should be doing. Final Fantasy XI was just instantiating Final Fantasy online without being terribly well thought-out, resulting in an okay game for those who didn't like World of Warcraft, XII clearly took the universe of the popular Final Fantasy Tactics and the feel of an MMO, while XIII was just trying to be as Final Fantasy as a Final Fantasy could be. Everything was funneled into graphics and showiness, nothing innovate or ultimately compelling.
What is really upsetting is that this is representative of the Japanese-RPG genre as a whole; sticking to fan-base convention and trying to be as stereotypical as possible, pumping out quantity over quality. While doing some research for a paper, I came across a brief research paper that wanted to gauge the emotional quality of video games, and if they could really make a player care about what was going on as they played. The top genre that was reported to cause a player to be emotional were RPGs, more specifically J-RPGs, with Final Fantasy VII being the game what cause the most emotion, and predictably after that, Aeris' death being the most emotional moment in gaming history. This says that at one point, Final Fantasy and J-RPGs in general were doing something right, had a quality that a lot of critics of video games say the medium could never really achieve to have. But the genre didn't change, and I believe in response, Western-RPGs have been learning from J-RPGs and are taking over the RPG market. Now games like Half-Life and Mass Effect are considered compelling games, while Final Fantasy XIII and XIV are the same old games with new graphics to hook in what their name could get them on past merit alone. This doesn't mean they need to turn the series into an FPS hybrid, but they have to find some other way to entertain the masses. Kingdom Hearts did very well and could provide some inspiration, but that franchise is also a money-milking machine. Square-Enix always entertained experimental titles like the SaGa series, but it was obvious that not a lot of attention was put into them, and were easily ignored despite interesting game mechanics. The same formula is just not relevant anymore, and I'm sad to think that Final Fantasy will soon be a relic of the past.
My advice to Square-Enix? It's time to start earning fans again instead of expecting them to sit around awaiting anything with "Final Fantasy" in the title. Use past predictability to surprise players into something completely fresh, both in mechanics and story. Don't lose the soul and culture that is Final Fantasy, but don't treat it as a static, unchanging object. I personally hope the series gets back on its feet and starts to produce awesome games, but I remain a skeptic to this old friend of a company.
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