Well at least this gives room for other newer Japanese developers to grow. Atlus recently has been making some quality games, and Platinum Games came out of nowhere.

agreed but you never answered your own question.

Vanquish 2 plz. 3ds and Vita will bring what made jrpg's special like the handhelds before them.

I read the first 7 pages of this thread some interesting points of view. The stand out one for me though that makes me agree with many others that Xbox had no influence on the decline of FF games is that XIII was started on long before they ever decided to release it on Xbox, all the ground work was laid down and the decision to go multiplatform was nothing but an after thought.

Perhaps the Xbox had a negative effect on XIII-2 (disc space limitations causing them to squeeze everything onto one disc). Even that though reinforces what I said above though, as I believe the only reason XIII was on 4 or 5 discs on Xbox was because it was already virtually done before they decided to put it out on Xbox, by which time it was too late to try and squeeze it down to one disc. Had the Xbox already been in mind when they started development, I dont believe it would have ended up on as many discs as it did.

For me the biggest thing holding Square down in present day and has had the most negative effect on their games, is the advance in technology. This is even some what reinforced by their reasoning as to why they will never do a FF7 remake, where they stated 'to remake FF7 with todays tech would be too expensive and take many many years'.

That would just be a remake, so alot of the ground work is already there. To make a game like that from scratch would cost even more and take even longer. Thats a big gamble to take, spending such money and time on a game, and the more time and money they spend on something like that the less likely they are to make a profit. So they started to trim stuff from the games to be able to make them for todays tech. This aghain is reinforced by previous FF entries, take FF10 for example, the first FF to hit the PS2 generation of consoles (after the previous PS1 gen) and we lost free roaming and exploration. Instead of having a world to explore, you were given a plane and pick a destination.

I believe this trend has also continued through to the current generation of consoles, look at the combat on the latest gen FF (FFXIII) compared to the previous entries.

Which leads me to my next point and one I hadnt seen mentioned in the 7 pages of posts I read.

Combat

The combat system in this generation of FF games has been terrible, I consider it even worse than FFVIII (which if not for the poor poor combat system (draw, draw, draw,) would be my favorite Final Fantasy game). We now only control one person in our party? and we dont even really feel like we control them that much, the combat pretty much plays itself out (Auto Fight???) all we do is pick the Paradigm and press 'Auto Battle' that pretty much sums up the combat in XIII, as long as you use the right Paradigm and change it when needed you dont need to do anything else. It needs to be totally scrapped and for them to go back to there roots.

This post went on a lot longer than I intended, but to throw out another 'food-for-thought' before I finish.

Perhaps the decline of Square came a long time before this Generation of consoles, perhaps even before the Xbox original console idea was contrived by Microsoft.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

That movie for me was the cause of the first cracks. They took a huge gamble on making that movie, hoping the success of Final Fantasy brand of games would drive it. They spent an absolute fortune and took a huge gamble on that, and it bombed. Not just bombed it nearly destroyed Square (before being Square Enix). They gambled and lost, and almost lost everything.

Given that past experience, they are no longer to take such a gamble. To make a game on todays tech that would come close to matching the experience of the games they had done in the past would take a huge investment of both time and money, and they simply arent prepared to do that anymore, and play it safe while living off the past rep they built up with previous games.

As each game comes out and doesnt do as well as expected, the less likely they will ever be to make another modern game that lives up to their previous games. As many developers keep saying as the tech improves the investment needed to make games becomes greater and greater, even putting some companies out of business.

That is an extremely ignorant statement.

FF metacritic scores have only Square Enixs cockiness to blame

I don't think it's the merger as much as it was Hironobu leaving. Enix and other developer games since the merger have still been good (Dragon Quest VIII and IX were excellent from what I played/hear, and the remakes aren't bad, Drakengard by Cavia is excellent, etc). It's mostly Square's IP's that have suffered. The 3rd Birthday, all types of Final Fantasy, and most other old Square IP's are the games which have gone down the drain. Some are alright still, like Star Ocean, but it's not the same as it used to be, ad the new IP's from Square are nowhere near the levels Chrono Trigger and XenoGears were at.

Mistwalker (The studio Hironobu made in 2001) has made some pretty good titles. I would say Lost Osyssey is an excellent game, and I hear the Last Story is pretty good too. Not as good as his older games while working for square, but so far, better then the non Dragon Quest games Square Enix is responsible for lately.

They way I remember it, Final Fantasy XIII development was pretty far along when the announcement/decision to make it multiplatform came down (I even remember people whining because they said the game was going to be delayed because on the porting time) so I don't believe the 360 version had anything at all to do with how the game turned out.

Thing is the game wasn't far along at all.  When asked about the game's development they kept on saying "It's progressing slowly" for a good year and then *bam* Final Fantasy XIII trailer appeared at MS' E3 conference with a playable demo.  Like, the game was going to end up the way it did regardless, but I think when the decision was made to port the game to the 360 most work on the White Engine was probably scrapped and had to be rebuilt, which is what most of the delay was.  Plus the game had no direction until before Advent Children was released, like the game was made a year and a half before release, with 3.5 of those 5 years spent on the engine.

Yes and they also damaged SquareEnix a lot.
They want to be loved in the West and favored the 360...The 360 got more attention than the PS3.
Even after FF13,while their fanbase on the Sony side still crushed the 360 Version...
What does SquareEnix do?They favor the 360 even more and want to push their games somehow.
Now they lost a lot of their fanbase with 13-2 - Even Tales of a series that came back to Sony destroyed them in Japan.Something that NEVER ever would have happened as a Sony Exclusive...No matter how bad the game is.

I hope SquareEnix is happy over the 350k sold Units worldwide on the 360 -
3-4 Million PS3 Only or 2 Million combined on both consoles...Totally understandable they favor them so much.

I highly doubt they decided everything that made FFXIII the game is it (for better and for worst) in the last year and a half of development. They had to know what they were aiming for well before that point so the combat system, the linearity, the lack of towns, the story, all this was already heading in a direction similar to what we got in the final product when they made the decision of porting the game.

No, Square Enix and the fans that actually bought FFXIII and FFXIII-2 and praised them damaged the Final Fantasy brand... Beyond repair it seems.