I loved Final Fantasy VII - IX. Then I played FF X and it was OK. Then I played Dragon Quest VIII and decided never touching any new FF again.

I feel the same way about it. It was a very exciting time then, I remember the FF7 ads coming out and being very intrigued by it. Looking darker than what I had played before. However, I had my mind of N64 games by then, and only later on did I get to play it.

Exactly the same way for me too.

There is something interesting that I have been reading up on. Why 3rd party developers were so eager to jump to Sony, was partly because Sony was a Tokyo based company, whole Nintendo was Kyoto based. Believe it or not, it matters to them, even today to some extent. Of course that is not the entire reason why, but I think it was part of what made it easier.

I was a gigantic Square and Enix fan growing up - so much so that I imported a lot of their games (importing was fairly normal for fans in the 90s).

With the Square vs Nintendo thing, I felt more burned by Nintendo than Square in the long run. Nintendo as a hardware manufacturer began to feel very cult-like with their whole “Dream Team” class of second party developers, and later totally dissing RPGs as a genre alongside RPG fans - as almost justification for the use of expensive cartridges (which was really felt by European gamers considering our N64 games cost anywhere between 30% to 3 times as much as brand new PSX games). In addition, Nintendo’s cult-like fans got very cunty toward RPG fans (especially Square fans); and considering I mostly hung out on Nintendo forums - I found myself in constant defensive arguments for liking FF7, FF8, Xenogears, and more. So yeah, I had a bit of an antagonistic relationship with a lot of Nintendo fans during the N64 and Gamecube era despite considering myself one. It was like being on the wrong side of the wall.

Then in the Wii and DS era Nintendo fans lightened up significantly.. But there was still this “Square was only good until the end of the 16-but era, and FF9 because it is kind of like Crystal Chronicles” element in the Nintendo fan base that survived from the Gamecube era... but for the most part, a lot of Wii and DS fans were also fans of FF7, 8, and Xenogears, and that had been a very rare thing during the N64/Gamecube era.

I hope these releases really end that hostility once and for all, because I think a lot of Nintendo fans missed out on some phenomenal games as a result of their dogmatic biases and game anti-fandom.

I’d LOVE to see more Square back catalogue stuff, including their gameboy RPGs which IMO are incredibly under appreciated (especially Final Fantasy Legend 2).

I pretty much agree with Shadow1980.  I was a bigger fan of the N64 and its amazing first/second party offerings, but I was fortunate enough to have a PS1 as well—I mainly remember it as my RPG machine.  My family is middle class (not upper middle class) and my brother and I were able to get a "two kids, two systems" policy.   Each of us was the primary owner, so to speak, of one system, so that probably kept fighting over them to a minimum.   In 1996 we changed from a Nintendo/Sega family to a Nintendo/Sony family.

I'm skeptical of the comments that the hardware of the N64 was part of the schism beyond the obvious CD/cartridge issue.  It is fairly well known that the N64 has a lot of hardware advantages over the PS1, though the PS1 had some advantages too, notably in the sound chip.  It was also significantly easier to develop for, which I suspect has a lot to do with the comments in that article considering the systems hadn't even come out yet at the time they are talking about.  Either way, I seriously doubt that any hardware differences made even a quarter of the difference that CD vs. cartridge did to Square.  Square's vision for its flagship games was becoming increasingly focused on cinematics and other things the limited storage of the N64 cartridges just couldn't accomodate, so they had even stronger reasons than most to jump ship.   The rest is history.  

Very interesting read, so just that unfinished hardware and cartridge limitations made big problems for Square Enix support, but Nintendo has terrible communication with SQ, it seems that back than Nintendo treated partners who made games for their platforms more like slaves than like partners.
Yamauchi was really hard man, he sounded like he was Yakuza. :)

Also, it's crazy how much Nintendo decision to stick to cartridges changed gaming industry, and made Nintendo from that time constantly have much weaker 3rd party support than competition.

I think they had such a negative experience with trying to develop a CD based console with Sony and Philips, that they just kept with what they were familiar with. Also, of course there are other factors that made them choose that format.

I mean yeah, all CD based consoles until than failed, CD based console were huge risk while cartridge were sure thing.