Jrpg vs. wrpg

[Bitmap Frogs]

Words Of Wisdom said:

Bitmap Frogs said:

If you have a well known brand and tastes change, what would you do? Using your brand name to push something more appealing to the market or risk raising a new IP from the ground? Giving up to the nostalgia of players no longer interested on your game and dropping a valuable asset is not the correct answer. 

So about Super Paper Mario, you do not know if the consumers at large were disappointed by the change in direction. Your casual evidence is meaningless. Again, it appears to wish corporations would decide according to your own tastes and needs not those of the larger pie.

They've been evolving vertically, you like it or not. The tweaks to the turn based system have been constant and other elements of the franchise have been tweaked several times but still without deviating from the original format. That's vertical progression and as it's happened the power of the franchise has dwindled as sales show. Of course I can't stablish a direct link between those two events (FF's vertical progression and its sales results). Again, you are talking about people praising the old super nintendo games, drawing from anecdotal evidence conclusions for the whole customer base. Again, anecdotal evidence is bad. 

And how many instances in the video game market can you think of where a company had a decaying brand name and were able to convert it with success?  About the only real example I can think of is Mortal Kombat (remember Mythologies and Special Forces?) which wasn't a success and, in fact, damaged the brand greatly.  Street Fighter which didn't resort to such things is in a much stronger position than its age old rival thanks, in part, to Mortal Kombat's own screw-ups.  Mortal Kombat was a great brand until they did exactly what you're suggesting and flushed it down the toilet.  Sadly it has never recovered.

Also, anecdotal evidence is not meaningless nor bad.  We know this thanks to the Ant Principle (I forget the real name of it but I've always called it the Ant Principle).  Essentially the nickname comes from the fact that you will never find just one ant or termite in your home.  If you find one termite in your home, you call pest control because there probably are more.  Essentially it's a theory based on the fact that the probability of finding the only instance of something is much lower than the probability of finding one instance among many when dealing with non-unique cases.  Anecdotal evidence is an indication of existence, not of scope.  If you find one termite in your home, then you may reason that you have termites in your home (via the Ant Principle) however you don't know how many.  It is not usable in a scientific study as a basis of generalization however it is useful in its own right for establishing existence.

As for Final Fantasy, reread what I posted above.  I say they haven't improved things, you point out tiny improvements, I say those are meaningless overall and not an indicator of improvement, you say I'm moving the goal posts, we argue about what defines "improvement," and we end up agreeing to disagree.  If it's all the same to you, I'd just rather skip to the end and agree to disagree.

 

Prince of Persia has been considerably retooled.

Resident Evil 5 is a new direction for the series.

Etc...

Just because you don't want to acknowledge it does't change the fact it happens. 

By the way, the Ant principle is meaningless when what you were doing is extracting conclusions for the larger market from anecdotal evidence. I have a friend who still plays his ps2 and the only games he plays is the yearly iteration of pes: obviously all guys with ps2 still active that's all they do, play pes. C'mon...  there's no validity whatsoever in extrapolating results from a small non-representative pick. You think Reggie says: ok, my son likes that basketball game in Wii Resorts and the Ant Principle says that's all I need to know! Greenlight it!. There might be a few ants who like this or like that, but wether those ants represent the whole nest is a different thing - and that's what you were trying to do.

But yeah, let's just agree to disagree.