Famitsu Sales (12/21 - 12/27)

[RageBot]

dunno001 said:

RageBot said:
I just wanted to hear your reasoning for this, since I wanted to know why you thought that 2D FF will be/sell better than a 3D FF.

Actually, I'll give you a reason why: The Final Fantasy series explosion with the intro of 3-D at FF7 was not due to the switch. It was due to the fact that Sony put a huge marketing machine behind it worldwide. As fwap mentioned already, the pretty graphics of 7 pulled in new players, and they had to keep pushing the graphics to keep some of these new people. Unfortunately, the focus shifted from gameplay and story to graphics.

No, that's actually wrong, the focus didn't shift "from" story, since the stories of FF 7-10 far eclipse those of 1-6 (of which only 6 had a really remarkable story), and, to tell you the truth, my favorite battle system in the franchise is still the one from FFX-2, in which ATB was at it's peak, by being *really* active time.

The depth, the intrigue, the hookpin, if you will, that kept people playing before 7 was gone, replaced with pretty pictures. And, since 7, the only thing that FF has really had to offer that was top-notch was graphics. Graphics alone aren't going to keep people buying your game, and thus, the decline of the FF series.
And if that's true, than why do so many JRPG lovers, who their favorite games are based solely around the story (my fav JRPG is Xenogears, WRPG is Deus Ex) still prefer the 3D FFs?
Because of the story, duh.

So why would 2-D be good? If you can't use graphics to sell a game, you have to fall back on the old ways that you sold them- gameplay and/or story; these were things that prior FFs exceled at. There will be many of the old graphics fans buying the first one of this style because of the name alone. They will initially dismiss it for being "ugly." But some will keep going. And they will see what made a FF of yesteryear. I imagine that the first one would have a weird sales curve, something akin to FF5, even, as word gets out that the focus went back to where it should have been all along.
And why would being in 2D make the gameplay different? You see, you get exactly to my point, 2D and 3D in FF does not, in any way, shape or form, hamper the gameplay, in what way is the gameplay in FF9 different that the one in FF4? The way you get abilities, and that just because Square chose to do the gameplay different, FF4's system could work perfectly well in a 2D FF, and the opposite with FF9

But, but... the old Nintendo 2-D games didn't sell! True, but how many fewer systems were sold in Japan at this time? If you line up the number of systems made and adjust as a percentage the game sales, suddenly you have sales matching the better 3-D games. (This low system count I also think is part of what is keeping the downturn with FF13, rather than the boost 10 saw.) I do think that if you bring back what made the old FF games so memorable, and had to use actual words, story, and sprite animation (C'mon, who has played FF6 and doesn't remember the Opera House?) to sell the game, sales would rebound. Coupling this with the cheaper development costs would only cause skyrocketing profit for SE.
I wasn't talking, at any point, about the sales in Japan, but about the sales in the west :)

However, I don't see them returning to these days. FF has become their "Ooh, look what we can do!" for graphics. And as long as they ignore the other parts of a game, or what made people like so many of the FFs of the past, sales will only continue to decline.

Now, it seems like you missed it, BUT YOU AGREE WITH ME.

The problem with new FFs are the gameplay, which strays too much from the formula that pepole want in a FF games, and the plots, that are getting boring and redundant (which i'm sure I just spelled wrong).

HOWEVER.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that what hampers the story and gameplay is the graphics, what hampers them is, in my opinion, sadly, SE's wish to "westernize" their games, by making their battle system more and more similar to WRPGs and MMOs, while straying far from the systems that made their games popular.
And about the plots - There was a standard decline in the quality of plots in all RPGs from every subgenre since the PS1 era, that reached it peak in Xenogears (and supposedly, PS:T for the PC), just like the general downgrade in the level of music in RPGs, the old creators simply run out of steam (Compare Koji Kondo's early work in SF2 and Secret of Mana to the KH series for example) and it seems like no one can really replace them.