What went wrong with Final Fantasy? Two things.
One - Superfluous Fantasy: The series, even up to the PlayStation era, was doing fine. It was being handled masterfully and at a nice pace. At the rate of about 1 main game every 2 years and a port or side game every year or so. But then, something horrible happened. With the launch of the DS and XBOX360...all hell broke lose. We started seeing ports, remakes and sequels coming from every corner possible. Why, since 2004, we've seen the series quadruple in size with nearly 45+ games bearing the label 'Final Fantasy'. And the list isn't shrinking anytime soon. Even the most diehard Final Fantasy fan isn't going to be able to keep up with that onslaught. And probably won't want to.
Two - Every game has to be 'Different': Now, its not bad to be different. Heck, changing gameplay can be healthy for a game series. But sometimes...changing too much can be bad. And for the Final Fantasy series, they've piratically changed the gameplay, art design and well...everything on nearly every game. Think about it. What does Final Fantasy X, XII and XIII have in common? Aside from the name, a few summons and probably the appearance of some Chocobo...not much at all. And this breeds problems. Some people will love the massive diversity. But others will be turned off by this constant change. Causing them to pick favorites. We all know the problem. Final Fantasy 'A' is better than Final Fantasy 'B'! Why is this such a problem? Well...because they're so different, and as a result, so easy to choose one over the other. Perhaps the games designers should have looked for more common ground when designing the games.
If you combine the two, you get a simple reason for the seemingly complex decline in Final Fantasy XIII. Too many games in the last 6 years caused people to lose interest in the series. This coupled with people expecting the game to be something totally different from previous Final Fantasy games, which some people embraced and others decided against.
Six upcoming games you should look into:
