Squenix, in my eyes, has had this problem for a while. There is the occasional good game that comes out from them, but I think that Square started going down the wrong road late in its life. (Yes, I'm referencing Square pre-merger with that.) They discovered that with marketing and graphics, that they were able to increase sales of their flagship title. (Despite the fact that it was Sony doing the marketing...) And since marketing wasn't handled by them, they fell back on what they did- graphics. Everything else took a hit, key people from Square left, and things went to hell. Then came the merger, and surprise, surprise... those crappy decisions hit a few Enix games also.
But I'm glad I think they fell earlier than most would say. It led me to finding my new favorite company: Atlus. (And thus, I must also highly disagree with Atlus quality going down.) It's a small company (relative to Squenix), with smaller budgets, who have to make actual games that stand on the gameplay. Sure, they don't sell like FF. But they're not expected to. And that leads them to today's market- they are still doing plenty. As a Japanese company, they have to look at their home market, where the portables reign supreme. Sure, they released a lot last gen- but that's because they were able to reuse assets and engines, and had one system. Now there are more viable options, so more time is being spent learning more systems' architectures, designing and porting over assets, and factoring costs to publish on the different systems to expected sales. Their smaller budgets have led to the less powerful systems- where you don't need to compete with all the graphics-intensive games. And I'll stop there before I go into my graphics tirade...
-dunno001
-On a quest for the truly perfect game; I don't think it exists...
