Square Enix in trouble - time for Sony make a move?

[VoiceofReason]

Rob-Ot said:

darkknightkryta said:

Rob-Ot said:

huaxiong90 said:

dahuman said:

I feel no sympathy towards Square-Enix these days, they've just been latching on their past successes and not doing much these days tbh.

I honestly want to understand how this is so...I mean, to me, it seems like they're TRYING to achieve global appeal, but they're doing it completely wrong.

I don't even know where they are trying to achieve global appeal, I hear so many people saying they are westernizing their games, but I don't see it. The most westernized game to come out Square-Enix was Final Fantasy XII, its been 4 years since that came out.

Replacing the ending theme of Final Fantasy XIII with Leona Lewis was one thing that came to mind.  Not sure if it was directly stated but getting rid of towns and stuff from FInal Fantasy XIII was to "appeal to western audiences" though that was probably hinted if anything.  The biggest thing is everything that comes out of Wada's mouth.

Adding a english song at the end isn't "westernization". Taking towns out isn't either, I mean have the clowns at Square-Enix seen Western RPG's this generation? If anything FFXIII was most similar to FFX in structure (apart from Towns), I really don't see how it was meant to appeal to the West, because FFXIII is as Japanese as it gets from its art style, characters to even its dialogue. Perhaps they said its meant to appeal to the West to desparately try to make an excuse for the linearity. As the original FFXIII for PS2 was planned to be pretty non-linear (with even a cocoon world map I believe), moving the game to PS3 and the terrible development process (that we spoke about in the other thread) is what led to a linear structure being formed.

FFXIII was really dumbed down and linearized, it basically took all strategy out of the game in favor of making things look cool and fast, and killed any possible exploration which even FFX had quite a bit of