Real talk: What's up with Kingdom Hearts 3 and Final Fantasy XV?

[Salnax]

I think that whatever has gone wrong with FF15 is part of a bigger problem.

Ever since around 2002 or 2003, when Square Enix was created, they've started having some ridiculous development times. FF12 started development in late 2000 and was released in 2006. FF13 was in development from early 2004 to late 2009. FF14 was first mentioned in mid-2005, released in late 2010, and released again for real in 2013. Even Dragon Quest 9, a handheld game, was in development for over three years.

If I had to guess, Square Enix simply handles development of games differently tan Squaresoft did. If I had to guess, directors are given more creative freedom. The problem is, this does not complement other company philosophies. For example, Square Enix usually focuses on a game's story, characters, and art before tackling the gameplay, world design, etc. What this means is that instead of developing a cool gameplay mechanic and working off of it, an elaborate world has to be worked around and built up before squeezing it onto a console. Hence, FF13 apparently had mountains of content cut from the final game, because story elements changed and whatnot.

It doesn't help that Square Enix builds their own engines for their various games. This means that they have to devote their teams, which are smaller than the typical Western AAA studio's by the way, to a bunch of technical work before making the game. But this can only happen after the story has been laid out. So before even beginning proper development of gameplay, Squenix developers need to first design an elaborate world, then build an engine if it's a flagship title like Final Fantasy.

It's not a bad thing to build a game around a story concept. I like games with good stories. The problem is, Square Enix does it in possibly the most difficult way possible: with high-rez textures and hours of CGI cutscenes. Many other story-based games exist, but whether they be visual novels, indie platformers, adventure games, or whatever, they usually do best as smaller downloadable or handheld games. Making big CGI cutscenes not only takes time, but spends a lot more resources and once they are done are hard to significantly alter or discard.

And of course, it wouldn't be a modern Final Fantasy without amazing graphics. Which are nice, but take even MORE time to make, especially in a game with an expansive world. Even the corridor-like Final Fantasies (X and XIII) have diverse enough environments that making all the assets would take ages. And as consoles get more powerful but Square Enix remains the same size, it's only going to get worse.



I guess my point is that Square Enix handles development in a very poor fashion for what they're trying to accomplish. If they wanted to release games on a more regular basis without necessarily doubling their size or whatever, they have to change things up.

Maybe they could look to older Final Fantasy games for inspiration. Take, for example, FF4 for the SNES. Just because I'm fairly familiar with it. That game was not graphically impressive even for its time, but did look good enough to meet all the game's story-telling needs (characters had a number of sprites and could move around both in and out of battle) while standing out from its predecessors. By having relatively few cutscenes, and making them on the in-game engine, the story and world are more flexible, and can be adapted to meet changing needs and desires. FF4 also introduced a style of gameplay, Active-Time Battles, that was the basis of series combat for roughly the next decade. Maybe older battle systems from previous FF games can be improved upon, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. Imagine if FF13 used, Id dunno, X's Conditional Turn-Based Battles, just with Paradigm shifts featured in as a new component. That could have saved a lot of time without necessarily hurting the game's quality.



As things stand though, I doubt SE is going to change anytime soon. Which sucks, because I think what they're doing right now has led to their relative decline this past decade or so. At this point, I'm just hoping they localize their 3DS games before disaster strikes.